The Narrativization of Music. Music Narrative or Proto-Narrative

HSS II.2 (2013)

DOI: 10.2478/hssr-2013-0004
The Narrativization Of Music.

Music: Narrative or Proto-Narrative?1
Jean-Jacques Nattiez*
University of Montreal
Abstract
After describing the main features of the literary narrative and demonstrating
its analogy with music, the author underlines the necessity not to consider a
priori a musical production as a narrative. He analyses the intonation of musical
contours as a form of proto-narrative which he later explains from the
standpoint of Daniel Stern’s developmental psychology. It is then emphasized
that music should be considered as a proto-narrative and the authors suggests a
criticism of the so-called narratological musicology.
Keywords
Narratological Musicology, Developmental Psychology, Semiology, Intonation,
Narrative, Proto-Narrative.
1. Does music tell a story?

When I was a child and I was asked to play a piano piece for my
parent’s guests, people would frequently add: “Then you will tell us what
it says!” assuming that any piece of music tells a story.2
Most probably because music, unlike painting and sculpture, shares
with the narrative and the film a linear dimension; this is due to the fact
that the presence of titles, including narrative titles, in the Western
repertoire, encourages the listener to hear a narrative in any piece of
music; because people who did not receive a musical education feel more
comfortable if a piece of music is linked to the present-day reality, and

*
Faculté de musique, Université de Montréal, CP 61-28, Succ. Centre-ville,
Montréal, Qué., Canada, H3C 3J7 ; jean-jacques.nattiez@umontreal.ca
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HSS, vol. II, no. 2 (2013): 61-86
thus, it “talks” to them. A series of experiments conducted by François

Delalande regarding La Terrasse des audiences du clair de lune by Debussy,
which were aimed to identify what were the listening behaviours of the
audience, demonstrated that figurativization was one of those
spontaneously adopted by the subjects (Delalande, 1989: 79). The reason
is simple and the seminal work of Jean Molino and Raphaël Lafhail-
Molino on the literary narrative clearly demonstrates it: the human being
is not only, in its anthropological essence, a Homo symbolicus or a Homo
ludens, but also a Homo fabulator, always ready to integrate into a narrative
objects or actions that are available to our senses in a linear sequence:
“The myth-making function is a fundamental capacity of humanity”
(Molino, Lafhail-Molino, 2003: 315). When we set forth a figurative
listening in order to establish a link between the objects of a linear chain,
especially non-linguistic ones, we are actually building a plot, and I would
like to recall here the excellent definition provided by Paul Veyne to
characterize the writing of history: “The facts do not exist in isolation, in
the sense that the fabric of the narrative is what we call a plot, a very
human and not very “scientific” mixture of material causes, purposes
and events; a slice of life, in a word, what the historian decides to show,
and where the facts have their objective connections and their relative
importance: the genesis of the feudal society, the Mediterranean policy of
Philip II or a sole episode of this policy, the Galilean revolution. The
word plot has the advantage of reminding that what the historian studies
is as human as a drama or a novel, War and Peace or Anthony and
Cleopatra.” (Veyne, 1971: 46) The attitude of many people, music lovers
or not, certainly justifies an even briefer analysis of why it is legitimate or
not to speak of “musical narrative.” Moreover, the developments in
musicology over the last twenty years, of the so-called “narratological”
research I will discuss at the end of this article, is an additional reason.3
But there is even more today: cognitive psychology and neurobiology of
music have recently examined the ability of music listeners to narrativize
music. I refer particularly to the book of Michel Imberty, La Musique
creuse le temps (Imberty, 2005) and the two special issues of the Musicae
Scientiae journal: “Rhythm, Musical Narrative, and Origins of Human
Communication” (Trevarthen, 1999-2000) and “Narrative in Music and
Interaction” (Imberty-Gratier, 2008) from which I will borrow some
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elements. But in order to examine the possibilities of narrativizing music,

we should first try to define the concept of literary narrative.
In my attempt, I will make use of the above-mentioned work by Jean
Molino and Raphaël Lafhail-Molino. For the authors, a narrative is first
characterized by “a phrase of action, centred around a verb expressing a
dynamic situation (act or action): “The Marquise went out at five
o’clock,” “Julien Sorel put his hand on the hand of Madame de Rênal,”
“Charles Bovary entered the class”” (Molino, Lafhail-Molino, 2003: 24).
In music, if two contrasting sound events succeed one another, and they
are placed, or they place themselves in a situation of narrative listening,
the listeners attempt to establish a link between the two events by
building a plot to connect them. Nevertheless, in a literary narrative,
there is generally more that this “smallest narrative unit” because a story
is a hierarchically stratified object, organized into sequences of sentences
and episodes (Molino, Lafhail-Molino, 2003: 33). Thus, a second analogy
with music emerges. A musical piece is also made of a number of
musical events, objects of recurrence and variation, but it is equally
hierarchically organized into units of various levels: motives, phrases,
themes, etc.
But the authors do not stick to this taxonomic and hierarchical
characterization of the narrative.
Within a narrative, actions and events follow one another so that at every
moment the listener or the reader asks himself/herself: What happens next?
[...] We are finally satisfied only if the story leads to a conclusion that is
consistent with our expectations and gives a sense of closure. The listener
and the reader are thus driven by curiosity, surprised by unexpected events,
caught by the tension of suspense and, finally, appeased by the outcome.
(Molino, Lafhail-Molino, 2003: 42−43)
Here, and I obviously appeal to the semiotic tripartition of Jean Molino

