WIal lIe Sovcevev Said

AulIov|s) CavoIn AIIale

Souvce 19lI-Cenluv Music, VoI. 12, No. 3 |Spving, 1989), pp. 221-230
FuIIisIed I Univevsil oJ CaIiJovnia Fvess
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What the Sorcerer Said
CAROLYN ABBATE
Narrative music is a
commonplace;
we think
immediately
of Till
Eulenspiegel,
of the
Sym-
phoniefantastique. Perhaps
the notion of "nar-
rative music" is not often
scrutinized, perhaps
it cannot survive closer
scrutiny,
for it is at once
pervasive
and ill-defined.
Program
music and
symphonic poems
are somehow
narrative,
and
we all have a casual
understanding
of their
pleasant conceits,
their
representation
of turns
in a
literary story by
musical
gestures.
In this
case,
the "narrative music" is a shadow thrown
by
a
literary narrative,
and the musical narra-
tive is child's
play-the gong
stroke in Tod und
Verklirung
as death's
hammer, shattering
the
protagonist's earthly
shell. We soon learn to
put
1 9th-
Century
Music XII/3
(Spring 1989).
?
by
the
Regents
of
the
University
of California.
'See Peter
Kivy,
Sound and Semblance:
Reflections
on Mu-
sical
Representation (Princeton, 1984), chap.
9
("Music
as
Narration").
this kind of
understanding aside,
as a
game
in-
herited from the nineteenth
century
and now
turned
trite, simple-minded, unprofitable.
Narrative in literature is so rich and funda-
mental that it must loom
very large
and intimi-
dating
above
things
like Till
Eulenspiegel.
Nar-
rative music is of course
by
no means trite or
simple,
and
by
no means limited to
symphonic
program
music. But while
literary
narrative has
devices, tricks, shapes
that have been examined
within a
sophisticated
critical
tradition,
think-
ing
about music and narrative is
yet
in a rela-
tively young
state.2
Contemporary theorizing
2There are
exemplary
studies of narrative in
opera,
such as
Reinhold Brinkmann's numerous studies on
Wagner,
"Szenische
Epik. Marginalien
zu
Wagners Dramenkonzep-
tion im
Ring
des
Nibelungen,"
in Richard
Wagner:
Werk
und
Wirkung,
ed. Carl Dahlhaus
(Regensburg, 1971), pp.
85-96;
" 'Drei der
Fragen
stell' ich mir frei': Zur Wanderer-
Szene im 1. Akt von
Wagners 'Siegfried',"
Jahrbuch des
staatlichen Instituts
fur Musikforschung (Berlin, 1972), pp.
120-62;
"Richard
Wagner
der Erzihler," Osterreichische
221
19TH
about
the nature of
literary
narrative thus has a
CENTURY
MUSIC particular allure; might it at once enable us to
redefine musical narrative and enrich our inter-
pretation
of music? "Narrative music" as a
dull,
unprofitable lump-an amalgam
of
"program
music" and conventional
interpretations
of it-
is due, it seems, for transmutation.
Interpretation
of music can be enriched
by
critical stances borrowed from
disciplines
con-
cerned with words. That is another common-
place,
one
continually
refurbished and
defiantly
unwilling
to settle down from fanfare into rea-
sonable and unremarkable fact. Given the ex-
plosion
of
musicological writing
informed
by
modes in
literary criticism, historiography,
lin-
guistics,
and
philosophy, any hortatory
words
about
cross-disciplinary
contexts are
beginning
to sound
merely obligatory,
even a bit vieux
jeu.
We
might, then, object
to the
cross-discipli-
nary
fanfares out of a distaste for last
year's
hemlines. But there is another cause for
skepti-
cism. Fanfares can be
perilous.
If
invigorating,
they
are
occasionally deafening; they
make it
difficult to think. We sense that casual analo-
gies
between literature and music
may
be
forced,
twisted to make closed
systems,
meth-
ods,
and answers.3 This
gloomy
noise echoes
my
uneasiness about the
analogy
between mu-
sic and
narrative,
which I fear
may
be used un-
thinkingly
to elude secret convictions that mu-
sic has no
meaning.
More than this: if we
fashion out of
post-structuralist
criticism a sin-
gle explanation
of how music
narrates,
we
per-
vert the subtleties of the
literary theory
we have
evoked
by ignoring ways
in which
meaning
can
escape,
and
explanation
fail.
The
phrase
"narrative music"-this is im-
plied by
all that I have said so far-raises
large
issues and
poses
serious
questions:
How does
Musikzeitschrift
37
(1982), 297-306;
"Sentas Traumer-
zahlung,
"
Bayreuther Programmheft
1984
(Bayreuth, 1984),
pp.
1-17. On the
problem
of
program music,
among others,
see Carl Dahlhaus's
"Wagner
und die
Programmusik,
" ahr-
buch des staatlichen Instituts
fur Musikforschung (Berlin,
1973), pp. 50-63;
and his "Thesen uber
Programmusik,"
in
Beitrige
zur musikalischen
Hermeneutik,
ed. Dahlhaus
(Regensburg, 1975).
See also nn. 1 and 4.
3As Carl Dahlhaus
sensibly
advised in his introduction to
the 1975
cross-disciplinary symposium
on musical herme-
neutics,
caution is
necessary:
in a laudable wish to avoid
provincialism,
we
may
let our enthusiasm for the methods
and
problems
of other
disciplines
lead us to sterile acts of
imitation;
sterile when
they
do not connect to the
history
of
musicians'
thinking
on music
(Dahlhaus,
Musikalischen
Hermeneutik, pp. 7-8).
music narrate? What
parallels
can we draw be-
tween
literary
theories of narrative and means
to
explore
narrative music? I want to circle
around these
questions,
but
by looking
at a
work that is
small, minor, banal,
even frivolous:
Paul Dukas's The Sorcerer's
Apprentice,
a
"symphonic
scherzo" based on a verse narra-
tive,
Goethe's ballad Der
Zauberlehrling.
