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Why Narrative? Why Now?

Wayne D. Bowman

Abstract
How or whether we make good on the promise of narrative inquiry depends
upon what we understand that promise to be. This essay raises many vexing
questions about the nature of narrative inquiry and its significance for music
education. Distinctions between narrative and story are advanced. The
distinctions between meta-narrative and small or local narrative are
explored. Narrative’s potential complicity in both legitimation and
emancipation are probed. Doubts are expressed about the compatibility
between music education’s methodological obsessions and an undertaking as
open-ended as narrative inquiry. The essay concludes that narrative
inquiry’s contributions to professional knowledge in music education must
not just be asserted, but demonstrated, and that the questions posed in this
essay’s title should be addressed explicitly by each narrative inquirer.

Introduction

Narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society… Nowhere is nor
has been a people without narrative. All Classes, all human groups, have their
narratives…. Narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply
there, like life itself. (Barthes, 1977, p. 79)

There is no true version of a life, after all. There are only stories told about and
around a life. (Behar, 1993, p. 234)

To feel comfortable telling stories requires one to wander bardlike away from the
warmth of one’s disciplinary home. (Kreiswirth, 1995, p. 66)

Can we say that the triumph of narrative is a happy event of our time, or an occasion
for worry? (Fulford, 1999, p. 152)

Since you could hardly be blamed if, having seen the title of this essay, you are
expecting a definitive accounting of narrative inquiry’s essential nature and value to
the music education profession, let’s clear the air at the outset: that will not happen
here. My answers to the questions I’ve posed will not be definitive, ultimate, or final.i
For those of you who know me and know my work, this will not come as much of a
surprise because I’ve made no secret of my distaste and suspicion toward such
aspirations and orientations. But if you are here in search of a knock-them-dead
rationale, prepare to be disappointed. Narrative inquiry is not, I will argue, the kind
of thing for which there can be a definitive rationale—and we should be wary of
claims or assumptions to the contrary. We music educators are notorious for our
passionate embraces of perceived novelty, and for our eagerness to ride (and to be
seen to ride) the bandwagon at the front of the parade. But the bandwagon isn’t the

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best place to watch the parade, and narrative inquiry’s role in the salvation of music
education is not exactly assured.
Clearly, there’s a tremendous amount of interest in this so-called narrative
turn and its potential relevance to the music education discipline. The number of
submissions for this event surpassed expectations significantly. What might account
for this interest? Why narrative? What’s going on here? The range of submitted titles
raises another, even more foundational question: What do we take narrative to
mean? Puzzling over these questions, I can’t help but ask yet another: Who might
this “we” be? After all, three in four of the submissions for this conference are from
women; and the participants are predominantly white. What is it about this
particular mode of inquiry that draws this particular group of people together at this
particular juncture?
I raise these questions—to which, I assure you once again, my answers will be
equivocal—out of interest in still another series of questions. How will this narrative
turn, this burgeoning interest in stories, be remembered in and by music education?
What kind of stories will be told about story telling and the story tellers? What will
be the critical incidents or distinguishing features of this chapter in music education’s
story? Or put more directly and pragmatically: What difference will narrative make?
The answers to questions like these will depend upon what we understand narrative
to be, which, again in pragmatic terms, depends on what we ask of it.
But is narrative inquiry an “it” or a “they”? Obviously, the issue to which I’m
alluding is whether narrative can be fruitfully understood to be “an” approach, or
whether, on the other hand, it designates a host of loosely affiliated approaches that
are best understood in that loose affiliation.ii How the narrative turn is remembered
will depend on the uses to which it gets put by music educators and the extent to
which those uses change our understandings, beliefs, and ultimately our actions as
music educators—and how. It will also depend upon whether narrative inquiry
succeeds in altering our understandings of things like professional knowledge, the
aims of instruction, curricular content, and a host of other things. It will depend, in
other words, upon what we understand its promise to be and how effectively we
make good on that promise. And this, in turn, impinges in important ways upon
who “we” turns out to be: What kind of community is the community of narrative
inquirers? What kind of stories might be told about us?iii
At present, and within the field of music education research, the community is
(among other things) a marginal one. Now, under certain circumstances, margins
and centers can relate to each other in interesting, dynamic, and very important
ways. Margins have transformative potential. I wonder, though, if narrative inquiry
can change music education: whether music education is the kind of discipline to
which narrative can be added without fundamental or profound alterations in how it
does what it does and what it conceives itself as being—issues, in other words, of
professional identity.
Another question troubles me: If narrative is all we have and all we areiv —if
narrative is everywhere, and everything is narrative—and if at the same time we
think it worth studying, what is distinctive about “it”? How do we distinguish good
from bad, useful from pointless, profound from trivial? A wise friend of mine once
remarked to me, “If you put ketchup on everything, everything will taste like
ketchup.”v If narrative is everything and everywhere, then we aren’t really talking
about anything distinctive, and narrative inquiry is whatever anyone says it is.
Narrative, it has been aptly observed, is no longer simply in the spotlight: it is rather
the spotlight in whose light everything is seen.vi If that’s the case, how are we to

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distinguish it from journalism, history, philosophy, biographies, diaries, stories-

about-how-I-spent-my-summer-vacation, jokes, gossip, delusional rants, and so on?
Whose narratives warrant our professional time and attention, limited as these
precious resources are? And whose are better passed over?