(2009: passim), the author went from the inherent characterization of the
hierarchical structures to the aesthesic behaviours of the listeners and
readers that assume, both in the literary narrative and in musical
productions, the units cut by taxonomy and linear involvement
phenomena.
In fact, one will have immediately noticed that this statement
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regarding the literary narrative may as well be applied to the perception

of music by changing a few words, and, in the following adaptation, I
will deliberately make use of the vocabulary put forward by Leonard
Meyer, especially in Emotion and Meaning in Music (Meyer, 1956):
In the course of the musical development, sound events succeed one

another so that at every instant the listener may ask: and will I hear next?
We are only satisfied when the expectations set forth by musical repetition,
suspension, tension finally find their conclusion at the places of rest,
temporary or permanent, and give a sense of closure.
This is thus an aesthesic analogy that could have encouraged both

music lovers and contemporary areas of musicology to talk about
narrative and narrativity in music.
2. Narrativization of music: music as a proto-narrative

In the absence of a verbal support – in the title, in annotations, a
programmatic narrative, an experimental soliciting – a musical piece
cannot, by itself, tell a story. Never will a musical piece tell us something
like “For a long time, I went to bed early.” Otherwise, there would be no
difference between music and language as symbolic forms. The
composers of works they explicitly intend to be narrative are well aware
of this, and, thus, they precede their works by programmes and
narratives. Let us think about Berlioz who specifically requested, at the
beginning of the score of his Fantastic Symphony, to distribute his
introductory notes to the audience, or about Dukas, who reproduced
Goethe’s ballad at the beginning of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, probably
wishing it published in the concert programme. Without any doubt, in
the symphonic poems, the title and/or the narrative programme are part
of the piece. In the absence of the linguistic support, the musical piece is
not a narrative, but it can be a proto-narrative, which is a completely
different thing. This is what Mendelssohn had well understood by
composing his Songs Without Words, or Adorno, when qualifying Mahler’s
symphony as “a narrative that doesn’t tell anything” (1976: 117).
The musical “discourse” is inscribed in time. It consists of rehearsals,
reminders, preparations, expectations, resolutions. If one is tempted to
speak of musical narrative, this is due not to its intrinsic and immanent
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content, but rather to the effects of the syntactic organization of music, of

the figurative listening that controls the music by means of the
implications and achievements so well described by Meyer, particularly in
Explaining Music (1973, passim). On an immanent level, and from a
narrative point of view, what music does best is to imitate the appearance
of language and narrative. Thereby, it acquires the status of a proto-
narrative.
Linguists have long looked at what they called the “musical elements”
of the human language. Music and language have in common the fact
that they consist of sound objects. This is particularly obvious in the so-
called tone languages. In the drum music of an dance of initiation to
marriage, the Mbaga dance of the Baganda tribe in Uganda (Nattiez,
Nannyonga-Tamusuza, 2005: 1119), one of the eight patterns at the base
of this dance imitates the intonation and rhythm of the word
“baakisimba,” which means: “They planted it [the banana tree].” We can
thus rightfully consider that, in the societies where the drum is used to
convey linguistic messages, the insertion of these patterns in the context
of a musical performance and choreography is accompanied, for the
audience, by the semantic content that the same pattern conveys when
used as a means of communication. But we should, of course, check this
by a field survey.
In language, just as in music, there are rhythms and accents, lengths of
notes and syllables, and it is not by chance that, in Greek, mousikê meant
lyric poetry, that is, something that was both what we now call music and
poetry, and it is not impossible to explain the rhythmic and metric
dimension of modern lyric poetry by its origins and inextricable links to
music, as Molino and Tamine have pointed out in their suggestions for
the analysis of poetry (1987). And there is more. In language, with the
exception of tone languages, vowels do not acquire fixed heights, but the
sequence of syllables creates intonation curves – prosodemes – to which
some phoneticians – Pierre Delattre (1966, 1967, 1969) in particular –
have devoted specialised studies. This is crucial: music and language
share the linearity of speech and the use of sound objects. Music is able
to imitate the intonation curve of a narrative.
In the Fifteenth Quartet by Beethoven, it is not necessary to have read
the motto posted at the beginning of the last movement – “Muss es sein?
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Es muss sein” (Must it be? It must be) – to recognize from the outset
that we are dealing with a question, suggested by the ascending fourth,
followed by a double response evoked by the descending fourths. And
from there, the rest of the movement can be interpreted as the
transposition of a musical dialogue. We do not know what is said, but
Beethoven depicts the change, as if we captured the inflections through a
wall or we listened to a conversation in a language we do not know.
Thus, here, the voices of the quartet have the character of what
Edward Cone called, speaking about the dialogue of the oboe and
English horn in the “Scène aux champs” (Scene in the Fields) of
Berlioz’s Fantastic Symphony, “virtual characters,” or more precisely,
“virtual agents” (Cone 1974: 88). Obviously, the most important word
here is “virtual.” The bassoon song in Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf can
become the grandfather character, but only when enlightened by a verbal
text that assigns it a denotative meaning. Undoubtedly, this same virtual
dimension determines the traditional vocabulary of the analysis of the
fugue to use terms such as subject, answer, exposition, discussion and
summary and, equally, it explains the high number of theorists in the
Baroque period, including Mattheson (1739) in particular, trying to find
in the music of his time the different moments of a rhetorical discourse.
He thus matches the introduction, not always present, to the exordium,
the narrative and the divisio to the exposition, the confirmatio and the
confutatio to the development, and, finally, the peroratio to the summary
and the coda. In a recent work, Mihaela Corduban reviewed the first
book of the Well-Tempered Clavier starting from the rhetoric terminology
used at the time (Corduban, 2011).
These cases of intonation imitation are not unique. Nettl (1958)
suggested that the first syllable stress in Czech explains the stress pattern
of the Czech composers’ musical phrase. Robert Hall (1956) attempted
to find the influence of English intonation on Elgar’s music. He argues:
“In British and American English, the end of a declarative sentence is
characterized by a falling intonation, from a relatively high tone to a
relatively low tone. This is also what happens in Wh-questions (e.g.,
Where are you going?). But in questions that do not begin with an
interrogative pronoun (e.g., Are you coming?), American English and
most European languages use a marked rising intonation, whereas British
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English uses the same falling intonation like in Where are you going?”
Turning to the music of Elgar, Hall argues that – statement that should
obviously be statistically verified - “a large number of themes present a
predominantly downward trend; think, for example, of the main motives
of Falstaff, of the initial theme of the Introduction and Allegro, of the first
subject of the Second Symphony, to mention only a few.” “No wonder,” he
further concludes, “that the English have the feeling there is something
special in Elgar, something of their own that the non-British are unable
to appreciate” (Hall 1953: 6).
If there is here a possible explanation for the analogy between music
and the pace of discourse, this analysis also reminds us that it can be
restricted to a particular culture. By means of a specific process, a
language can leave its marks on the music of the same society. By using
the only text known to have remained unchanged throughout the history
of Western music, Thrasybulos Georgiades (1954) showed how each age
treated the canonical words of the Mass, and how, by comparison, the
style of each country has been influenced by the structures, especially
rhythmic and stress-related, of the corresponding language. More
importantly, he demonstrated that instrumental music, by gradually
growing apart from the vocal music, dominant until the Baroque period,
had kept track of the languages with which they had been in contact for
at least ten centuries.
The word that writers who recognise music as showing a kind of
“narration en creux”, of virtual narration, spontaneously use, is that of
gesture (even if the name is only an approximation), undoubtedly because,
as Combarieu argued in the early twentieth century, “music moves us
because it encourages us to move.” Also, in his recent book on musical
semantics, Ole Kühl renamed by the term “gesture” what is, most often
than not, nothing more than a musical unit, similar to motives and
phrases, but considered from the point of view of their expressive
dimension (Kühl, 2008: chapter VIII). “Mahler’s gesture is that of the
epic” writes Adorno (1976: 95), even though “the epic music is
forbidden to describe the world it is aimed at” (ibid., 108). In this
context, it seems relevant to explain the universal success of Ravel’s
Bolero, not only by the simplicity of its repetitive structure, but also by its
ability to evoke the irresistible rise of desire to the orgasmic climax of the
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trombones, as was clearly seen by Maurice Béjart in two righteously