Henri
Blaze's French translation of the
poem
was
printed
with
every
edition of the score
(see box).
The Sorcerer's
Apprentice may provide
Duka-
sian
insights
into musical narrative in
greater
works
(by Debussy,
or
Beethoven),
or
may sug-
gest
the
perils
of that
assumption;
it
suggested
in
any
case
adopting
without fanfare a number
of
pedigreed approaches
to
analysis
of narrative.
Let's start in the middle. In stanza 6 of
Goethe's ballad is a moment of
forgetting.
The
apprentice, having brought
the broom to life
with a
spell ("que pour
l'ceuvre l'eau bouil-
lonne,"
etc.),
has
forgotten
the word to reverse
the
spell:
"Malheur!
j'ai
oublie le mot!" With-
out the
word,
he cannot make the broom inani-
mate once
more,
"le mot en
part
de
qui
le rendra
en fin ce
qu'il
etait tout a l'heure." He murders
the broom with an axe
("voyez,
il est en
deux!").
What
happens
next is a child's
nightmare:
both
pieces
rise
up
undeterred and resume
repetition
of their task. The
apprentice
is rescued in the
end
by
the sorcerer.
How does the music of The Sorcerer's
Ap-
prentice
narrate a moment of
forgetfulness?
The
apprentice's spell
is often identified with
an idea at the end of the slow
introduction,
a
brass fanfare of
augmented
chords
(ex.
1 is
repro-
duced from a
typical analysis,
a sort of Wolzo-
gen
for
Dukas).
This
motif
d'evocation is fol-
lowed
by
the creatio ex nihilo of the famous
bassoon theme. The
augmented
chord fanfare
returns at the end of the
piece,
followed there
by
nihilo ex nihilo: no
bassoon,
no
theme,
silence.
Any
statement that the
augmented-chord
fanfare
represents
the "evocation of
magic"
is
born of the most familiar
approach
to narrative
music. This is a
fundamentally
leitmotivic
ap-
proach:
the musical element is the
signifier
for a
dramatic idea or
object; here,
the dramatic idea
is at once the words of the evocation
("Que pour
l'ceuvre," etc.),
and the word
itself, evocation,
incantation. The
relationship
is
arbitrary;
in a
moment I will
suggest
that in this case it is
wrong.
But the form of
analysis
is common
enough. Wagner
and works
Wagnerian
un-
222
L'APPRENTI
SORCIER,
FROM
GOETHE, POESIES,
TRANS. HENRI BLAZE
Enfin,
il s'est done
absente,
le vieux maitre sorcier! Et maintenant c'est a moi aussi de commander a ses
Esprits;
j'ai
observ6 ses
paroles
et ses
oeuvres, j'ai retenu sa
formule,
et avec de la force
d'esprit, moi aussi je ferai des
miracles.
Que pour
l'oeuvre l'eau bouillonne et
ruisselle,
et
s'6panche
en bain a
large seau!
Et
maintenant, approche, viens, viens,
balai!
prends-moi
ces mauvaises
guenilles;
tu as 6et
domestique
assez
longtemps; aujourd'hui songe
a
remplir
ma volonte! Debout sur deux
jambes,
une tete en
haut,
cours
vite, et te
depeche
de m'aller
puiser
de l'eau!
Que
pour
l'oeuvre l'eau bouillonne et ruisselle, et
s'6panche
en bain a
large
seau!
Bravo! il descend au
rivage;
en
verite,
il est
d6ja
au
fleuve, et, plus prompt que l'6clair,
le voila ici de retour avec un
flot
rapide. D6ja,
une seconde fois! comme
chaque
cuve s'enfle! Comme
chaque
vase
s'emplit jusqu'au
bord!
Arrete,
arrete! car nous avons assez de tes services. Ah!
je
m'en
apercois!
-Malheur! malheur!
-j'ai
oublie le
mot!
Ah! le
parole qui
le rendra enfin ce
qu'il
6tait tout a l'heure? Il court et se d6emne. Fusses-tu donc le vieux balai!
Toujours
de nouveaux seaux
qu'il apporte!
Ah! et cent fleuves se
pr6cipitent
sur moi.
Non!
je
ne
puis
le souffrir
plus longtemps;
il faut
que je l'empoigne!
C'est
trop
de malice! Ah! mon
angoisse
augmente!
Quelle mine!
quel regard!
Engeance
de l'enfer! faut-il
que
la maison entiere soit
engloutie? Je
vois sur
chaque
seuil courir
deja
des torrents
d'eau. Un damne balai
qui
ne veut rien ententre! Buche
que
tu
6tais,
tiens-toi donc
tranquille!
Si tu n'en finis
pas, prends garde que je
ne
t'empoigne,
et ne fende ton vieux bois au tranchant de la hache!
Oui-da! le voila
qui
se traine encore
par
ici! Attends
que je t'attrape!
Un
moment, Kobold,
et tu seras
par
terre. Le
tranchant
poli
de la hache l'atteint. Il
craque! bravo,
vraiment fort bien touche!
Voyez,
il est en deux! et mainte-
nant
j'espere
et
je respire!
Malheur! malheur! deux morceaux
s'agitent maintenant, et s'
empressent
comme des valets debout
pour
le
service! A mon
aide, puissances sup6rieures!
Comme ils courent! De
plus
en
plus
l'eau
gagne
la salle et les
degr6s; quelle effroyable
inondation!
Seigneur
et
Maitre! entends ma voix! -Ah! voici venir le maitre.
Maitre,
le
p6ril
est
grand;
les
Esprits que j'ai 6voqu6s, je
ne
peux plus
m'en d6barasser.