Ceci n’est pas une narration (What kind of narrative is it?)vii

To repeat, how or whether we make good on the promise of narrative inquiry
depends on what we think that promise is. That depends on what we mean by
narrative which, in turn, depends in important ways on what it excludes. And that,
as it turns out, is not a matter of immutable fact, but convention or habit.viii Symbolic
interactionists understand or inflect the idea of narrative one way; discourse analysts,
another; poststructuralists, another; organizational theorists, another; psychologists,
another; feminists, another; literary theorists, another; and on, and on (and on). This
doesn’t bode particularly well for those who would like to claim distinctive or
unique epistemological grounds for narrative: What kind of knowing, after all,
derives from something whose status as fictive or factual, aesthetic or ontological, is
a matter of habit or convention, perhaps even indeterminate?ix What does it mean to
extol the virtues of narrative inquiry if we aren’t really referring to the same thing?
What is narrative? If we follow Roland Barthes (1977) in the epigraph to this
essay, narrative is everywhere, and “simply there, like life itself.” Only, this doesn’t
leave much out, does it? x And telling us where it is doesn’t get us very far in
understanding what it is. Such sweeping claims are not particularly useful.xi
Many of us here are familiar with Bruner’s (1986) distinction between
narrative and paradigmatic knowledge. On this view, what’s distinctive about
narrative is its temporality or processual nature, together with its situatedness or
particularity. Narrative lends itself especially well to conveying the shape and
character of human experience, and should therefore be regarded as one of the basic
ways humans create and share meanings. These claims go beyond the rather obvious
fact of narrative’s ubiquity to its temporality and particularity. Narratives are
sequential, up close, and personal – as opposed to schematic, abstract, and general.
And because of these characteristics, narratives lend themselves particularly well to
relating human experience as it unfolds in time: a lived present with an experiential
past, anticipating a future. This perspective helps us distinguish narrative interests
from others, to distinguish “mere” utterances from utterances with narrative
character. The further conviction seems to be that narrative relates to human living
and experience in ways that are more authentic than other contenders:xii telling
stories is how people everywhere make sense of and share meanings. Narratives
present events developing in time according to causes or human intentions.
Is narrative the same thing as story? Judging from the use of these terms it’s
often presumed to be. There are those, however, who urge us to draw a robust
distinction between narratives and stories.xiii On this view, “narrative” properly
designates a broad range of human expression in which events are serially ordered.
But narratives need not be stories, and many are not. Narratives can have what we
might call “storyhood” in varying degree. At one end of a continuum lies “mere”
narrative;xiv toward the other end lies story. As we progress toward the storied end of
this narrative continuum, we add, successively, considerations like explanation,
teleology, unity of purpose or intentionality, plot, and so forth. Story is narrative that
is designed, among other things, to invoke emotional response: to be persuasive.
And as Fulford (1999) puts it, a story “has shape, outlines, limits… . Stories, in order
to become stories, must be simplified, stripped of extraneous detail & vagrant

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feeling.”xv To me, then, the narrative/story distinction resonates in certain ways with
Dewey’s (1934) distinction between (mere?) experience and “an experience.”
Is this a distinction without a difference? I don’t think so: It is probably helpful
to recognize that we should expect or look for things in story that we wouldn’t
necessarily expect to find in “mere” narrative—things like plot, character, power, and
so on. To put this point in a slightly different way, we can think of stories linking
events in two different ways: by telling us “how things go” (the temporal/causal or
narrative level), and by telling us “how things feel” (the level of emotional
resonance).xvi When dealing with stories, as distinct from narratives, we can also
characterize them in terms of their conformance to plot type, as Northrop Frye (1976)
showed us. It may be revealing and useful, for instance, to know whether a story is
comedic or romantic or tragic in character;xvii or whether or how the story is a variant
on certain archetypes. Many of our favorite stories about music education, for
instance, are variants on Cinderella, in which, despite her evil, ugly stepsisters, music
education ultimately gets to attend the ball, marry the prince, and live happily ever
after. We also have more than our share of what I like to call Stuart Smalley stories:
stories of affirmation that claim, in effect, “we’re good enough, we’re smart enough,
and doggone it, people like us.”xviii
We can look at how stories work as representations of experience, or we can
look at stories as stories. We can focus on the told (the narrated) or focus on the
telling (the narration).xix These can be pretty different orientations, depending,
among other things, on what we make of the teller’s veracity: whether the story is
credible, or true, or not.xx If one believes, with Sartre and many others, that all stories
are by their nature inherently untrue—that all tales are “tall tales”—narrative inquiry
suggests something quite different than it does to the naïve realist or the “naturalist”
(or “representationalist”) who thinks narrative has a privileged or “authentic”
relationship to the truth of personal experience.xxi The existentialist, the
constructivist, and the naïve realist may use the same word, but their understandings
and expectations of narrative could hardly be more different.xxii
Some claim to turn to narrative out of an interest in how people create and
renew themselves. On this view, narrative is how people weave identities for
themselves, with pasts linked to presents and futures (who we are in relationship to
who we’ve been and who we are becoming). But this idea (this story?) of self-creation
is challenged by others who take the view that people don’t so much speak language
as language speaks people.xxiii The idea of selfhood, then, is a projection that
conforms to cultural pattern. We might find it useful, then, to distinguish between
utterances or narratives, on the one hand, and discourses on the other: between
things people say, and the kind of things their society and its power structures
(including linguistic ones) encourage or permit them to say. Most often, it seems to
me, we use the two synonymously.
As if all this weren’t already complicated enough, our various understandings
of narrative are functions of the uses to which we tend to put them:xxiv of what kind
of actions our interests in narrative invoke or enable. We can collect them; we can
categorize them; we can analyze them; we can interpret them; we can create them;
we can tell them; we can write them; we can sing them;xxv we can praise them; we can
criticize them. And there doesn’t seem to be any basis for saying that one of these
standpoints beats all other contenders: each is valid. When we use the term narrative,
to what are we referring? What ranges and qualities of human actions do we intend
to designate?

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Narratives great and small (Does size matter?)