famous choreographies, still performed today.
A comparison with the story I cited earlier to define the concept of
plot will illustrate the problem even better. Historical facts do not
constitute, by themselves, a narrative. They are covered by a narrative that
gives them meaning, which is very different. As clearly shown by Paul
Veyne (1971: Chapter 2), I notice that the events took place – a fight
broke out, a treaty was signed, the borders were changed – but there is
no historical interpretation unless I am able, by building a plot, to establish
between the events a relation of causality which explains them, that is, to
connect, by the logic of a narrative, the selected events. If this is the case,
it is because the events are neutral objects in time and, as such, they seek
the interpretation built by a narrative. But in music, just like in the case
of a story, these objects cannot constitute, per se, a narrative. The
narrative built on this subject occupies a metalinguistic position relative to
the data or the events that, according to the valuable distinction made by
Hayden White (1965: 2), do not narrate, but narrativise, just like, beyond
the affective semantics inherent to any piece of music, verbal language
contributes to semanticise music. The auditor, adopting a narrative
listening conduct, or the musicologist, studying music from a
narratologic point of view, does not do something else.
Kühl defines the principle of the musical narrativity as both our inner
urge to give coherence to a certain experience and a desire to give
meaning to a series of sound events (Kühl, 2008: 210−211). This is what
the music analyst does by describing and interconnecting all musical
events recorded in the period of its development. When we analyse
music in its immanent dimension, we well and truly resort to a
methodology-driven plot we have adopted, the one that makes us favour
some aspect of music, in the same way that, in the terms used by Veyne,
the historian chooses among an infinity of events subject to historical
interpretation, those that are relevant according to the explanatory frame
developed.
Dangerously enough, Kühl does not hesitate, throughout his book, to
talk about musical narrative and to qualify the implicative and linear
progress of the music as “a pathway,” although approaching the end of
his book, he concedes that the phrase “pathways are stories” is a
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metaphor (ibid.: 216), and by means of a u-turn rhetoric, he declares

before concluding: “From a semio-cognitive position, it seems necessary
to clarify that when I speak of gestures, agents and narratives in music, I
do so metaphorically”4 (ibid.: 237). It is this position supported in extremis
that seems right to me.
For the purpose of this analysis, it is certainly legitimate to paraphrase
the famous words of Susanne Langer, who argues that music is an
unconsummated symbol (1951: 204). If it is a narrative, music is an
incomplete one. But we can not be satisfied only with this philosophical
characterization.
3. The developmental origins of the musical proto-narrativity

