Journal Article

Telling Tales: A Survey of Narratological Approaches to Music

Millard, Russell

2018

Overview

First-Wave Approaches to Musical Narrative The focus of the first wave of musical narrative theorists was on devel- oping the means to adapt the narrative tools of literary theory to music. In his classic Morphology of the Folktale ([1928] 1968), Propp outlines thirty-one \"functions\" (minimal narrative units) of Russian fairy stories, from which various archetypal narrative patterns or plots can be derived.2 The basic shape of the tales studied by Propp is similar to that of Joseph Campbell's \"Hero's Journey\" ([1968] 2008), and can be summarized thus: (1) a hero (protagonist) sets out on a quest; (2) various obstacles are met and overcome; (3) the hero returns from the quest with new knowledge or power. Some functions belong to the opening stages of a narrative and serve as initiating factors in the unfolding of the plot, such as Function II, in which the hero is given an interdiction or order which motivates the ensuing quest (Ibid., 27). In a series of articles that since have become classics in the field of musical narrative, Anthony Newcomb (1984; 1987; 1992) adapted Propp's insights for music by drawing an analogy between functional sequences and plot archetypes in literature, on the one hand, and formal types in music, on the other, explaining that both can be thought of as \"a standard series of functional events in a prescribed order\" (1987, 165).

• Publisher: Columbia University, Department of Music
• Subject: Exegesis & hermeneutics / Music theory / Narratology / Plot (Narrative) / Structuralism