Schütz (1967) showed us that to understand conduct, as opposed to mere
behavior, we need to know intentions; and that to know intentions, we need to
consider settings or contexts. So an understanding of human meanings or values is
fundamentally reliant upon situation. These, it is often argued, are precisely
narrative’s strengths. Because it is temporal, personal, and situated, it affords unique
and indispensable insights into human meanings and action: the ways people use
music to make sense of their lives, for instance, or how they make sense of their
musical lives.
These are important potentials, but they occur in narrative in varying degrees
depending on its perspective or range. Often we refer metaphorically to this
difference as one of size. Little story, petit récit, stands in marked contrast to the
global ambitions of metanarrative, or grand theory: those big stories about music and
music education that supposedly obtain for everyone, everywhere, for all times.
Grand theory is abstract, general, schematic, and universal in its presumptions.xxvi
Rather than a story, it seeks to tell the story.
The narrative turn, then, is a turn away from such grand scale pontification,xxvii
a turn toward accounts of everyday happenings, here on the ground, amongst real
people. Little narratives recover concreteness, particularity, individuality, and
situatedness. They feature people as people, and actions as actions—instead of
reducing them to examples of something else: data, or behaviors, viewed from
somewhere “out there.”
Because they are situated, particular and personal, little stories can offer
alternative, often resistant or counter-hegemonic versions of things like truth and
reality. As accounts of circumstances, meanings, actions, and events that are
situationally and temporally-grounded in the here and now of personal experience,
little story doesn’t aspire to occupy the same turf as grand theory. Unlike meta-
narrative, there is always another version of a story, a different perspective from
which it might be told, a different embellishment or inflection. Indeed, many of the
pleasures of story telling come from the particular spin given to a sequence of events
whose main features and overall structure are well known and familiar. Because
they’re local and situated, little narratives are about this event, my experience, our
meanings. They’re at home with contingency and fallibility. Their point isn’t
achieving the kind of certitude that beats all contenders: Things like performability
and resonance usually suffice.
Instead of advancing knock-them-dead truths that vie for official status (“the”
story), little narratives seek only to tell local stories (this story) as persuasively or
authentically as possible. At issue is not so much whose story taps the ultimate truths
of the universe, but rather, whose stories warrant telling? Whose stories warrant
being heard? These are sociopolitical matters. The experiences that narrative inquiry
often seeks to consider, validate, and legitimate are not just those of influential
academics playing king of the mountain, or of people whose refined rhetorical skills
assure access to the power structures controlling the gates to the kingdom. Narrative
inquiry exposes and explores music as it is lived by everyday people in everyday
situations—stories that may be resistant, even disruptive, to the accounts circulating
through positions of academic power and authority.
Put differently, narrative inquiry takes the stance Lyotard (1984) famously
describes as “incredulity”xxviii toward metanarrative. On this view, what we need to
do, and a significant part of what narrative inquiry promises, is to demystify grand
narrative’s totalizing power, help us “get over” the needs metanarrative appears to

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serve. Little narratives give us alternative descriptions of things, different truths and
realities: they make audible voices that are ignored and silenced by theoretical
abstraction and global explanation. Non-totalizing, local, and contingent, little
narrative is the antithesis of theory.xxix
From the point of view most notably advanced by Nietzsche (1993), global
accounts or justifications for human action are nihilistic: retreats from responsible
action and self-reliance.xxx Nietzsche’s claim that God is dead was not intended as a
negative claim but an affirmation of human power and self-determination. To offer
an illustration from music education, one might say that modernist aesthetic
doctrines are meta-narratives that reduce human musical actions to mere means for
the production and consumption of commodities called “pieces” or “works.” Thus
they turn us away from the very things that people find most compelling about
music: action and agency. As accounts of actual human experience, narratives can
help recover what most counts musically: the ways people use it to create lives that
are active, vital, and corporeally engaged.
The view that I’ve been describing here often makes the epistemological
assumption that narrative is a natural mode of human consciousness—in contrast to
the presumably unnatural, and therefore suspect, assumptions of logic and reason,
the bases of metanarrative. Thus, in contrast to meta-narrative, we should recognize
narrative as “the quintessential form of customary knowledge.”xxxi Or narrative is a
way of knowing requiring “nothing beyond social performability for its
authority.”xxxii Or (as with Bruner, 1986) the narrative and the paradigmatic are
fundamentally different approaches to knowledge.xxxiii However, aren’t meta-
narratives narratives, too? Can narrative assumptions help us understand grand
narrative? Can’t theory be used as a tool to achieve human ends and enhance human
aims?
That is certainly the way I understand philosophical pragmatism. And on
pragmatic grounds, I’m reluctant to draw a hard line between narratives little and
large. I’m wary of the kind of heaven-and-hell discourses that portray petit récit as
inherently authentic and metanarrative as inherently bogus. The fact is, both are
needed, both are “meta” to some degree:xxxiv and we need to become more
discriminating toward both. Master plots can serve valuable human and professional
purposes, so long as we don’t lose sight of their status as stories and “storied.”xxxv By
the same token, there is nothing inherently valuable about little narrative. We need to
understand both the ways the cultural gets into the individual and the ways
individuals shape the cultural.
Furthermore, the legitimacy of small narratives is governed by the pragmatic
“rules” that keep them traveling and circulating: their fit to experience and
circumstance, and their usefulness. The same should obtain for theory. Instead of
being opposites, then, they should relate dialectically: one informed by and tested
against the other, and each contributing to each other’s cogency. They may have
differing points of view, different presumed ranges and spheres of influence; but
both are narratives, regardless, and socially symbolic acts. The question, I submit, is
whose rather than what kind of story to trust; and that’s an ethical/political matter,
not a question of size. The fact that a narrative is small doesn’t necessarily mean
anything interesting or important is being said; and the fact it is large doesn’t
necessarily render it deceptive. Size matters: but it isn’t everything.
Narratives large and small are crucial parts of what holds cultures together.
“Past events recover their original urgency only if retold within the unity of a single
great collective story… only if seen as sharing a single fundamental theme;” and

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these need to be “grasped as vital episodes in a single vast unfinished plot.”xxxvi Oral
tradition remains our primary means of cultural orientation and transmission, even
in literate cultures. Modern institutions run on fictions—from a pragmatist
perspective, habitual ways of self-description—as all institutions always have. The
task of the narrative scholar is not just to assure that the diversity and richness of
little stories gets heard; it is also to show how these fictions are constructed,
circulated, and sustained, organizationallyxxxvii —and to evaluate them.