The explanation of the semantic and narrative associations to music
has made considerable progress since Daniel Stern, in his book The
Interpersonal World of the Infant, highlighted in his studies on the mother-
infant dyadic relationship, two important findings, classified by Kühl
among the foundations of his conception of musical semantics and used
by Imberty in order to caracterize the unfolding of the musical time: the
successive and cumulative introduction of the different areas of dyadic
interpersonal relationship and the existence of amodal relationship
modes since the first weeks of life (Imberty, 2005: 189-209; Kühl, 2008:
59−63).
During infancy, each interpersonal bond area between the mother and
the child is introduced one after the other but in a cumulative way, that
is, each new field is added to the previous without deleting them. In the
first two or three months from birth, the domain of emergent
relatedness is established; from 2 or 3 months to 7-9 months, the
domain of core relatedness; from 7-9 to 15 months, the domain of
interpersonal relatedness and, starting from 15 months, the domain of
verbal relatedness. To each stage corresponds a formative phase of the
sense of the self (Stern, 1985: 33). What is crucial to our research topic is
the fact that specific symbolic forms correspond during the first years of
life to each of these four stages and, as these stages go on throughout
life, they will find a place in the life of the child, the adolescent and the
adult.
In the first phase, at the end of eight weeks, direct eye-to-eye contact
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is established at the same time with the first coo (ibid., 37) and various
vocalizations (ibid., 58). The observation of suction allowed seeing how
infants become interested in the human voice and prefer it to other types
of sounds (ibid., 40). We notice intentional vocal cries before three
weeks and, between two and six months, sound productions, many of
which are not part of their native tongue (Imberty, 2004: 509) and which
can already be considered musical. But above all, what is characteristic of
this initial period, the infant is able to “transfer perceptual experience
from one sensory modality to another” (Stern 1985: 47), as Stern argues,
especially between touch and vision. The experiments seem to show that
this amodality is innate and not acquired. Infants are also able to respond
in the same way to sound and light intensity signals, as well as to auditory
temporal patterns and visually presented temporal patterns, as early as
the age of three weeks (ibid., 48-49): “Infants thus appear to have a
general and innate ability, which can be called amodal perception, to take
information received in a sensory modality and somehow translate it into
another sensory modality” (ibid., 51). The infant creates abstract
representations of shapes, intensities and time figures. “They are
predesigned to forge certain integrations” (ibid., 52). Key result: “Some
properties of people and things, such as shape, intensity level, motion,
number and rhythm are experienced directly as global, amodal perceptual
qualities” (ibid., 54). Stern concludes that this is how “vitality affects”
arise, which are characterized by dynamic and kinetic terms such as
“asurging,” “fading away”, “fleeting,” “explosive” “crescendo,”
“decrescendo,” “bursting,” “drawn out” (ibid., 54). Extension beyond
infancy: “Abstract dance and music are examples par excellence of the
expressiveness of vitality affects” born throughout this period (ibid., 56).
Kühl draws the highly relevant conclusion that this may, in part, explain
the lack of lexical differences between dance, music and drama in some
cultures (Kühl, 2008: 61).
From the point of view at stake, there are two aspects established
before the age of two or three months: from a poietic perspective, it “is
the ultimate reservoir that can be dipped into for all creative experience”
(Stern, 1985: 67), and, from an aesthesic perspective, “it also acts as the
source for ongoing affective appraisals events” (ibid.). It is not
surprising, then, if the infant is already in possession of an amodal
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Gestalt gathering the auditory, visual and motion patterns, and, as the list
of terms collected by Stein proves it, that the words used by the
participants in the musical perception experiments reported by the works
of Robert Francès (1958) and Michel Imberty (1979) in their attempt to
identify the content of musical semantics, are revealed by these
modalities, since, as they both demonstrate, semantization is based on an
analogy between patterns of tension and relaxation, the spatio-temporal
perception of music and muscle, postural and gestural reactions. We
identify here the origins of the narrative potentialities of music.
The later stages of the interpersonal domain development will
establish other symbolic forms that make music what it is. After the first
two or three months, the infant directs vocalizations at other persons
(Stern, 1985: 72). Music becomes thus a social phenomenon, offered to
an audience and perceived by other participants different from the
creators. The infant also becomes aware of the origin of the sound
sources (ibid., 82) which, according to the Canadian composer Murray
Schafer, could be called schyzophonia inherent to music practice and
listening. This is also the age when the infant begins to move within a
“basic temporal structure” and becomes aware of the existence of time
(ibid., 84), an essential factor for both the production and the perception
of music. It is the moment when the infant understands there is a
relationship between two events that share the same temporal structure
(ibid., 85): this is actually the birth of music proto-narrativity. I identify
here the birth of a sense of rhythm and the affects connected to it since
that basic temporal structure is common to all the stimuli (auditory,
visual, tactile, proprioceptive). Researchers also found an intensity
structure common to the loudness of vocalization and to the movements
that accompany it, and that the infant feels in the chest, arm muscles and
vocal cords (ibid., 87). These findings led Imberty to assert that in the
first two to five months, the infant perceives musical units on the basis
of proximity and similarity, and that between four and six months it is
aware of the structure of the musical phrase (Imberty, 2004: 510). This
common structure contributes to ensuring that semantic responses
borrow their vocabulary from various modes of perception, auditory,
tactile and proprioceptive.
Finally, during the first nine months, the mother-child relationship is
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based on reciprocal imitation processes that can be explained today