"Dans le coin, balai! balai!
que
cela
finisse,
car le vieux maitre ne vous anime
que pour faire
servir a ses
desseins."
doubtedly played
a role in
shaping
this
deep-
rooted
assumption
about how music narrates.
Interpretations
of
Wagner's narratives,
cer-
tainly,
focus
unswervingly
on Leitmotive and
their
symbolization
of the
story being narrated;
how a chain of
symbolic
motives evoke nodal
points
in a tale.4
Rheingold, Ring, Giants,
Ni-
belheim, Curse, Erda,
will do for the essence of a
musical
story.5
We are now in a
position
to undermine our
first
analysis.
The
motif
d'evocation also recurs
4See for
example
Carl
Dahlhaus,
Richard
Wagner's
Music
Dramas
(Cambridge, 1979), pp. 84-87,
and the discussion
of Wotan's narrative in Die Walkiire, pp.
122-24.
SNarrative can be
encapsulated
in a
string
of critical
words,
as in Humbert Humbert's
story
of how his mother
perished:
picnic, lightning.
The reader creates the connections and
the
details, just as the listener
might
weave the links be-
tween the associations called
up by
the Leitmotive.
in the center of the
piece.
Here it
precedes
a car-
dinal moment in the musical
story,
the murder
of the broom and its
uncanny
resurrection as
two-two bassoon
themes, played
in canon.
But here the assumed
relationship
between mu-
sical
symbol
and dramatic idea has broken
down. Goethe's
apprentice
cries of
absence,
of
the
magic
work
forgotten.
If the
motif
d'evoca-
tion indeed
represents
the
word,
then Dukas
has added his own turn to the
story, making
the
apprentice experiment
with one futile
spell
af-
ter the
other, repeating
the
augmented-chord
fanfare over and over in
upward transposition,
before
resorting
to the axe.
But
perhaps
the musical
gesture
indeed no
longer signifies
the word and floats without an-
chor or fixed
meaning.
In that
case,
we would
claim that the brass fanfare recurs in the middle
of the
piece
for some reason not
having
to do
with Goethe's
story,
some
wholly
musical rea-
223
CAROLYN
ABBATE
What the
Sorcerer Said
19TH son.6 This
interpretive escape
route has become
SENTRIY
a typical
strategy
in
Wagnerian analysis; indeed
in most
analysis
of texted music. The blame for
contradiction
(fanfare, you
have
appeared
where
there isn't
any evocation)
is
put
off on the
sign.
And the
sign
is
punished.
When a motif's
ap-
pearance
seems
contradictory
in terms of its
symbolic force,
it will be
stripped
of its
sym-
bolic
meaning.
Its recurrence is written off to
the
exigencies
of
purely
musical
logic.
We can in fact
forgive
the fanfare and rescue
the first
reading by listening
more
closely
to the
score. The word-the
magic
instant when lan-
guage changes
the world-has not been
ig-
nored,
nor the word
forgotten.
The
symbol
for
forgetting
is absence.
Something
as small and as
ordinary
as a word is
lacking
in the central "in-
cantation"
episode.
If we look
again
at the
motif
d'evocation passages
at the
beginning
and end
of The Sorcerer's
Apprentice (ex.
2a and
b),
we
see the
exotic, augmented-chord
fanfare ends
rather
bluntly, recitative-like,
with a
single,
ba-
nal chord. This
monosyllabic expletive
also
concludes the sorcerer's incantation at the end.
But the chord is
missing
from the middle state-
ment. The
chord,
not the exotic
fanfare, repre-
sents the
magic
word. The
sign
is
lodged
else-
where,
and the semiotic
reading
can be
restored.7
II
Simple
leitmotivic-semiotic
readings richly
deserve their
peril. Though
I like the idea that
powerful spells might
be
depicted
not
by
musi-
cal exotica but
by banality-a
C7
chord-my
fondness does not blind me to the limitations of
this
variety
of
analysis.
For one
thing,
we must
6The notion that motives with textual associations often re-
cur for
largely
musical reasons and are
developed musically,
without
necessarily carrying
the
baggage
of their referential
meanings,
is another truism of
Wagnerian analysis:
see Al-
fred
Lorenz,
Das Geheimnis der Form bei Richard
Wagner,
vol. I
(Berlin, 1924), pp. 73-74;
Carl
Dahlhaus, "Formprinzi-
pien
in
Wagners 'Ring
des
Nibelungen'," Beitrdge
zur Ge-
schichte der
Oper,
ed. Heinz Becker
(Regensburg, 1969), pp.
112-13. For a brief
history
of the dialectic of
"form-defining
themes" and "referential
motives," see
Carolyn Abbate,
introduction to
Analyzing Opera:
Verdi and
Wagner,
ed.
Carolyn
Abbate and
Roger
Parker
(Berkeley
and Los
Angeles, 1989), pp.
6-7.
7Perhaps
we overlook the
significant thing
because it is so
ordinary:
as Poe's
Dupin points
out in "The Purloined Let-
ter,"
we are
continually duped
because we do not
expect
the
things
we search for
(a letter, answers, solutions, meaning)
to be visible in
plain sight -especially
when surrounded
by
exotic
hiding places.
224
, Vif k k r
-
r
M
; ir
b"b~~~~~~EV
Example
1
remember that
any
Leitmotiv has more than
just
the two
terms,
musical and
literary,
and in-
volves more than a
simple
association between
musical
gesture
and
poetic
idea. This is a tru-
ism,
but needs to be stressed. The word "incan-
tation" itself
signifies
an
idea,
or
image
or dra-
matic
action, embracing
a web of
potential
connotations. In the same
way
the musical idea
refers not
only
to
incantation,
but to other mu-
sical ideas and
topoi;
its field of associations in-
cludes music itself.8
Here we can turn to a second
reading
of The
Sorcerer's
Apprentice by stripping
the
piece
of
its title and hence its immanent
text,
and
seeing
it as the
scherzo,
as music without extraneous
literary baggage. What, then,
is the musical
stretch that
begins
with exs. 1 and 2a? The
aug-
mented brass chords are an atonal
fanfare,
ex-
hortations to
listen; the fanfare is
repeated
in se-
quence,
motion toward the event announced.