Emancipation, legitimation, affirmation

As much as we need small narratives to challenge and renew official,
disciplinary conversations,xxxviii keeping them related to the experiences of human
agents in a changing world; as much as we need the periphery to challenge the
center; we need to resist the notion that narratives are authentic and emancipatory.
Just because they are personal doesn’t make them credible or trustworthy. What
narratives offer is not truth in any event, but habitual or convenient ways of
describing selves, actions, and events. They have a great deal to tell us, but they can’t
give us the kind of pre-discursive truth naïve realists would have us believe they
do.xxxix
Narrative work can show us the multiplicity and diversity behind apparent
uniformity; it can highlight the temporality of musical engagement; it can give us
vivid accounts of the processes of rupture and change that are music’s life-blood; it
can help recover the processual and ethical qualities in musical action that theory so
often neglects or obscures. But these are potentials, not guarantees.
Attending to stories and talk that are local and particular affords opportunities
to hear voices and versions other than the officially-sanctioned ones: to examine
ways of negotiating the landscape that are at odds with hegemonic master plots.
However, local stories arise in social contexts that powerfully shape and constrain
their discursive possibilities. Organizational narratives function both as “inscriptions
of past performances and staging instructions for future performances”xl —and these
may as easily be conservative as progressive. To that extent, narratives can as easily
affirm, reinforce, and legitimate the status quo as they can challenge it. There is
nothing inherently emancipatory about narrative. Talk can be, and often is, cheap.
Narrative inquiry rightly seeks to make audible voices and stories that are
outside the mainstream. And many of these stories are indeed moving and
persuasive. But they are persuasive in no small part because that is what stories, as
stories, do. “[They] can be honest, moving, insightful and revealing, but they can also
be mistaken, disingenuous, evasive and beside the point.”xli And there are no
methodological grounds for drawing the distinction between “how it seems to me”
and “how I want it to seem to you,”xlii or “how I think I should talk about it in
situations like this.”xliii
Nor are there methodological grounds for determining whether or to what
extent things said simply mimic official discourses. As much as people speak
language or tell stories, their language speaks them or their stories tell them.
Discursive and linguistic habits and the social practices in which they are situated
shape and constrain both identity and our sense of the possible. We are what we do
and do repeatedly: “truth” and “self” are convenient shorthand for habit that
appears to serve present patterns of action. The Frankfurt School was instrumental in
showing us how the commercialization of thought can make it difficult to distinguish
between what people think and what they are told or sold. In a complimentary way,
Foucault showed us that subjectivity or selfhood is discursively constituted, and to
that extent a function of what sociopolitical power permits it to be.

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Again: There is nothing inherently emancipatory about narrative. It may, and

often does, legitimate existing power relations, existing discourses, existing patterns
of privilege and possibility.xliv This is not to say that narrative inquiry is bankrupt,
only to urge the necessity for vigilance and for approaches that are both criticalxlv and
“committed.”xlvi Among the questions we need to ask are: what kind of stories we
appear to like; how those likes appear to square with our needs; what kind of
assumptions and values our stories portray; whose stories our official discourses
privilege, and whom they marginalize or silence; and what our answers to questions
like these tell us about our apparent needs as an aspiring profession.xlvii
There are stories and there are mere stories. There are stories that help and
stories that hurt. (Often, the same story does both, at once). There are stories that
advance provisional truths and stories that presume vainly to speak for us all. These
are distinctions that should concern us: not because they are somehow implicated in
rational explications of narrative, but because of the uses to which they may be put,
their consequences, the differences they make.xlviii

Working without a net (What counts as professional knowledge?)

Method inevitably disappoints. Posing as a pure metalanguage, it partakes of the

vanity of all metalanguages. A work that unceasingly declares its will to methodology
always becomes sterile in the end… Nothing is more sure to kill research and sweep it
off into leftovers of abandoned works…than method. (Barthes, 1971, p. 9)

I’ve been asking a lot of questions about narrative inquiry, but on one level
they all boil down to “What difference will it make?” How do we think the music
education profession may eventually be better off for our narrative efforts? Is this
event, this conference, the beginning of a movement with the power to transform
music education? Perhaps. But I wonder whether the music education profession as
it is currently constituted is ready for or capable of absorbing what narrative inquiry
has to offer. And that’s because so many of the professionally oriented stories we tell
ourselves are what we might call salvation stories that revolve around discipleship to
the one true way of teaching music: what Regelski and others have dubbed
“methodolatry.”xlix Can a profession with methodological obsessions at its heart
accommodate habits and dispositions like the ones I’ve been suggesting narrative
inquiry entails? Or will our passion for button-down method reduce it to more of the
same? Can the music education profession accommodate narrativity without
fundamentally modifying what it has worked so hard to become? Or will we
succumb to the temptation to reduce narrative inquiry to a recipe in order to teach it
in a neatly defined unit and in order to make it fit into our prevailing notions of
professional knowledge?
We need to think carefully about how ‘different’ narrative inquiry is, and in
what ways. Is there, or should there be, a “method” for narrative inquiry? I’m
inclined to say no: first, because it is not a single orientation, and shouldn’t be;l and
second, because its situatedness and particularity are the very antithesis of method’s
generality.li How does a method-obsessed discipline deal with absence of method? lii
There are multiple plausible approaches to narrative, each appealing to
distinctive kinds of curiosity and each requiring different kinds of interests,
sensibilities, and skills. If, as I think it should, every narrative journey requires re-
invention, a new start without explicit criteria,liii on what do we rely? Things like the
ability to write with grace and precision, respect for the complexities of language,