neuro-biologically by the existence of mirror neurons (Rizzolatti and
Sinigaglia, 2008) as Kühl has also noticed (2008: 125). “If the infant
vocalizes, the mother vocalizes back” (Stern, 1985: 139). The infant uses
protolinguistic forms of expression, which, especially by resorting to
semanticised intonation contours, constitute the basis of what
researchers will later call proto-narrativity. Mechthild and Hanuš
Papoušek (1981) have particularly highlighted that the development of a
social exchange and dialogue between mother and child during the first
nine months – what Trevarthen (1993) will describe as proto-dialogue or
proto-conversation – could be based on musical vocal features that
subsequent studies will describe in great detail (Malloch, 1999−2000). A
very important aspect of the “musical dialogue” between mother and
child is, according to the results of surveys, a vocally expressed event, at
the beginning or at the end of a vocalization of specific amplitude, a
stronger moment or a change in the pitch of the mother’s voice. The
mother uses certain words to which the child responds with
vocalizations, all part of a measurable time-space that shows a
remarkable consistency indicating a process of communicative
musicality. Defined in this manner, these vocalizations have a specific
melodic and pitch colour, and the analysis of the contours respectively
used by the mother and the infant shows the influence of the interaction
that occurs between them. For instance, once the baby has produced a
vocalization twice, the second higher than the first, the mother continues
and exaggerates the upwards movement in her subsequent vocalization:
the contour is the relevant parameter. This is also the case when the
infant uses a downward contour: the mother responds using a similar
contour. All contours recorded show a balance in the general form of the
contours alternately used by the mother and the infant. I identify here
the developmental origins of the intonation foundation of semantics and
musical proto-narrativity presented above.
And there is more. We are faced with a veritable construction and, on
my behalf, I would not hesitate to speak of the creation of a collective
work (here, with two authors), similar to that resulting from the
interaction between jazz musicians. Thus, it is not a coincidence if a
music psychologist, Maya Gratier, herself involved in the study of the
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dyadic relationships between the mother and the infant, saw the basis of
these relationships in a jazz performance (Gratier, 2008). A study by
Stephen Malloch also focuses on the musical organization of the timbre
relationships in the vocalisations of the mother and infant. This time, the
measures confirm the research, in both cases, of contrast effects. All this,
Malloch argues, contributes to create, between mother and child, “the
narrative structure of their companionship” (1999−2000: 45), although,
once again, it would be better to speak of proto-narrative, especially as
the author defines the narrative as allowing two persons to “share the
sense of time passing and to create and share emotional envelopes that
evolve through this shared time” (ibid.)
This musical expression constitutes my focus: just like in the music we
know, imitation is subject to change and Stern did not hesitate to speak
of a “theme-and-variation” form insofar as each new vocalization is
likely to be different (Stern, 1985: 139). The infant reproduces by
imitation and transformation the components of the mother’s “baby
talk”: segmentation procedures, repetition, syntactic simplicity, slow
tempo, and simplification and amplification of the melodic contours’
expressive patterns, using five or six prototypes of intonation curves,
which determines Imberty to argue, following Stern’s views, that the
repetition of these patterns “creates a regularity that allows the subject to
anticipate the evolution of time” (Imberty, 2004: 511−513). This is
probably the source not only of the repetition-transformation
mechanism described by Ruwet’s paradigmatic technique, but also of the
implication-realization relationship analysed by Meyer (Imberty, 2005:
187-189). All these processes contribute to the development, in the six
months infant, of a sense of the other based on intentional
communication.
Everything is thus in place for the development of what will be later
called by various authors the musical proto-narrative allowing for
harmonious attunement between the mother and the child (Ibid.: 199-
202), resorting to intensity, timing and shape parameters that must be
remembered as transmodal (Stern 1985: 146, 148, 153−154). “Most
human behaviour, Stern writes, consist of kinetic shapes – that is,
configurations that change in time – and vocalisations are one of the
most pervasive kinetic shapes involved in attunements” (ibid., 154). The
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kinetic answers are commonly found in the verbalizations on musical

semantics obtained by experimentalists.
Once entered in the last phase of the early childhood, the human
being can begin to make use of language to describe what (s)he feels,
including when listening to music.
The observations of early childhood psychologists concerning the
dialogue between the mother and the infant have led Stern, in a later
work (The Motherhood Constellation) to develop the concept of
“protonarrative envelope” (1995: 82−93); he discovered the concept in
the infant while (s)he organises the first ways of dealing with time, based
on, for instance, the experience of waiting, the desire for food or the
interaction with the mother. The protonarrative envelope patterns
published by Stern show very well that the intensity of the child’s desire
begins when the mother enters the room, and it rises until the nipple is
in the baby’s mouth, while the curve of this intensity decreases when the
baby is satisfied with the milk he received (Stern, 1995: 86) “When the
motive or desire is enacted in an interpersonal situation, it creates,
subjectively, a narrative-like structure” (Stern, 1995: 90). This envelope,
explain Jean and Raphael Molino referring in their book Homo Fabulator
to Stern, “is both the first form of time organisation and the
psychological basis of the plot experienced.5 We now understand the
importance of suspense in the narrative: “it is organized at all levels,
from the local to the global, by this very structure of tension and
relaxation, which highlights the end of each episode of a serial novel”
(Molino, Lafhail-Molino, 2003: 250). It is particularly noteworthy that the
terms “tension” and “relaxation” can also apply to the musical
phenomenon. Inspired by Labov, Stern reminds us that the first forms
of causality and a “line of dramatic tension” show what he calls a plot or
a proto-plot (Stern, 1994) and, as stated by Imberty, “[they] allow the
emergence, from the time frame of experience, of a line of dramatic
tension which orients it” (Imberty, 2004: 522). Also, this experience of
the newborn and the child can also be the basis of our relationship with
music in its linear evolution consisting of expectations and resolutions,
obviously mutatis mutandis. In both cases, both the protonarrative
envelope experienced by the infant and the plan within which is
inscribed the musical development are characterized by a contour
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embedded in time, with time on the X-axis and the intensity of the
expectation on the Y-axis. In addition, it is particularly noteworthy that,
although in this presentation of Stern’s view, I went from the concept of
protonarrative in infants to finally discussing musical protonarrative, in
fact, in his presentation, music is the one that served as a model and
based on which he discussed the protonarrative envelope: “One of the
biggest surprises of recent research on infants has been to discover that
infants do not need words nor symbols to represent different sound,
visual or tactile patterns, as it was previously believed” (Stern, 1998: 170).
We assume that protonarrative envelopes constitute the basis of the implicit

knowledge contained in the relational human knowledge. What is interesting
[...] it is the fact that the smallest subjective units (the present moments), on
which depends the emotional appreciation of music, are concepts very
similar to the basic subjective units on which is built an understanding of
the non-verbal interpersonal relationships. (ibid., 182−183)
It comes as no surprise then, as Imberty excellently put it, that we