The blunt C7 chord-the "recitative chord"-
alludes to
opera,
to the
phatic dithering
that
pre-
8Asaf'ev's notion of
intonatiya may clarify
this
point.
Asa-
f'ev
argued
that musical ideas
originated
as
expressions
of
human actions and
experiences,
but that over historical
time
they
came to
express music,
to refer to one another and
not
things
outside the musical universe. To take one ele-
mentary example:
a fanfare is
played by
a
king's trumpeters
to
signal
his
arrival,
to exhort and
signal
the crowd. In the
course of
time,
the musical idea
may
lose its
specific
and in-
evitable
expressive meaning
and become "sound formu-
lae"; a fanfare in a Mahler
symphony
refers to other fanfares
in hundreds of other
symphonies.
See
J.
R.
Tull, trans.,
B. V.
Asaf'ev,
Musical Form as a Process
(Ph.D. diss.,
Ohio State
University, 1976), I, 184-95; II, 543ff. and 625-33.
For
Asaf'ev,
music could nonetheless not be seen as a
wholly tautological,
as a
closed,
self-referential
system.
For
every
fanfare is linked back
through history
in a chain of in-
numerable members and is
distantly, subliminally
bound
by
this filament to its
origins
in referential sound. If I have
simplified
an elaborate
theory,
the
summary
will suffice to
suggest
how Asaf'ev's
thinking impinges
both on the notion
of musical
topos
as
interpreted by,
for
example,
Frits Noske
in The
Signifier
and the
Signified (The Hague, 1977),
and on
the broader tradition of
Hegelian
musical
aesthetics,
and
the
neo-Hegelian
tradition of musical hermeneuticists like
Kretschmar
(whom
Asaf'ev
occasionally cites).
i, 7
a.
Tpt.
. K I k K I k i I k i I , I I I
I~k~,1i~~
!7ZHLi:Ivq
:
"Ns Hs"~Nt .4l i U,F :
7-
--~--i5
ii
Hn.
9: l~b- ' W V
Cb.
Ww., Str.
. rr rr r
v~ ~ ~~~~~~~=012SMM
.I ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~-
~ ~ T'
~~~~".5~~~~~~~~~i
A. ~ I
i
b bb S<
9P
[Silence
7 Timp.
Silence
I I
tutti
Example
2
cedes the real
beginning,
the real
event,
the
number. If we read the chord
according
to the
harmonic
code,
it is a
dominant,
the annuncia-
tion of an F-minor tonic that has been adum-
brated
throughout
the slow introduction. Lis-
ten:
something
is introduced and will now
begin.
What
begins
is the creatio exnihilo of the
bassoon solo.
In this
interpretation,
the narrative is
again
a
string
of musical
items,
but now
they
are read as
executions of
gestures
codified
by
musical con-
vention,
rather than as
arbitrary
associations of
music and dramatic or
literary
cues.
The small units-the
augmented-chord
fan-
fare,
the C7 chord- cast above themselves
para-
digmatic
connections to similar sonorous for-
mulae;
to all
fanfares,
or to
opera.
But so do
larger sequences, creating
what could
plausibly
be seen as a musical version of "intertextual-
ity."
For
example,
the entire
piece-called
a
scherzo-
might
been seen as a comment
upon
a
historical
type,
or an invocation of the
proce-
dures of all the
past
scherzos in all
past sym-
phonies.
Certain
sequences
refer back to
spe-
cific works. The
example toyed
with
here,
the
sequence
of
hortatory fanfare,
blunt recitative
chord,
and woodwind
solo,
cites another work
whose
opening
"narrative" is similar and
given
in ex. 3
(listen-annunciation
of a
beginning-
the inanimate is
animated):
that
is,
the
opening
of Saint-Saens's Danse macabre.
In this second
analysis
we have
again
read the
narrative at the
beginning
of The Sorcerer's
Ap-
prentice
in terms of a
literary-theoretical
mod-
el-perhaps
the most common of those
applied
to music: classic structuralism. An irreversible
syntagmatic progress through
time
(the
three
musical
gestures) brings
with it
implications,
225
CAROLYN
ABBATE
What the
Sorcerer Said
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Example
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LEXIAS 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
Semes
Cultural codes
Antithesis
Enigma
1
"Deep
in"
"Hidden"
b n
0
j
-
d--
Example
4
references, associations, potentially infinite,
which hover
paradigmatically
and
timelessly
above each
gesture
and above the
sequence
as a
whole.
Our
reading might
be read
by draping
over it
terms borrowed from
any
number of classic
structuralist narrative
theories;
ex. 4
suggests
one
option
with an
obliqueness (not
to
say
an air
of
mystery)
that is calculated. Barthes's famous
reading
of Balzac's Sarrasine in
S/Z,
is a whim-
sical choice on
my part, suggested by
the un-
canny
coincidences that resonate from his
title,
S/Z,
the subtitle of Dukas's work
(scherzo),
and
the French translation of Goethe's title
(L'ap-
prenti sorcier,
Der
Zauberlehrling).9
Barthes's
idiosyncratic
structuralism is
easily
turned to-
ward
music,
for he sees the musical score as a
symbol
for his
experience
of narrative in two di-
mensions-syntactically through time, para-
digmatically
in
sensing
at
every
moment reso-
nances and associations that could flash
forward or
backward,
out of
time,
out of the
9Roland
Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller
(New York,
1974; original
edn.