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and an eye (an ear?) for detail,liv are crucial; but can they be developed in a neatly
defined unit of instruction? How can we achieve rigor and deliver on the promise of
narrative inquiry without reducing its inherent plurality and complexity to method?
Can the music education profession learn habits and dispositions like these?
An affirmative answer is too facile, I think. What might a music education discipline
without methodological obsessions look like? Is a music education discipline without
method at its core even possible? What kind of professional stories might we tell
without method?lv
One of the attractions and benefits of narrative inquiry is its capacity to “keep
us going as beginners.”lvi But not everyone is comfortable with new starts, beginner
status, and the pragmatic habit of changing habits.lvii This brings me back to the “we”
question. The community of narrative inquirers is, arguably, a place for innovative
scholars with an optimal blend of hardiness, curiosity, tenacity, and comfort amidst
things like ambiguity, complexity, and the enigmatic.lviii For better or worse, this
situates narrative inquiry outside current disciplinary norms. To the extent its
interests are also seen as self-indulgent diversions rather than bona fide sources of
professional knowledge,lix membership in this community also entails courage and
considerable risk. As long as narrative inquiry is perceived as airy-fairy, artsy-fartsy,
hippie-dippie, its advocates will continue to wrestle with significant narrative issues
both in their research and in their bids for promotion and tenure. The challenge is to
achieve the rigor that professional respectability demands without sacrificing the
openness that narrative requires, and to communicate to others how the work at
hand achieves this balance.lx Where everything is narrative and all utterances are
legitimate (a pointless cacophony of individual voices?), marginal status is inevitable
—and probably warranted. Where we neglect to make compelling cases for our
choices, decisions, and actions—where we fail to tell persuasive stories about the
stories that interest us, why they interest us, and what differences they might make -
narrative inquiry will remain a professional oddity without real transformative
power.

Fine (Why narrative now?)

We’ve touched on quite a few provocative questions here, and since good
questions are among our most valuable professional resources I don’t feel
particularly guilty about not having answered them.lxi But as we draw to a close,
what can be said in response to the question I posed in my title: Why narrative now?
Those of you who made the choice and effort to attend this Narrative Soundings
conference no doubt have personally satisfying answers. But are there answers with
broader professional significance?
From one perspective, narrative inquiry is a much-needed corrective to our
profession’s positivistic propensities: its love of answers that purport to be definitive,
final, and universal; its fetish for objectivity. Most narrative scholars rightly resist the
notion that people are incidental to music, and that informants are mere objects of
investigation - notions nurtured and exacerbated by aesthetic accounts that construe
music as entity rather than action. lxii Narrative inquiry features people, values,
intentions, and actions as opposed to entities, properties, rules, logic, and
“behaviors.” It is post-positivistic. It is also often anti-essentialist, anti-foundational,
and post-modern. Perhaps one day we will even be able to declare it post-patriarchal.
Narrative inquiry also attempts to understand music and music education
from the bottom up and from the inside out - offering to restore some of the power
and significance of which they have been deprived by off-the-rack, one-size-fits-all
accounts. It draws its force from daily detail that highlights events and experience

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rather than logic.lxiii Narrative thus has considerable promise as a way of recovering
the complexity, multiplicity, and polyphony of musical meanings, and music’s deep
implication in the construction and maintenance of identities, both personal and
collective. It offers profound insights into the ways actual people build and drape
their lives around musical engagements.
Narrative inquiry makes audible the voices and stories of people marginalized
or silenced in more conventional modes of inquiry. To that extent its aspirations or
ambitions are emancipatory and transformative. It seeks to open up what grand
theory too often tends to shut down.lxiv Narrative is a way of keeping alive questions,
conversation, and controversy, by stirring up the sedimentary deposits of official
discourses.
Narrative epistemological orientations are decidedly constructivist and
situated, drawn from convictions that social life is enacted narrative.lxv Thus, people’s
stories afford unique insights into their development as moral agents, lxvi as complex,
historically- and socially-situated individuals. Narrative inquiry can help us better
understand how to teach music in ways that nurture lives lived actively, lived
ethically, lived well.
To the extent that narratives create, reflect, and sustain habits of action, new
narratives open up new possibilities for action. Hearing and telling new stories can
nurture the crucial pragmatic habit of changing habits—as circumstances warrant.
Why narrative now? It offers to keep us changing in a world of change, to keep us
asking whose stories are persuasive, and how the circumstances in which we find
ourselves square with those in which we hope to find ourselves in the future. In a
changing world, failure to change spells peril, and narratives are stories of change
and possibility. Narrative inquiry can help us get over the needs served by certainty
and absolutes - as well as many of the misguided practices and injustices that attend
such needs.
But again, each of these claims is contingent. There are stories, there are tall
stories, and there are mere stories; and the difference is not always easy to discern.lxvii
As such, narrative inquiry is an enormously complicated affair, in which the difficult
questions whether and whose tales to trust and what to do with them are only the
most obvious ones. When to stop listening and start talking? When to stop talking
and listen? When to act instead of talking or reflecting? These are ethical questions -
questions of right action where “rightness” can only be assessed in light of particular
circumstances and outcomes that cannot be foretold. The choices they demand of us
are not between right and wrong, but between multiple “rights.” There are no
definitive answers, and no guarantees.
We need to remember, then, that narrative inquiry is not the salvation of the
world, the answer to all questions asked and unasked, the position without
positioning, the view from everywhere. To take such stances only makes of narrative
inquiry another orthodoxy: a status, I think, quite at odds with its most promising
features, and one that absolves scholars of the responsibility (response/ability) that
we have every right to demand of them. Among our fundamental obligations as
scholars is to look closely at the uses people make of narrative, the ends it serves.
These are always multiple, often contradictory, sometimes undesirable.
Why narrative inquiry now? Because, obviously, it serves the needs and
interests of those who engage in narrative inquiry. And what are those? It is
incumbent upon us as narrative inquirers to address this question, not just to use and
advocate the approach. What we understand narrative to mean, why we approach it

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as we do, and what we hope to achieve are matters to be acknowledged and

addressed forthrightly, for there is no inherency in narrative; there are no ends it
serves automatically or invariably.
Hearing, interpreting, telling, and creating stories are potentially worthy
professional pursuits. But as professionals, we also need to probe, criticize, and,
where appropriate, work to improve them. Many of us have heard the aphorism,
“telling is not teaching.” Is telling stories scholarship/research? If it is, its
contribution to professional knowledge needs to be not just asserted, but
demonstrated. Answers to questions like those I’ve raised here are far from self-
evident, and it is crucial that they be addressed—critically, explicitly, and by each of
us.