find in music “the art of creating wordless stories, voiceless histories”
(Imberty, 2005: 238).
Rather than identifying a form of narrative in the game of the tension
and relaxation musical patterns, it seems to me more profitable to follow
the analyses of music psychologists inspired by Stern, aimed precisely at
showing how they base their proto-narrative interaction on units
inscribed in the time, the contours, the intonation patterns, even those
that, later, music would make use of to imitate the narrative; this led
Imberty in his book (2005) and some of the authors of the issue of
Musicae Scientiae quoted at the beginning, especially Imberty and Gratier,
to speak of “musical proto-narrativity.” Therefore, based on
observations of developmental psychology, I strongly suggest
renouncing to talk about musical narrative and adopt the term proto-
narrative.
4. The discourse of narrative musicology as fictional narrative

In the past, I used to keep a certain distance from works that may be
considered as pertaining to narrative musicology, but without going into
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further detail. Following the above section, I would synthesise as follows

the view that I am going to back up here: the attitude of that orientation
of contemporary musicology has the disadvantage of confounding the
semiotic functions of music configurations with the content of
aesthesic behaviours which narrativize them and which are essentially
meta-linguistic. Thus, giving in to the temptation to speak of “musical
narrative” means slipping from a metaphor – which is in itself suggestive
if we keep in mind that it is a metaphor, as Kühl admits it – to an
ontological illusion according to which, since music suggests the narrative,
it would be in itself a “narrative art,” as qualified by Tarasti (2007). This
nuance that we might consider imperceptible and which is in fact
essential, makes the difference between the literary narrative and the
musical proto-narrative.
In principle, I obviously have nothing against the narrative
musicologists’ interest in the explicitly narrative music from a poietic
point of view, where the prototypes are Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, or the
symphonic poems, or those composed following a more or less precise
narrative line – and not faithfully inspired from a literary text – for
example, the one that suggests the titles of the five movements of
Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony or the one that we could retrace in
Mahler’s symphonies, relying on the documents or comments left by the
composer.6
The problem concerning the narrative musicologists’ approach to
explicitly narrative music would reside in the methods used for
rebuilding the narrative intention that they were based on and that I
won’t discuss here. If I were to define the intention from a poietic point
of view, this could be done in a best case scenario with the help of the
proven techniques of history and philology investigation; by contrast,
from an aesthesic point of view, spectators and listeners, who have or
not access to a programme, a title or the linguistic paratextes inscribed in
the partition, could rigorously establish this only by recurring to
experimental methods. In order to identify what story listeners usually
hear in an instrumental piece of work whose narrative intention is
attested, we would simply have to ask them, but without mentioning the
title or the programme of that work.7
Secondly, I have to emphasise the fact that the narrative musicology
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works have the great merit of updating the research initiated by Leonard
Ratner (1980) and continued by Robert Hatten (1994) and Raymond
Monelle (2000), who demonstrate the existence of a certain
organisational level of the work consisting of units bearing feelings or
topic figures different from the traditional elementary structures such as
the degree of the scale used, the melodic-rhythmic or harmonic
structures, phraseology or the big formal sections. These investigations
parallel those initiated by Boris Asafiev and József Ujfalussy, presented
and discussed by Grabócz (2009). I reproduce here the definition of
“topos” suggested by Monelle and which I consider particularly
clarifying: “We assimilate topics to fragments of melody or rhythm, to
conventional forms or even to timbre aspects or harmony which shape
the elements of social or cultural life and, consequently, to themes such
as virility, countryside, innocence, grievance, etc.” (Monelle, 2007: 178)
or, as he states elsewhere, “A figure becomes a topos when its evocation
becomes conventional” (Monelle, 2001: 105). This is not the place to
enter into details regarding the epistemological context authors usually
place themselves in, oscillating between the most classical hermeneutics
and the preoccupations of the diverse semiotic paradigms, nor to discuss
the methods they use for defining the music units considered as topoi
and for identifying the meaning associated to them. It is enough for the
time being to underline the great merit of the concept of topos and to
signal the existence of symbolic configuration classes (as defined by
Piaget and Cassirer) at the disposal of composers during quite a long
period of time, for example, the topos of “ranz des vaches” (or of the
shepherd’s air) mentioned by Rousseau in his Dictionnaire de musique, as
well as by Grétry, Beethoven, Rossini, Berlioz, Liszt, Schumann and
Wagner. Thus, the notion of topos seems a remarkable contribution to
the poietic dimension of musical semantics, supplementing the work of
experimental psychologists (Francès, Imberty) who expressly situate
themselves on the side of aesthesics (and who are inconveniently and
totally ignored by narrative musicologists…).8
It would be appropriate to initiate a detailed study in order to establish
the role of the “narrativity” in the exact sense of the word that narrative
musicologists believe to identify in music and in what it consists from a
musicological point of view. They seem to be, once more, prudent, and
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Kofi Agawu’s hesitation is revelatory in this context. In his work, Playing