Paris, 1970).
226
story.10 Example
4 is
by
now itself a notorious
icon: Barthes's
interpretation
of the first
para-
graphs
of
Sarrasine, translating
his five "codes"
of narrative into musical terms.
Dukas's
triple sequence-fanfare,
recitative
chord,
creatio ex nihilo of a bassoon theme-is
an action
sequence,
irreversible in
time;
in
Barthes's
terms,
such
sequences
are
governed
by
the
proairetic code,
the code of
action,
how
events are
enchained,
how
they begin
and end.
(We might say,
for
instance,
that the musical
proairetic
code dictates that
upward transposi-
tions in
sequence
end in
stasis,
in a
goal.)
In Barthes's score there are two action se-
quences begun
at the
story's beginning (the pro-
tagonist's being "deep
in
thought"
and
being
"hidden behind a
curtain"). They
are irrevers-
I'More than one structuralist has seen in the musical score a
symbol
of his
interpretive vision; indeed,
one could
argue
that structuralism itself is a method of text criticism that
mimics
music,
or mimics entrenched
nineteenth-century
music-theoretical views of music's "structural"
logic.
See
Harold S.
Powers, "Language
Models and Musical
Analy-
sis,
"
Ethnomusicology
24
(1980),
16-25
(Levi-Strauss).
19TH
CENTURY
MUSIC
Scordatura
Vn. solo
A . 5
I7
Vn.
Vla.
I:,,
N n n o o . n n o o . f . n
r,
ible. Each initial action
brings
with it a chain of
gestures
that debouch in closure
(in
the action
of
hiding oneself, one hides, one
pulls
the cur-
tain shut,
and one later
emerges
from the lair:
this ends the action of
hiding).
An initial
ques-
tion later answered
("enigma I") belongs
to the
hermeneutic code, equally irreversible,
as a rid-
dle is
posed,
false answers
suggested,
solutions
blocked, suspense engendered,
an answer
given
at last
(the
tonal
choreography
of a
piece might
be
compared
to the hermeneutic code: the an-
swer comes when the tonic
arrives).
Both codes
move in one direction
only.
In Barthes's score
they are visualized as white
notes,
cantus
firmus. They
are described as
embodying
musi-
cal continuousness and
irreversibility,
and as
instrumental
personalities.11
The instantaneous flashes sent
upward
from
each of Dukas's three musical
gestures,
the as-
sociations-like the reference to Danse maca-
bre,
or the connection between the blunt chord
and
operatic
recitative-these
correspond
in
our
analogy
to Barthes's semiotic and cultural
codes:
signs,
references to
history
and its actors.
One of the
signs
in Sarrasine's first
pages
is a re-
curring
reference to
pale trees,
white
ground,
silver moon: color as a
culturally
defined
sign
for
winter,
for cold. The three
paradigmatic
codes
(semiotic, symbolic, cultural)
in Barthes's
symbolic score are visualized as
upward
flashes
above the whole-and-half note
pedal points
and
are described as individual
instants,
uncon-
nected, not bound to the
unfolding
time of the
story.'2
Barthes, in
short,
likened the
proairetic
code
to
long pedal points
and
typically
continuous
instrumental
timbres, and the
paradigmatic
codes to instantaneous sixteenth- or
eighth-
notes, flashes in the
percussion
or brass.
My
analysis
makes
very
different
analogies,
of
course: the musical
proairetic
code involves
l"Roland Barthes, S/Z, p. 29: "what sings, what flows
smoothly, what moves by accidentals, arabesques, and con-
trolled ritardandos through an intelligible progression (like
the melody often given to the
woodwinds)
is the series of
enigmas, their suspended disclosure, their delayed resolu-
tion ... what sustains, what flows in a regular way, brings
everything together, like the strings, are the proairetic se-
quences, the series of actions, the cadence of familiar
ges-
tures."
'Ibid., p. 29: "What stands out, what flashes forth, what em-
phasizes and impresses are the semes, the cultural citations
and the symbols, analogous in their heavy timbre, in the
value of their
discontinuity, to the brass or percussion."
the
enchaining
of musical events over
time, the
semiotic and cultural
codes, not blasts from the
percussion,
but
something
more
directly
analo-
gous
to their
literary parallels-actual musical-
historical
references, citations,
and
symbols.
My
musical
analogies
for Barthes's codes are
not more or less
plausible than Barthes's own.
Yet what the
analogies
do have in common is a
concealed statement about the nature of music
vis a vis narrative.
Any music with
sequences of
events-thematic
ideas, harmonic
processes,
cadences, instrumental
exchanges-in short,
almost all
music, can be said to be "narrative."
The model borrowed from classic
literary struc-
turalism
brings
us to
seeming absurdities, that
"narrative music" could be so
broadly defined
that all music
narrates, and without
conveying
any particular meaning. Referring to exs. 1 and
2a as
augmented-chord fanfare, C7
chord, to be
followed
by bassoon
theme, means a reversion
to
(putatively)
neutral terms to describe
music,
and with them we strike what Leonard
Meyer
would call an "absolutist"
stance, even as we
evoke
language and literature to
impose sense
upon the musical material.13
If our little structuralist
analysis has hinted
that as an extreme
case, a formalist/absolutist
could
analyze
all music as
narrative, yet still
view music as void of specific expressive con-
tent
(not
to mention cultural or referential or
ideological
content),
this hints that evocation of
literary-theoretical analogies is sterile. What
does it tell us if we
speak of music with narra-
tive
metaphors (a modulation as a
"departure,"
13Musical semiotics, similarly, has concentrated on analy-
sis of the "niveau neutre" the
(allegedly) pure musical mate-
rial, though its apparatus is borrowed from disciplines ob-
sessively concerned with
language, messages, and
meanings. Most musical semioticians have argued that the
"niveau neutre" is the only proper sphere in which to begin
analysis, staging what David Lidov criticized as an escape
from basic issues. See "Nattiez's Semiotics of Music," Ca-
nadian Journal of Research in Semiotics 5
(1977-78),
17:
"the theme... is plain enough, but its development is com-
plex in the hands of both Molino and Nattiez. What disturbs
me is their construction of a semiotics which discards so
lightly the distinction between communicative and non-
communicative use of symbols. To me this distinction is
paramount. Whatever its justification in theory, the tripar-
tition
[of
the sign into the niveau neutre, the niveau esthesi-
que, and the niveau
poietique] has been utilized in practice
to stage a retreat from the problems of meaning." Lidov, like
many critics of Nattiez's musical semiotics, does not note
that consideration of the "niveau neutre" is proposed only
as a first step in the semiotic project, that questions of
meaning are, according to Nattiez, properly dealt with at a
later
stage.
