Reconsideration of Musical Gesture as a Musical Event in a Narrative Discourse

Abstract

AbstractThe purpose of this study is to reconsider musical narrativity and gesture in the semiotic sense through debate among the former studies, taking the examples of Beethoven and Mahler. From these findings, I conclude that narrative analysis is a kind of syntagmatic analysis. Musical events in narrative discourse are regarded as (1) narrative-defining features (Micznik in Jounal of the Royal Musical Association 126/2: 193–249, 2001), (2) representations rather than physical entities (Meelberg, Vincent in New Sounds, New Stories. Narrativity in Contemporary Music. Amsterdam: Leiden University Press, 2006), and (3) isotopy in the Greimasian sense (Tarasti in A Theory of Musical Semiotics. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1994). Significant events in music are defined by the syntagmatic perspective and the work’s strategy (Almén in A Theory of Musical Narrative. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2008); more precisely, telos (the goal of the lineal process) is a central position in narrative discourse. We need more aspects of an author for narrative analysis and its procedure, and that many significant and elaborate theories and ideas frequently seem to relate to the lack of the composer’s stance or the author’s psychological and strategic perspectives. From these aspects of musical narrativity, in music analysis, we need to take notice of (1) musical gesture that emerges from the textural level, i.e., “the score,” and (2) musical gesture by the composer, which is an attempt to put thoughts and images into compositions through the composer’s perception by means of the five senses, “the body.”KeywordsMusical narrativitySyntagmatic analysisMusical gesturesLudwig van BeethovenGustav Mahler