References
Adorno, T. (1984). Aesthetic theory. (C. Lenhardt, translation), G. Adorno & R. Tiedemann,
(Eds.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Babbitt, M. (1958). Who cares if you listen? High Fidelity 8(2).
Barthes, R. (1971). Écrivains intellectuals, professeurs. Tel Quel 47.
Barthes, R. (1977). Image, music, text. New York: Hill & Wang.
Behar, R. (1993). Translated woman: Crossing the border with Esperanza’s story. Boston:
Beacon Press.
Bowman, W. (2005a). The limits and grounds of musical praxialism. In D. Elliott (Ed.),
Praxial music education: Reflections and dialogues (pp. 52-78). New York: Oxford
University Press.
Bowman, W. (2005b). Music education in nihilistic times. In D. Lines (Ed.), Music education
for the new millennium: Theory and practice futures for music teaching and learning
(pp. 29-46). Oxford: Blackwell Press.
Bowman, W. (forthcoming). No one true way: Music education without redemptive truth. In
T. Regelski & J.T. Gates (Eds.), Action for change in music education.
Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1986.
Cohen, S. (1986). Historical culture: On the recoding of an academic discipline. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Czarniawska, B. (1998). A narrative approach to organizational studies. London: Sage
Publications.
Dewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. New York: Minton, Balch.
Elliott, D. (1995). Music matters. New York: Oxford University Press.
Frye, N. (1976). Spiritus mundi: Essays on literature, myth, and society. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Fulford, R. (1999). The triumph of narrative. Toronto: Anansi Press.
Goodman, N. (1976). Languages of art. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishers.
King, T. (2003). The truth about stories. Toronto: Anansi Press.

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Kreiswirth, M. (1995). Tell me a story: The narrativist turn in the human sciences. In M.
Kreiswirth & T. Carmichael (Eds.), Constructive criticism: The human sciences in the
age of theory (pp. 61-87). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Kreiswirth, M. (2000). Merely telling stories? Narrative knowledge in the human sciences.
Poetics Today 21(2), 293-318.
Langer, S. (1942). Philosophy in a new key: A study in the symbolism of reason, rite, and art.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lyotard, J. F. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
MacIntyre, A. (1981). After virtue: A study in moral theory. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame
University Press.
Nietzsche, F. (1993). Thus spake Zarathustra. (T. Common, translation). Amherst, NY:
Prometheus Books.
Paley. J. & Eva, G. (2005). Narrative vigilance: The analysis of stories in health care. Nursing
Philosophy 6, 83-97.
Regelski, T. (2002). On ‘methodolatry’and music teaching as critical and reflective praxis.
Philosophy of Music Education Review 10(2), 102-23.
Rorty, R. (1980). Philosophy and the mirror of nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Rorty, R. (1989). Contingency, irony, & solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schütz, A. (1967). The phenomenology of the social world. (G. Walsh & F. Lehnert,
translation). Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Weiland, S. (2003). Writers as readers in narrative inquiry: Learning from biography. In R.
Josselson, A. Lieblich, & D. McAdams (Eds.), Up close and personal: The teaching
and learning of narrative research (pp. 199-214). Washington DC: American
Psychological Association.
Wittgenstein, L. (1958). Philosophical investigations. (G.E.M. Anscombe, translation). New
York: MacMillan.

About the author

Wayne Bowman is Professor and Chair of Music Education at Brandon
University, Canada.

i
Indeed, I do not intend to offer answers to many of the questions I pose. That is not always because I
don’t have answers or firm convictions, but because my answers are mine. This isn’t to say others are
not welcome to consider them, but careful exploration of the questions from which they follow is a
much higher priority. My concern is to set others on a course toward development of their own
answers. For most of the questions I advance there is, in any event, no single or definitive answer.
ii
This matter is reminiscent in some ways of the distinctions David Elliott (1995) asks us to draw
among “music,” “Music,” and “MUSIC.” It’s not necessarily inaccurate to think of narrative,
inclusively, with a view to what we might call family resemblances. But there are within this family

