Review of Michael L. Klein and Nicholas Reyland, eds.,Music and Narrative since 1900(Indiana University Press, 2013) and Peter Kivy,Antithetical Arts: On the Ancient Quarrel between Literature and Music(Clarendon Press, 2009)

Abstract

[1] Does narrative musical analysis still need to be defended? For Michael Klein and Nicholas Reyland, the answer is emphatically "no." Their new collection of essays, Music and Narrative Since 1900, promotes the value of narrative analysis-and the impulse to do it-as simple common sense:Since we know it is productive to speak about musical narrative, the primary question asked in this collection concerns what has happened to musical narrative since 1900. (x)Such confidence in the narrative approach-unthinkable in the 1990s-comes across as perfectly reasonable today, especially in the wake of Byron Almen's A Theory of Musical Narrative (2008), which rigorously counters the most common objections to narrative analysis. Thus Klein-in a characteristically whimsical opening essay-fancifully invokes a world in which the pent-up anxiety from three decades of critical onslaught simply vanishes: "those tiresome arguments about music's failures of diegesis, representation, temporality, agency, and causality are rendered moot with the wave of a wand" (3).[2] Klein might find this magic wand especially handy for Peter Kivy's Antithetical Arts. Kivy has been arguing against the concept of narrative in absolute music for quite some time, and he isn't ready to watch a narrative victory parade without spreading a bit of rain:For more years than I care to remember, I have defended against all comers...enhanced formalism: the view that absolute music, music without text, title, or program, pure instrumental music, in other words, is to be understood and appreciated as a structure of sound, sometimes an expressive structure of sound, without either representational, narrative, or semantic content. (201)He describes Antithetical Arts as possibly his "last effort in the cause," which he has defended "with a confidence sometimes approaching a kind of evangelical zeal" (201).[3] Before we see how narrative fares amidst the chaotic diversity of the twentieth century, then, we might first take notice of Kivy's objections. As most readers will know, Kivy has approached music mainly as a philosopher; he is not typically concerned with the day-to-day mechanics of music theory and analysis. But Antithetical Arts is unique in that it includes a middle section-the heart of the book, really-that launches extensive, lacerating critiques of specific narrative analyses by some of the most prominent analysts in the field: Fred Everett Maus, Anthony Newcomb, Jenefer Robinson, and Gregory Karl.(1)[4] The entire book is written in Kivy's trademark prose: witty, intelligent, and exceptionally clear. But for anyone sympathetic with the narrative approach, it is a deeply frustrating read. To begin, many "narrativists" will find that Kivy has fundamentally misunderstood what they do and why they do it. Here, for instance, Kivy explains why analysts identify agents and personae in music:The musical persona performs, really, two functions for the narrativist: to give to absolute music a fictional content that is supposed to account for its artistic substance and interest, at least in part; and to explain how absolute music is capable, which such theorists claim it is, of arousing what I have been calling the "garden-variety" emotions-love, happiness, fear, melancholy, anger, and a few other such. (101)While I don't doubt that some theorists have thought about musical personae in just these ways, it hardly represents the way most theorists think about their work. The principal concern of narrative analysts, typically, is not to explain the value or emotional impact of a particular piece-which is usually taken as a given-but to offer new ways of thinking about and experiencing music's temporal organization.[5] Kivy, however, seems entirely unconcerned with such suggestive possibilities.(2) Consider his response to Newcomb's interpretation of the scherzo in Mahler's Ninth Symphony. …