that “the subversive elements of the piece seem far too powerful to be contained in so conventional a manner.”8
Since the narrative resulting from Almén’s method is largely the listener’s confection, many different narratives may result from the same conflict. “Another analyst,” he speculates, “might have viewed the intrusive harpsichord music as a threat that is ultimately excised by the final ritornello—a romance narrative of the successful quest, if you will, rather than a comic narrative of a blocked society renewed or an ironic narrative of a fractured society.”9
Almén’s stipulation that the work must establish a hierarchy that undergoes change specifies some structural features the music must possess in order to be considered a narrative. But unlike Abbate’s definition, Almén’s may not be solely dependent on the work’s structure. Although he rejects Abbate’s requirement of a storyteller, he affirms the importance of a listener who interprets the work as a narrative.10 Precisely what role listeners play in determining a work’s narrative status remains unclear, however. It may be that McClary, by interpreting Brandenburg Concerto no. 5 in the way she did, makes it a narrative. If that is correct, the work is a narrative for McClary, but it would not have been a narrative for Peter Kivy, who rejected the validity of such interpretations.11 Alternatively, Almén may be arguing that the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto is a narrative, even if certain listeners refuse to regard it as such, because it is a work to which it is appropriate to adopt a method like the one he outlines. Given Almén’s lack of interest in authorial intentions or historical practices of music listening, what makes this approach appropriate appears to be structural features capable of supporting such interpretations.
Texts and Works
To understand what separates the foregoing definitions from the one I will put forth in the following section, it will be necessary to expose some of the assumptions about the nature of musical works underlying these definitions. Inspired by French literary theory, particularly the work of Roland Barthes, New Musicologists such as Abbate and McClary moved away from regarding their subjects of study as works and began to think of them as texts. This is not to say that opera scholars abandoned the study of scores and focused instead on libretti. What Barthes seems to have meant by the work-text opposition was the difference between interpreting what one is reading or listening to in light of the historical circumstances of its production and approaching it as a mere sequence of words or sounds, which could be interpreted in any way one pleased.12
Another way of understanding the opposition between texts and works is through the contrast between products and processes. As a text or product, a work of instrumental music is merely a sound structure.13 As a process, by contrast, it also includes all factors that contributed to its production, such as the performers, instruments, and performing circumstances for which it was written, and influences both artistic and nonartistic (e.g., religious or philosophical beliefs or events in the composer’s private life).
Barthes preferred texts to works because of his interest in maximizing interpretive freedom. Reducing works to mere texts licensed musicologists to put forth interpretations that were implausible accounts of composers’ intentions. It is unlikely that Bach’s compositional choices were guided by the values of freedom and individualism underpinning McClary’s interpretation of Brandenburg Concerto no. 5.14 For those interested in understanding works in light of the actual historical circumstances of their creation, one is better off regarding them as processes—or at least as contextualized products—rather than as mere texts.15 If a work is a process, determining whether it is a narrative involves not only analyzing its structural features but also investigating how and why it was created, including whether its author intended it to tell or present a story.
The relevance of the composer’s intentions to interpretation remains a contentious topic in musicology and music theory. One of the larger aims of this study is to rehabilitate the figure of the author in music scholarship; depending on the object of appreciation, that may be the composer, librettist, director, or performer. As I have argued in more depth elsewhere, commitments to the “intentional fallacy” and the “death of the author” fostered the kind of interpretive freedom musicologists of the 1980s and 1990s were seeking but failed to align with the discipline’s renewed interest in history in the past two decades.16
One of the reasons for this incongruity between theory and practice is a lack of awareness of more sophisticated forms of intentionalism that have been proposed in response to the criticisms of Barthes and the authors of “The Intentional Fallacy,” William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley. The most robust of these accounts have come from philosophers working in the analytic philosophical tradition. Paisley Livingston’s Art and Intention (2005) provides a clear and comprehensive discussion of what intentions are and the roles they play in the creation and interpretation of art. He defines an intention as an attitude one takes toward a plan of action. In contrast to desiring or wanting, intending involves being “settled upon executing that plan, or upon trying to execute it.”17 Even so, it is possible to be unaware of or mistaken about some of the intentions motivating one’s actions. As action plans rather than actions themselves, intentions are subject to revision. Even when we decide to act, we may be unsuccessful in realizing our intentions.
The possibility of author failure is a serious problem for forms of intentionalism that equate the content and meaning of a work with authorial intentions (absolute or extreme intentionalism).18 One response to this problem is to eschew reference to the real author in favor of an implied author, an entity that is constructed by the reader or listener through his or her engagement with the work. The concept of the implied author originates from The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) by the literary critic Wayne C. Booth. In philosophy, this interpretive approach is commonly referred to as hypothetical intentionalism, a term coined by Jerrold Levinson.19 Hypothetical intentionalism may serve the purposes of some philosophers and theorists but is unable to explain the attention music historians pay to authors’ sketches, notebooks, letters, and interviews. Such sources inform us about the actual author’s intentions and actions, not those of the implied author. Throughout this study, the intentions to which I will be referring are those of the actual persons responsible for creating the works under consideration.20
Other philosophers, such as Livingston, have responded to the author fallibility problem by defining more moderate forms of real-author intentionalism. According to moderate actual intentionalism, authorial intentions determine meaning only in cases where they are successfully realized in the artistic product. Success is determined by assessing whether the intention and the features of the product “mesh.” Not only does meshing entail a degree of consistency, “but [it] also carries the implication of a stronger condition involving relevance and integration: if there is a sense in which an extraneous hypothesis is consistent with data, but bears no meaningful, integrative relation with them, we would say that the two do not mesh.”21
Another common objection to intentionalism is the putative impossibility of knowing another’s intentions, particularly if one’s subject died hundreds of years ago. In some cases, all we may have is a score. We may not even know who its author was. That there are limits to what may be known does not justify abandoning the search for what can be known. Inquiring into the artist’s intentions does not require mind-reading abilities but merely the sorts of activities musicologists routinely engage in: studying the finished product, evidence about how it was produced, and the various influences on its production, with an aim to understanding how and why it possesses the features it does.
One may also be concerned that a commitment to real-author intentionalism unduly restricts the creativity of the interpreter. If one’s primary aim in engaging with a work is to display one’s creativity or to maximize one’s enjoyment, one may wish to heed Barthes’s call to regard that work as a product rather than as a process. But if one wishes to understand the historical influences