227
CAROLYN
ABBATE
What the
Sorcerer Said
19TH a harmonic
period
as an "action
sequence"),
or
CENTURY
catch at the skirts of
literary
criticism to
give
us
new
categories
and names?
Perhaps only,
as
Jean-Jaques
Nattiez has
intimated,
that music
analysis
is itself born of a narrative
impulse,
that we create fictions about music to
explain
where no other form of
explanation
works.'4
Perhaps
the idea of narrative is so central to hu-
man rationalization of
experience
that we can-
not resist
pursuing
the
analogy
of narrative and
music,
no matter how
arbitrary
and fruitless it
might
be.
III
Here the
gloomy
noise heard at the
beginning
is
recurring.
The
analogy
between narrative and
music need not remain
fruitless,
but its fruit is a
paradox: literary
theories of narrative
suggest
ways
in which music cannot
narrate,
and how
our
metaphor
of narration
collapses
and lies
empty-in strange
folds and curves.
Does music have a
past
tense? Can it
express
the
pastness
all
literary
narrative
accomplishes
by
use of
past
or
preterit
verb
tenses,
"it was
early spring,
and the second
day
of our
journey."
To
linger
over "was" as
opposed
to "is" is to ex-
clude music from the canon of narrative
genres.
The
pastness, implicit
in "it was" tells us
many
things
at once. It tells us that there is a
narrator,
someone who lived
past
the end of the
story.
Knowing this,
we relax. The
past tense,
as Paul
Ricoeur
put it, nudges
the reader into detach-
ment:
What is essential to the narrated world is
foreign
to
the immediate or
directly preoccupying
surround-
ings
of the
speaker.
The model in this
regard
is still
the
fairy
tale . .. the
expressions
'once
upon
a
time,'
'il 6tait une fois,'... serve to mark the
entry
into nar-
rative. In other
words,
it is not
just
the
past
that is ex-
pressed by
the
past tense,
but the attitude of relaxa-
tion, of uninvolvement.15
In terms of the Aristotelian
distinctions,
what
we call
narrative-novels, stories, myths,
and
the like-is
diegetic, epic poetry
and not the-
ater. It is a tale told
later, by
one who
escaped
to
14Jean-Jacques Nattiez,
"The
Concept
of Plot and Seriation
Process in Music
Analysis,"
trans. Catherine
Dale,
Music
Analysis
4
(1985),
107-18.
'5Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. II
(Chicago, 1985),
p.
68. Music seems excluded from this narrative
world,
cer-
tainly by
Ricoeur. On
pp.
29-30 he
catalogs (as
a rhetorical
device)
the
things
that can
narrate;
music is absent from his
list.
228
the outside of the
tale,
for which he builds a
frame to control its
dangerous energy.
But music is
fundamentally
different, not
diegetic
but
mimetic;
like
any
form of
theater,
any temporal art,
it
traps
the listener in
present
experience
and the beat of
passing time,
from
which he cannot
escape.
Mimetic
genres per-
form the
story,
in the
present
tense.
They
can-
not disarm the
story,
or comfort
us, by insisting
upon
its
pastness.
For this
reason,
of
course, Goethe, Hegel,
and
the
neo-Hegelian
critics of the nineteenth cen-
tury
saw ballad
poetry
as a
powerfully subjec-
tive
genre.16
Ballads are mimetic;
they
are dra-
matic conversations or
monologues
that act out
the
story.
The
poet
and the listener are
trapped
in
unfolding disaster;
the
objective
narrator is
often
wholly
absent. The
Zauberlehrling
ballad
is a
present
tense
monologue
for the
apprentice,
whose voice calls out what
happens ("he
is al-
ready
at the
river,"
"he is
chopped
in
two!").
Does music have a
past
tense? Recent Ger-
man
literary
theories have
put
the mimetic-
diegetic
distinction another
way. Diegetic gen-
res,
with their
surviving narrator, play
both
with
Erzdhlzeit,
the time it takes the narrator to
tell,
the time of
reading,
and erzahlte
Zeit,
the
expanse
of time that is told about.17 In mimetic
genres
the two are
fused,
or
perhaps
neither is
wholly
there. The time of
telling
is the time be-
ing
told
about;
there is no
teller, only
time it-
self.
This
opposition has,
of
course,
haunted theo-
rizing
about verbal
narrative, taking many
forms. Peter Brooks has written that with its
first
preterit
verb narrative "ever and
inevitably
presents
itself as a
repetition
... of what has al-
ready happened."1'
Put another
way,
in the first
instants of
narrating,
of
Erzdhlzeit,
all the
past-erzahlte
Zeit-is immanent. We could
speak
more
conventionally
with the structural-
ist critical establishment of a
story (fabula)-
the
illusory played-out
events that we assume
'6See,
for
example,
G. W. F.
Hegel, Aesthetik, ed. Friedrich
Bassenge (Berlin, 1985), II,
474-80.