with Signs, he provides a list of 27 topoi for classical music:
alla breve, alla zoppa, amoroso, aria, bourrée, brillant style, cadenza,
sensibility, fanfare, fantasy, French overture, gavotte, hunt style, learned
style, Mannheim rocket, march, minuet, musette, ombra, opera buffa,
pastoral, recitative, sarabande, sigh motif, singing style, Sturm und Drang
and Turkish music (Agawu, 1991: 30),
but he points out that: “We have not yet succeeded in demonstrating,
except in an extremely trivial manner, that music has the power to retell”
(1991: 36). Nevertheless, later on, in his book Music as Discourse (Agawu
2009), he gives in, on the subject of Beethoven, Brahms and Mahler, to
the narrative temptation indicated in the title,9 and he is not the only one
to do so. I refer here to the contributions made by Lawrence Kramer,
Anthony Newcomb and Leo Treitler.
I would like to insist on the narratological works applied to “pure”
instrumental music. As regards my reluctance to speak of musical
“narrative,” Grabócz writes that “What connects all these applications of
different models is not the desire to see a ‘story retold in music,’ as
assumed by Nattiez, but to find the rules, the strategies organising the
signifiers” (2009: 27). Does this mean I do not know how to read?! Eero
Tarasti states in his Sémiotique musicale [Musical Semiotics] that “by
narrativity in music [we understand] the ‘structural’ narrativity according
to which every musical composition developing in time and which
transforms a thing into something different must be considered as being
narrative”10 (Tarasti 1996: 406). In the anthology Sens et signification en
musique, edited by Grabócz, he entitles once more his contribution
“Music as narrative art.” He mentions, in the first paragraph, that “Music
constitutes a narrative art in its own right”,11 while Grabócz herself, when
referring to Beethoven’s Leonore Ouverture no. 3, talks about “discursive
syntax” (Grabócz 2009: 191). Thus, does music bear or not a narrative?!
These two authors would surely contradict me in an attempt to correct
me or to diversify their position. According to Tarasti, “The semiotic
approach that I wish to develop in this article does not claim to
demonstrate that music is capable of enouncing specific narratives, but it
rather exposes why music structures can be associated with narratives”12
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(Tarasti, 2007: 209). This is quite different since there is no longer music
which would be in itself a “narrative art.” According to Grabócz, “We
call “musical narrativity” the concatenation of topics” (Grabócz 2009:
28). But what gives narrative meaning to this syntagmatic organisation of
topoi ? Certainly not just this succession, unless a musical piece is
capable, in itself, to tell us: “I am the Guardian Angel, the Muse, and the
Madonna!” A concatenation of moments does not speak in itself. In fact,
in either case, music triggers the enunciation of the narrative from the part
of the listeners or ... of the musicologists who resort to the metalinguistic
categories of general narratology. If music narratologists seem to play a
double game, this is because they have not recognised the protonarrative
(and not the narrative) nature of music.
The works of Grabócz and Tarasti point to three great difficulties.
On the one hand, these researchers seem to consider that, if it is
possible to apply (assuming this is the case, I will return to this matter)
the models of literary narratology to “pure” instrumental music, this
would be proof that music is a “narrative art.” It is almost as if, since it
was possible starting with the 1960s to apply to music the models of
phonology, of the paradigmatic analysis and the generative grammar, I
concluded from this methodologically successful expansion that music
would be a language in the sense of verbal language.
Second, it is quite amazing that researchers who claim to belong to
the field of semiotics have ignored one of its fundamental principles: any
symbolic form or any system of signs (verbal language, music, myth, and
cinema) has specific semiotic properties, and we cannot thus mistake the
subject of the semiotic investigation and the metalanguage that attempts
to explain it. As Hjelmslev argues, human language is the only one able
to “speak” all systems of non-verbal signs.
Third, the general narratology models, especially those of Tzvetan
Todorov and Algirdas Greimas, are they applicable to music? It would
be furthermore necessary to establish whether they are still adequate to
analyse the literary narrative. I would like to mention here Francis
Rastier’s testimony, co-author together with Greimas of the historical
article “Les jeux des contraintes sémiotiques” (Greimas - Rastier, 1970),
who, during the first Congress of the International Association of
Semiotics held in January 1974 in Milan delivered a remarkable mea culpa.
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Taking unequivocally distance from the model of the “semiotic square”

in the creation of which he participated, he had the scrupulous honesty
to report, in order to endorse it, the irritation of the specialists of the
Old and New Testament against the structural approaches suggested in
No. 22 of the journal Langages, “Sémiotique narrative: récits bibliques.”
How to pretend thus to reduce to mere “structures,” texts whose
philology has such difficulty in establishing the meaning and whose
interpretation must be based – it is, in fact, the task of the religious
hermeneutics to investigate its diversity – on the endless proliferation of
interpretations according to Peirce? And what about the retractatio, no
less courageous, belonging to Tzvetan Todorov himself, who, in Devoirs
et délices, engaged in a self-criticism regarding the structural approaches to
literature he himself was the first to suggest (Todorov, 2002: 105-138)?13
There is still time to ponder on the testimony of Roland Barthes who
denounced, rather early, “the structuralist mode” and called his views
“an anti-structural criticism” (Barthes, 1975: 149 and 151).
This is probably not the case of Grabócz – who continues to project
on the instrumental works the constraints of the “semiotic square,” even
with the reckless backing up of Charles Rosen – and Tarasti, even if the
latter, given the course taken by his Existential Semiotics (2000) will
eventually encounter the conflict between his loyalty to Greimas’s model
and “the challenge of a new hermeneutic efficiency,” as Daniel Charles
describes it in his article devoted to this book, noting, with his
characteristic philosophical insight, that it is based on the infinite
semiosis of Peirce (Charles, 2007: 137−142), where the concept of
interpretant seems to me unable to constitute the Greimasian approach
and even provides a solid semiotic basis to demonstrate its inadequacy.
Thus, what epistemological status could we assign to the works of
narratological musicology when dealing with “musical narrativity” in
instrumental music? Delalande, the author I mentioned at the beginning,
seems to have established, on an experimental basis and once for all, the
fact that the “figurative listening behaviour” was one of the possible lines
of perception when listening to an instrumental piece of music. The
narratological musicologist does not work otherwise, when, a successor
of the first Todorov or Greimas, and faced with the succession of events
bearing emotion, expression and meaning – especially the topoi - (s)he
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narrativises their syntagmatic succession by resorting to categories and