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striking and important differences. To use language to which I will turn later in this essay, the global
“narrative” operates, conveniently, on a “meta” level. We need to remember, though, that it names a
diverse set of practices, many of which diverge significantly. Categories are useful for some purposes;
they also, and invariably, distort.
iii
In some ways, this is the most crucial of the questions I will raise here: because the stories others
eventually tell will most likely be functions of the stories we tell about ourselves. So far as I can tell,
the development of the story about narrative inquiry’s place in music education is in its infancy. That
is reassuring, to the extent that it leaves open many exciting possibilities. On the other hand it is
sobering, since its neglect (a failure, that is, to develop and begin telling the story) would almost
certainly leave narrative inquiry’s future to be shaped by whim, by happenstance, or by stories told by
people not themselves narrative inquirers. To put it as Thomas King might, addressing the kinds of
questions I pose here may help us avoid having to ask, at some future date, “If we'd started with a
different story, what kind of a world might we have created?” King (2003) writes, “Don’t say in the
years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story. You’ve
heard it now” (p. 29).
iv
“The truth about stories is that that’s all we are.” Thomas King (2003, p. 153).
v
Les Paine was talking about jazz keyboard voicings, but it’s a metaphor that travels well.
vi
Kreiswirth (1995, p. 62).
vii
This deliberate contradiction highlights the seeming fact that to deny something amounts to a
narrative is arguably to engage in narrative nonetheless - in some other way, on some other level. I use
French to allude obliquely to surrealist Rene Magritte’s painting “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” - a painting
that very much intrigued Foucault. It also highlights, I hope, the possibility that what a person states
may at once be a lie and a truth. Whether narrative is taken to be a factual token of a class of things or
a fictional fabrication is crucial to one’s understanding of the field, the kind of conventions or habits it
is taken to invoke. Thus: Why trust narrative?
viii
As Wittgenstein (1958) taught us, the presence of family resemblances or affinities doesn’t require
that there be a shared essence underlying them all. And as Nelson Goodman (1976) taught us, what
counts as a resemblance or representation is always a function of habit.
ix
This worry has been around since at least the time of Plato, whose worries about the veracity of
mimesis led him to ban musicians from the polis. And as Yeats asked, how can we know the dancer
from the dance?
x
To be sure, the versatility and plasticity of narrative (Kreiswirth, 2000) are among its values and
warranted sources of attraction. But this sword has a double edge.
xi
And pragmatic utility is what interests me here. One can imagine many statements that are accurate,
yet useless: reasonable, yet making no real difference.
xii
In a way, this is reminiscent of Langer’s (1942) notion of isomorphism and her distinction (I think ill-
advised) between discursive and non-discursive symbols. The assumption I find troublesome is that
because experience is temporal and narrative is temporal, narrative is capable of representing
experience better than non-narrative modes of knowing. This begs the question, of course, whether
signification is a function of formal similarity, or whether representation is a function of formal
attributes. These notions have been conclusively refuted. In the particular case of narrative, one could
make a strong case, I think, that to the extent it is not experience itself, narrative is always and
unavoidably “meta” – and an abstraction. The heaven-and-hell debate over narratives large and small,
then, becomes a question of degree rather than “kind.”
xiii
Paley & Eva (2005).
xiv
I’m sure there will be those who object to the use of “mere” as denigration - as a dismissal of the
significance or importance of narrative. That’s certainly not my intention. I only want to suggest that
narratives can be usefully distinguished from one another in terms of the salience of certain attributes.
That distinction helps us identify what kind of narratives we’re dealing with and what kind of critical
habits to bring to bear. It may be helpful to acknowledge the existence, toward one end of the
spectrum I am describing, of non-narrative or pre-narrative utterance.
xv
Fulford (1999, p. 4).
xvi
Paley & Eva (2005).
xvii
Frye’s (1976) account classifies stories in terms of initial and final orders, mediated by
transgressions. Comedy, for instance, has an undesirable initial order that gets transformed into a
desirable final order. In romance, on the other hand, both initial and final orders are desirable; and in
tragedy, both initial and final orders are undesirable.
xviii
Stuart Smalley was a rather pathetic Al Franken character from the television show, Saturday Night
Live. The phrase “I’m good enough…” (etc.) was his mantra.

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xix
And indeed, as Yeats’ poem asks, how can we tell the dancer from the dance? I should mention an
additional concern, one that time constraints prevent me from exploring in this presentation: the
equation of story and narrative tends (though it doesn’t do so necessarily) to equate the two with
linguistic or verbal accomplishments. There are, however, very good arguments for considering music
itself an instance of narrative.
xx
Cf. Kreiswirth (2000): “A true story, one that claims to represent actual happenings…works as a
communicative act exactly the same way as a fictional story, one that doesn’t make such claims… .
Narrative still functions as narrative—as a means of apprehending, depicting, and/or communicating
temporal and causal relationships between agents and events—regardless of what use it is being put
to” (p. 313).
xxi
This view is grounded in the belief that what people say gives us reliable insights into who they are
and what they know: an epistemological stance we might call mimetic. This is, I take it, what Rorty
(1980) means when he writes about the “mirror of reality.”
xxii
Kreiswirth (2000) has this to say about how disciplinary boundaries have hampered (continue to
hamper?) better understanding of narrativity - about the divergent ways “narrative” is inflected in
various disciplines: “Research on the distinctions between story, fiction, and literature has been
carried out primarily by those not directly concerned with making or assessing narrative truth claims
and has, in any case been too often ignored by those who would most benefit from it” (p. 313).
xxiii
More accurately, I think, this process consists in a complex (simultaneous?) back-and-forth.
Perhaps this is an instance of that we might call the narrative-metanarrative dialectic - although, since
as I want to suggest later, all narrative is metanarrative, even this misleads subtly.
xxiv
This is, again, a pragmatist claim.
xxv
The senses in which music itself constitutes narrative are issues that warrant our careful
consideration. To make this assertion is to question, I think appropriately, whether narrative and story
(and all the claims made on their behalves) necessarily need take verbal form. My strong conviction is that
they need not; but that would require another, somewhat different essay to unpack.
xxvi
The turf wars that erupt when the incommensurable claims of these various stories butt up against
one another are functions of the global range of the “truths” they claim to advance. Little narrative,
being local and personal, is less inclined to result in warfare. Do narrative inquirers tend to pacifism?
xxvii
Grand claims are a familiar part of music educational lore: music is a purveyor of aesthetic
sensitivity; music makes you smarter; music makes us more tolerant; and on, and on.
xxviii
I suggest that skepticism might be a better way to understand this term than disbelief -
etymologically, it seems to suggest rejection of creed, not belief. Perhaps a subtle distinction, but
worth considering?
xxix
To be clear, this is not my view, but the view often advanced on behalf of narrative by those who
equate metanarrative with theory and oppose metanarrative to narrative. In Bowman (2005a) I have
alluded to Wendell Berry’s claim that “nobody loves this planet” – his point being that “love” on such
a planetary or global level is impossible. Whatever commitments people have to the health of planet
Earth originate and remain grounded in commitments and passions that are local in origin. The
relevance of this claim to the topic at hand should be clear.
xxx
Cf. Bowman (2005b).
xxxi
J.-F. Lyotard (1984, p. 19). This claim (or some variant of it) is a pervasive one.
xxxii
Kreiswirth (2000, p. 301).
xxxiii
“A good story and a well-formed argument are different natural kinds” (Bruner, 1986, p. 11).
xxxiv
Please see note 11, above.
xxxv
It would be quite healthy for us, I think, and potentially liberating as well, to treat or approach
large narratives as stories.
xxxvi
F. Jameson, “Foreword,” in Lyotard (1984). Quoted in Kreiswirth (1995), emphasis mine. Note, too,
the debt to A. MacIntyre (1981) here.
xxxvii
As Czarniawska (1998) observes, institutions both direct individual memory and channel
perceptions into forms compatible with the relations they authorize.
xxxviii
Or might they be better characterized as monologues?
xxxix
That is, story isn’t the root of cognitive experience, to which language relates as a second-order
phenomenon.
xl
Czarniawska (1998).
xli
Paley & Eva (2005, p. 93).
xlii
Paley & Eva (2005, p. 94).

