a component of the interpretive process. Even so, not all questions about art require intentionalist explanations. One question that does, I argue, is the question of whether a work is a narrative, as this is a question of the work’s “category of art.”22
A Moderate Intentionalist Definition of Narrative
What separates Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) from Almén’s A Theory of Musical Narrative, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) from Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight (1963), John Adams and Peter Sellars’s Doctor Atomic (2005) from Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach (1976), Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote (1898) from Igor Stravinsky’s Octet (1923), a recounting of my failed attempts to make a Sachertorte from a recipe for this delicious but formidable dessert? Without much thought or deliberation, someone sufficiently knowledgeable about the above items will tend to categorize the former but not the latter in the class of narratives. One of the factors motivating such determinations is that the former items were intentionally made to communicate stories (and succeed in doing so), whereas the latter were not.23 Obviously, I have not gotten very far in determining what a narrative is. I have merely replaced the question “what is a narrative?” with “what is a story?”
Before addressing this question, it is worth interrogating the validity of the intuitive view that the former of each pair of items is a narrative. Not all narratologists agree. Genette, for instance, defines a narrative as an “oral or written discourse that undertakes to tell of an event or series of events,” a definition that would include Pride and Prejudice and, potentially, my story about my attempt to make a Sachertorte but exclude the cases in between.24 Theorists who have brought narratology to bear on cinema and theater have expanded the means of conveying story content to include showing by means of images and sounds. However, like Abbate, many have assumed that since fictional narrators are seemingly ubiquitous to literary narratives, they must be a component of narration in other media as well.25 A more complete response to such claims will need to wait until chapter 3, where I explore the role of narrators in opera and musical theater. For now, I will simply state my agreement with Abbate that narratives require storytellers, not mere sequences of events. The point on which we disagree is her insistence that these tellers be fictional. There is no fictional agent responsible for presenting the entirety of Vertigo, Doctor Atomic, Don Quixote, or my story about my culinary disaster. Nevertheless, these utterances have authors who, in authoring their utterance, also narrate it.26
Although there are many differences between telling a story and presenting one (e.g., through a theatrical performance), everyday use of the term narrative cuts across this divide.27 With regard to the question of whether a work is a narrative, I do not care how the story is conveyed, merely that the work was created to convey a story and that it succeeds in doing so. Thus, I will use narrate to describe any act of communicating narrative content and narrator to refer to any agent, fictional or real, engaged in such an act, regardless of whether it is conducted through language, music, sounds, gestures, pictures, or moving images.
Having clarified my position on the range of acceptable storytelling media, I now turn to the question of what a story is. Since most discussions in music scholarship focus on instrumental music, I will take as my central case studies the aforementioned pair of instrumental compositions, Strauss’s tone poem Don Quixote and Stravinsky’s Octet.
As Strauss’s title advertises, his work is modeled on the characters and events of Cervantes’s novel. Strauss begins with a character sketch of the protagonist (ex. 1.1). One of the more striking features of the first dozen measures is their unusual harmonic plan. Strauss establishes the key of D major with a cadence in measure 4, but only four bars later, he is tonicizing A♭ major, a tritone away, subsequently returning to D major by measure 12. Even in the context of late-Romantic harmonic practice, the establishment of tritone key relations within such a compressed time span is unorthodox. Yet the passage is stylistically unperturbed. The lilting rhythms and graceful, if exaggeratedly Romantic, swooping gestures in the strings create a sense of complacency, minimizing the effect of the unstable harmonic terrain being traversed. In just these twelve measures, Strauss has communicated a great deal about his protagonist, depicting him to be a romantic of questionable psychological stability, but whose eccentricities remain largely hidden at this point. Many may be fooled into thinking Don Quixote entirely normal, just as he does himself. This belief becomes increasingly unsustainable, however, as Strauss’s harmonies become even more outlandish later on in the introduction.
Strauss then introduces Don Quixote’s sidekick, Sancho Panza (ex. 1.2). The ungainly leaps in the tenor tuba and bass clarinet parts—so unidiomatic as to be impossible to execute with grace—are appropriate to his humble occupation as a farmer. Suddenly, a viola enters with a jittery, oscillating figure. After the first motive is repeated, the viola takes over, imitating, if wanly, the flamboyancy of Don Quixote’s musical gestures and the noble heroism he espouses (rehearsal numbers 15 and 16, respectively). Strauss presents Sancho Panza as a country bumpkin, initially reticent of his friend’s proposal (hence the oscillation between the bumbling-farmer and quasi-heroic-viola motives and the nervousness of the latter), who quickly becomes intoxicated by delusions of grandeur and agrees to play along.
Example 1.1. The harmonic eccentricity of Don Quixote, opening of Strauss’s tone poem
Example 1.2. Character sketch of Sancho Panza
Having introduced his characters, Strauss proceeds to represent them undertaking purposeful actions. They combat windmills Don Quixote believes to be giants (variation 1) and sheep he mistakes for an army (variation 2). In variation 4, they attempt to halt a procession of penitents with a portrait of the Virgin Mary, believed to be a damsel in distress. To provide comfort to his friend and perhaps some personal amusement, Sancho Panza attempts to pass off a peasant as Don Quixote’s beloved Dulcinea (variation 6). They take an imaginary trip through the air (variation 7), followed by a real voyage by boat, which concludes with the capsizing of their vessel (variation 8). In variation 9, they attack a group of monks believed to be evil magicians. Finally, Don Quixote stakes his knighthood against the Knight of the Shining Moon and loses, which causes him to come to his senses and return home, where he dies (variation 10).
Although one may accept that my description of Strauss’s Don Quixote is a narrative, one may still doubt that Strauss’s music is responsible for conveying this story. Without Strauss’s title and program, I would have had no hope of divining what his music was intended to represent. Jean-Jacques Nattiez has verified this hypothesis with an experiment involving playing L’apprenti sorcier to hosts of Montréal schoolchildren who had never heard it before and who were not provided with its program. They were merely told that the music conveys a story and were instructed to write down what they thought the story was. Nattiez received all sorts of responses—stories about battles, revolutions, animals, mountain climbing, espionage, medieval chivalry, even the life of Beethoven—but none even remotely resembling a story about a wizard in training with a procreating-broom problem.28
That is not to say that music is incapable of representation without extramusical aids. If one’s target is an aural phenomenon, one could certainly expect more success. Nevertheless, the intended referent of even the most infamously onomatopoeic passages of Don Quixote (e.g., the sheep’s distressed bleating in variation 2, represented by