methods (now obsolete) to account for the literary narrative
functioning.14
Thus, musical narratology consists in projecting onto the music
considered a priori “as a narrative art” (although it is only a proto-
narrative) a narrative associated to music, as argues Tarasti; nevertheless,
this narrative is that of the musicologist, who proves once again the
ability of the human beings to invent fictions reflecting a greater or lesser
degree of storytelling.15
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1
This article is a revised version of a lecture presented in Lausanne on
October 28, 2011, in the context of the colloquium « Rencontres de
narrativités : perspectives sur l’intrigue musicale » and of a paper read in
Nanterre on December 13, 2012, in honour of Michel Imberty.
2
Another example, a significant slogan of the musical chain Radio-Canada:
“Music, beyond words, tells a story.” (September 2011).
3
For convenient textbooks illustrating this trend, see Carone 2006 and
Grabócz 2007. For a review, see Grabócz, “Bref aperçu sur l’utilisation des
concepts de narrativité et de signification en musique” [Brief overview on the
use of the concepts of narrative and significance in music], in Grabócz 2009:
21−57.
4
My emphasis.
5
I emphasise this expression justifying the fact that we could speak of proto-
narrativity between mother and infant.
6
See Dahlhaus, 1997: 123−125.
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7
See, for instance, Imberty’s investigation regarding the perception of the story
at the basis of Debussy’s The Sunken Cathedral (Imberty, 1985: 153−158), as
well as my own research on the young listeners of Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s
Apprentice (Nattiez, 2010: 113−119).
8
But it is not too late to do it. A recent work, Cinquante ans de psychologie de la
musique. L’école de Robert Francès (Fifty Years of Music Psychology. The Robert
Francès School) (Guirard, 2010), underlines, in an equally critical perspective,
the importance and repercussions of Francès’ Perception of Music (La
perception de la musique) (1958). An article signed by Imberty relates studies on
music semantics to the developmental psychology works mentioned above.
Narrative musicology should urgently refer to the 975 pages of Handbook of
Music and Emotion (Juslin and Sloboda, 2010).
9
See, in particular, Agawu 2009: 102-106, 195-196, 239, 247, 259, 247, 255,
271-273, 278-279.
10
My emphasis.
11
My emphasis.
12
The author’s emphasis.
13
I need to recall the fact that, it is in this monument of epistemological
erudition and insight which is the Homo fabulator by Molino and Lafhail-Molino
(2003), that we may found a valuable antidote to the excesses of the
structuralist approaches to literature, provided of course we do not simply
decide to ignore them.
14
An elaborate critical approach to Greimas’s “semiotic square” by referring to
the methodology suggested by Grabócz and Tarasti should obviously be
undertaken. To understand the epistemological and critical perspective I
generally adhere to with respect to the structuralism of the literary and
mythological symbolic forms see Lévi-Strauss musicien (Nattiez 2008: Chapter 4
and 5).
15
The present version of this article has benefited from stimulating and
challenging discussions with Márta Grabócz, Françoise Revaz and Raphaël
Baroni, as well as the particularly fruitful personal communications by Jean
Molino and suggestions by Michel Imberty.
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Biographical Note
Jean-Jacques Nattiez is a musical semiotician and professor of Musicology at
the Université de Montréal. He is considered a prominent exponent of musical
semiotics as a distinct discipline. In 2009, he received the Golden Medal from
the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the highest Canadian
distinction in these fields. In 2011, he was made Officer of the Order of
Canada “for his contributions to the development of musicology as a researcher,
professor and specialist of music semiotics” and in 2013, he received the “Ordre
des arts et des lettres” of the French Republic for “his contribution to the
knowledge of music”. In addition to his own thorough and characteristic
development of semiotic theory, he has given the field substance through his
influential teaching, organizational, editorial, and bibliographic endeavors. It is
due largely to his intellectual leadership that the semiotics of music is now
sustained by a very diverse and productive community of scholars. His main
works are: Fondements d'une sémiologie de la musique (1975), Proust as
Musician (1989), Music and Discourse (1990), Wagner Androgyne (1993), Le Combat de
Chronos et d’Orphée (1993), La Musique, la recherche et la vie (1999). He is the editor
of the five volumes of Musiques, une encyclopédie pour le XXIème siècle, published in
Italy (2001-2005) and in France (2003-2007).

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HSS II.2 (2013)

The Narrativization Of Music.

1. Does music tell a story?

thus, it “talks” to them. A series of experiments conducted by François

elements. But in order to examine the possibilities of narrativizing music,

Here, and I obviously appeal to the semiotic tripartition of Jean Molino

regarding the literary narrative may as well be applied to the perception

In the course of the musical development, sound events succeed one

This is thus an aesthesic analogy that could have encouraged both

2. Narrativization of music: music as a proto-narrative

content, but rather to the effects of the syntactic organization of music, of

trombones, as was clearly seen by Maurice Béjart in two righteously

metaphor (ibid.: 216), and by means of a u-turn rhetoric, he declares

3. The developmental origins of the musical proto-narrativity

based on reciprocal imitation processes that can be explained today

kinetic answers are commonly found in the verbalizations on musical

We assume that protonarrative envelopes constitute the basis of the implicit

It comes as no surprise then, as Imberty excellently put it, that we

4. The discourse of narrative musicology as fictional narrative

further detail. Following the above section, I would synthesise as follows

Kofi Agawu’s hesitation is revelatory in this context. In his work, Playing

Taking unequivocally distance from the model of the “semiotic square”

narrativises their syntagmatic succession by resorting to categories and

Stern, Daniel. “Une manière de construire un nourrisson cliniquement

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