'7The
coinage goes
back to Gunther
Miiller,
"Erzahlzeit and
erzahlte
Zeit," Festschrift fir
P. Kluckhohn und Hermann
Schneider, 1948
(rpt.
in
Morphologische Poetik, Tiibingen,
1968);
Genette
began
his classic Narrative Discourse
(Ithaca, 1980) by evoking
the distinction with its
suggestion
of
"pseudo-time."
For a brief
summary,
see
Ricoeur,
Time
and Narrative II, 61-99.
18Peter Brooks, Reading for
the Plot
(Oxford, 1984), p.
25.
have taken
place
because
they
are described in
literary
discourse
(sjuzet).
Genette wrote of his-
toire and
recit;
Chatman of
"story"
and "dis-
course";
while there is
disagreement
about
boundaries and
definitions,'9
while the
opposi-
tion has been
challenged,
it has seemed a neces-
sary
fiction of
reading.20
Music seems excluded
from this
game
with time. Can music have a
past
tense?
We can
explore analogies
once more. A musi-
cal work can
certainly
evoke the
past by
invok-
ing history, by calling upon
established conven-
tions or inherited
past models;
a musical work
may
unfold in a
transgression
of the convention
or a transformation of the model
(this is,
in a va-
riety
of
forms,
a familiar and fruitful
approach
to
analysis
of
nineteenth-century music).21
But
to view the
code,
the
convention,
as a set of illu-
sory past
events and the
piece
at hand as a
spe-
cific discursive
narration,
as it
were,
of the so-
nata
story,
is
perhaps
a
misleadingly
broad use
of "narrative."22 The
literary concept
invoked
19For a
summary
see Jonathan Culler, "Story
and Discourse
in the
Analysis
of
Narrative,"
in his The Pursuit
of Signs
(Ithaca, 1981), pp.
169-87.
20Reading for
the Plot, p. 97: "Narrative
always
makes the
implicit
claim: to be in a state of
repetition,
as a
going
over
again
of
ground already
covered: a
sjuzet (the novel, the dis-
course) repeating
the
fabula
as the detective retraces the
story
of the criminal." The Russian formalists' formulation
has been
challenged by
Richard
Belknap,
who has asked
whether the distinction is
pointless,
as
"story"
has no real-
ity
and is
only
constituted
through "discourse";
see "The
Minimal Unit of
Plot,"
in Literature and
History:
Theoreti-
cal Problems and Russian Case Studies
(Stanford, 1986), pp.
221-29.
2'Dahlhaus's
Wagnerian
studies-for
example,
his classic
"Formprinzipien
in
Wagners 'Ring
des
Nibelungen',"
Bei-
trage
zur Geschichte der
Oper,
ed. Heinz Becker
(Regens-
burg, 1969), pp. 95-129-suggests
this
approach
for
analy-
sis.
Anthony
Newcomb's
interpretation
of Schumann's
transformation of a basic
symphonic model,
Critical In-
quiry
10
(1984), 614-42,
is an
exemplary generic interpreta-
tion. On the side of Italian
opera
lie studies such as
Philip
Gossett, "Verdi, Ghislanzoni,
and Aida: The Uses of Con-
vention,"
Critical
Inquiry
1
(1974), 291-334; and Harold S.
Powers,
" 'La solita forma' and 'The Uses of
Convention',"
Acta
musicologica
59
(1987),
65-90. A case could be made
for
associating "generic"
musical
analysis
with another lit-
erary (or
at least
linguistic)
idea: Umberto Eco's
sign-type
"replica"
and its sub-class
"stylization" (he gives
the exam-
ple
both of
literary genre,
and of musical
genre,
of
any given
march as a
particular, unique replica
of the musical
type
"march").
See A
Theory of
Semiotics
(Indiana, 1976), pp.
237-41.
22Anthony
Newcomb's
analysis
of "narrative" in Schu-
mann's
symphonic work,
"Schumann and Late
Eighteenth-
Century
Narrative
Strategies,"
this
journal
11
(1987),
164-
74, musically
sensitive as it
is, over-simplifies
the notion of
"narrative"
by equating
it with a
refashioning
of standard
lies closer to
"genre"
as established artistic
codes or formal
patterns
that are
implanted (in
both author and
reader) by
the author's choice of
formal vehicle. To show how David
Cop-
perfield
as novel transforms
pedigreed
devices
associated with memoir and
autobiography
is to
read the novel in context of novels
past.
It is not
to take
up
its
past tenses,
and what is set in mo-
tion
by "was,"
"I was born ... on a
Friday,
at
twelve o'clock at
night":
the
past
tense that at
once roars of the
narrator,
hence of the
played-
out
story,
David's
life,
as
opposed
to the narra-
tive discourse in the time of
telling.
Can music have a
past
tense when Mahler
quotes Wagner?
A citation is
intertextual,
a ref-
erence to
history;
it evokes an artifact from the
past,
but cannot create a
past
tense. When
Goethe's
apprentice
in stanza 3 cites the bibli-
cal words of
John
the
apostle-"habe
ich doch
das Wort
vergessen"-history,
another
text,
is
cast
up,
but without
forcing
the
catastrophe
un-
folding
around the
apprentice-splashing,
broom
marching,
flood-from the fatal
present
into the harmless
past.
Can music have a
past
tense when we hear
the last few minutes of
Tristan,
and are re-
minded of
something
in the
past?
Is act II the
played-out event,
and the end of act III the narra-
tive
repetition?
Here we
may
be
drifting
closer.