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xliii
Even the phrase “situations like this” requires some unpacking, since the interview or
conversational situations with which narrative inquiry often deals are situations in which the telling is
shaped in subtle but important ways by the “tellee”: by such things as pauses, knowing looks, smiles,
indications of surprise, and so on.
xliv
See Kreiswirth (2000) pp. 311-12 for a sketch of the view that regards narrative as hegemonic. White
is quoted there to the effect that narrative constitutes “the still undissolved residue of mythic
consciousness.” And Cohen asserts that narrative “reduces present semantic and pragmatic
thought…to forms of story, repetition, and model, all of which service cultural redundancy” (Cohen,
1986, p. 1).
xlv
If we are prepared to grant narrative a powerful role in shaping identity, professional and other, we
need to acknowledge that power can as easily serve ends harmful or delusional as it can serve
desirable ends. Without checks and balances there is seemingly no end to the self-deception of which
we are capable. Thus, the necessity for critical scrutiny, both from within and from without - support,
again, for the need to attend, as pragmatists insist we must, to “what differences” our actions make.
This also implicates, I think, the need for open and critical dialogue, as a balance to story’s
persuasiveness.
xlvi
Here I intend “committed” in distinction from the supposed detachment of so-called objectivity.
xlvii
I have suggested that music education seems particularly fond of Cinderella stories, and of Stuart
Smalley stories. We need to ask ourselves why that is so; to whose ball we yearn to be invited and why;
why it is that we are so desperately in need of affirmation, security, and certitude; and what different
kinds of stories being told on local levels might offer us by way of alternatives.
xlviii
It warrants more than parenthetical recognition, but in the interests of keeping my story going, I
will point out here that the narrative-story distinction made above has the potential consequence, I
think, of positing a level on which there is at least partial possibility for verification or empirical
corroboration of, for instance, a sequence of events. If that is the case, we might well choose to divide
analytical efforts between the narrative level, and the storied level (the ontological and the aesthetic?).
xlix
T. Regelski (2002). Bowman (forthcoming) has characterized this as “redemptive truth.”
l
Should narrative be descriptive? Interpretive? Creative? Subversive? Doesn’t each of these entail
different, even divergent, strategic and tactical skills?
li
“How-to” in an ethical domain like narrative inquiry can only be determined on an individual, one-
off basis.
lii
I must say that in light of the points being pursued here I found very curious the following
endorsement of a recent music education publication: “Scholars in music education have, at last, a
splendid model of narrative research.” To be clear, what I find curious is the implication that previous
models have been deficient; and the assertion that here, “at last,” is something that establishes how
narrative research should be done.
liii
We might say that narrative inquiry relies fundamentally on practical knowledge. Or perhaps its
guidance system is ethical - which is to say the same thing if one follows the Aristotelian explanation
of the relationship between praxis and phronesis.
liv
Weiland (2003). Perhaps the best way we have of developing capacities like these is to assure that
our students have read broadly and deeply outside our discipline.
lv
Since this is such a fundamentally challenging question, let me advance the barest beginnings of an
answer: that instead of method (and especially instead of method-ology) we commit to developing
dispositions that are strategic and tactical.
lvi
Weiland (2003) p. 212.
lvii
Nor, to be honest, does everyone think it’s needed or a good idea.
lviii
By no means is this intended to be an exhaustive list. We should also hasten to add that narrative
inquirers are people who see music as action rather than entity, who are interested in intentions more
than behaviors, and who are, as a consequence, deeply interested in the ethical, moral, and humane
dimensions of musical meanings.
lix
From the personal perspective it is easy to understand why some would rather tell (or create, or
interpret, etc.) stories than submit to the perceived drudgery of conventional research. The important
question, however, is how we feel entitled to do this, given our responsibility to generate and refine
professional knowledge. In what way(s) does this constitute or reconstruct professional knowledge?
This is among the questions that must be answered directly by individuals undertaking narrative
inquiry.
lx
Admittedly, there are those - perhaps significant in number - who are loath to offer such
explanations, on grounds their work speaks for itself. Perhaps. Just as likely, though, is that the
message conveyed or received parallels Babbitt’s (1958) “Who Cares If You Listen?” The likely result

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is the very dilemma Adorno (1984 & elsewhere) described, in which the medium’s transformative
potential is unable to reach those upon whom real transformation rests.
lxi
As I tell my students (somewhat facetiously, but decidedly to the exasperation of those who come to
my classes expecting to be told what to think), my answers are mine, after all. What’s important is how
you answer these questions.
lxii
And people as disembodied perceivers whose role is to “appreciate” music’s supposedly intrinsic
quality.
lxiii
This is, note, a question of emphasis, not of inclusion or exclusion. To treat logic - of a certain kind -
as a secondary or tertiary concern is not to dispense with it altogether.
lxiv
This is a claim advanced in various ways by Rorty (1989 & elsewhere).
lxv
A. MacIntyre, 1981.
lxvi
MacIntyre (1981); Kreiswirth (2000) p. 309.
lxvii
Fulford (1999) writes, “Do I use stories to expand myself by making connections with others and to
understand cultures that might otherwise be closed to me? Or do I use them mainly as consolation
and distraction? And is there a way to distinguish between those two functions?” (p. 152).

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