Yet in verbal
narrative, repetition
and transfor-
mation of formulae
(like
the "leitmotifs" in
Thomas Mann's
novels) belong
to
Erzdhlzeit;
that
is, they
remind us of the
elapsed
time of our
reading-or
our
listening, experiencing-and
belong
to the artifice of
discourse,
not the
story
it
allegedly represents. My repeated question
about whether music has a
past
tense
thumps
through
the
elapsed
time of this
present
narra-
tive of
mine;
it is a sonorous device.23
Certainly
a
long
tradition of musical
analysis
rooted in
Hanslick's aesthetics of form would
argue
that
repetition actually
creates
structure,
architec-
ture,
hence stasis: time frozen.
musical
patterns, conventions,
and models
(which
he asso-
ciates with the structuralists'
"paradigmatic plots").
23Indeed,
the musical Leitmotiv is in some sense
parallel
to
Barthes's "code
symbolique":
the abstract
symbols
re-
peated,
encountered
(in
various
guises)
over the course of
the
story;
each
repetition
refers back to
previous appear-
ances and forward to future recurrences. The
repetitions
re-
mind us of the
past
of our
reading,
but
they
are not analo-
gous
to
past tense,
which does not
depend
on
repetition
of
the formula over
elapsed
time to establish
pastness,
but
which can evoke
pastness instantaneously.
229
CAROLYN
ABBATE
What the
Sorcerer Said
19TH
The
collapse
of the
analogy
between music
CENTURY and narrative is
preferable
to
satisfying
or even
satiating
conclusions that
posit
narrative as a
new
secret,
a lift
picked up
on the
long
march to
musical
meaning,
or a
magic
word
(narrative)
that creates a new music-critical
method,
the
magic
servant.
Perhaps
musical works have no
ability
to narrate in the most basic
literary
sense;
that
is,
to
posit
a
narrating
survivor of the
tale who
speaks
of it in the
past
tense. But this
incapability
cannot be said to
impoverish
mu-
sic;
rather it lends music a terrible force to move
us
by catching
us in
played-out
time. When mu-
sic
ends,
it ends
absolutely,
in the cessation of
passing
time and
movement,
in death.24
A musical shadow is a
particularly apt
shadow for Goethe's ballad of the sorcerer's
ap-
prentice.
Dukas's The Sorcerer's
Apprentice
is
not a
retelling
of
events;
it is a
depiction
of
events, happening
as we listen. The
poem
itself
is like music in this
respect:
a dramatic mono-
logue
for the
apprentice
who
speaks
in the
present
tense and whose
experience happens
as
we read. The Sorcerer's
Apprentice
is extraordi-
narily
successful as a
representation
of this
text,
for this reason: at
every moment,
it can be un-
derstood as an
acting-out,
with Goethe's
poem,
of the drama common to both. Neither narrates
a tale
retrospectively,
at a distance.
But after all that's been
said, perhaps
both
Dukas and Goethe have a covert
past tense,
a
moment when a narrator
appears
and makes of
the enacted drama a
thing past.
This
past
tense
takes
shape
in a set of
quotation marks,
in a
slow
epilogue.
At the end of Goethe's
poem,
we
hear the sorcerer's
voice, restoring
order to the
world:
"In die
Ecke,
Besen! Besen!
Seids
gewesen.
Denn als Geister
Ruft euch
nur,
zu diesem
Zwecke,
Erst hervor der alte Meister."
24This is
pointed
out
by Caryl
Emerson in her
analysis
of
Mussorgsky's
revisions to Kutuzov's texts for the
"Songs
and Dances of Death."
Composers
know what music is and
what it can
do;
music is a
marking
of
experienced
time that
ends without a
narrating
survivor who could tell the tale in
the
past tense;
when
Mussorgsky
eliminates the
framing
230
(Into
the
corner,
Broom! Broom!
Let it be as it was.
For as
spirits
You are
only conjured up,
for this
purpose,
First
by
the old
master.)
But
why
are his words
given
in
quotation
marks?
Who, now,
is
telling
us what is
happen-
ing by quoting
the sorcerer? We sense
instantly
that the
poem
is no
longer
in the
apprentice's
hands, yet
it is not in the sorcerer's either-to
be
quoted signals another,
the
person quoting.
A
third voice enters the
poem
at the site of the
quotation
marks and
speaks
a silent he said af-
ter the sorcerer's words. So there is a third
per-
son beside the other
two,
a third
person
narra-
tor,
to us
unheard,
who
peers
out from the
quotation
marks that
betray
his
presence.
Dukas's scherzo does not conclude with a
representation
of the sorcerer's words-the mo-
tif
d'evocation. Instead ten slow measures end
the
piece.
This is the usual
epilogue-coda,
and
many
musical-formalist reasons could be ad-
duced to
explain
its
presence (closure by
restat-
ing
the
opening,
as in Beethoven's late
piano
variations,
for
example).
The slow
epilogue
has
no
bearing
on the
story,
for it lies outside Du-
kas's musical
representations
of
spells spoken,
brooms in
motion, water,
and axes.
Does music have a
past
tense? We end where
we
might begin,
with a
question.
Do the last ten
measures
pass
over to the other
world, speaking
in the
past
tense of what has
passed?
Is this the
orchestral he said? Then the slow
epilogue
is
the voice of the third
person,
who in the
poem
is
mute and leaves his
mark,
the
quotation marks,
only
in the
poem's
final stanza.
Perhaps
this
narrator,
who in Dukas's scherzo is not "si-
lent," even continues
beyond
the he said. If
so,
he tells us what
happened-after
we ,
have heard what the sorcerer said.
narrator from Kutuzov's
poems
and
changes
all
past
tenses
to
present,
he is
compelling language
to imitate the condi-
tion of music. See
Caryl Emerson,
"Real
Endings
and Rus-
sian Death:
Mussorgskij's
Pesni i
pljaski smerti," Russian
Language
Journal 38
(1984),
199-216.