Narativitate Beeth Mahler

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Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 126 (2001)
Royal Musical Association
Music and Narrative Revisited:

Degrees of Narrativity in Beethoven
and Mahler
VERA MICZNIK
Narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general
human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into
telling, the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human.
Hayden White1
Music history is possible only insofar as the historian is able to show the
place of individual works in history by revealing the history contained
within the works themselves, that is, by reading the historical nature of
works from their internal constitution.
Leo Treitler2
DURING the last two decades musicologists have drawn upon ideas developed in literary criticism within the relatively new field of narratology.
The justification for such applications has been the belief that the
narrative mode of thought is a common trait of most human cultures
which amounts to a natural impulse to impose a certain kind of order
upon the perception and representation of the world. If, as Roland
Barthes has observed, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there like life itself ,3 and since music is one of the
cultural expressions of life, it makes sense to assume that music too
might share with other cultural manifestations some basic characteristics by means of which people fashion their experiences. Hayden
Whites broad definition quoted at the beginning of this article
narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general
human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into
telling certainly allows a place for music among cultural artefacts that
internalize in some way various kinds of narrative patterns.
I would like to thank Leo Treitler and Robert Bailey, who in the early stages of work for this article
offered their valuable comments and advice, and to Janet Levy for her encouragement and
support. For the final version I am grateful to the anonymous readers and, especially, to Nicholas
Cook for their meaningful questions and suggestions; and to David Metzer for his attentive and
constructive reading.
1 Hayden White, The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality, On Narrative, ed.
W. J. Thomas Mitchell (Chicago, IL, and London, 1981), 123 (p. 1).
2 Leo Treitler, What Kind of Story is History?, Music and the Historical Imagination
(Cambridge, MA, and London, 1989), 15775 (p. 173).
3 Roland Barthes, Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives, ImageMusicText,
trans. Stephen Heath (New York, 1977), 79124 (p. 79).
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As with many theories, the formal definitions of narrative vary widely

even within the fields in which the concept originated, such as literary
fiction, film and history. Despite that variety, there seems to be general
consensus on three minimal conditions for narrativity: that narrative
entails (1) a representation or recounting (2) of at least two real or
fictional events or situations in a time sequence (3) by at least one
actual or implied narrator.4 One more specific requirement is commonly stipulated. Seymour Chatman (among many others) postulates
as fundamental to narrative regardless of the medium the presence
of a deep structure characterized by two independent time structurings: the time sequence of plot events, which he calls story-time, and
the time of the presentation of those events in the text, which he calls
discourse-time. Thus for him (and for others) the global narrative
effect of a text emerges from the tension created between those two
different time orders: the causal and chronological order and timespan of the events in the story (that is, of the events considered independently of the actual text) and the temporal order and actual
reading time in which these events are told or presented in the discourse (that is, the ways in which the events actually unfold in the
text).5 The more specific applicability of these conditions to the definition, presence and functioning of narrative, however, may differ drastically from one narratologist to another.
The necessity of the double-time structuring model as a condition for
narrativity has been challenged by many literary critics. While recognizing as essential for narrative the interaction of story, discourse
and a third-dimension narrating, Genette focuses his analysis on discourse, as he believes that the narrative text . . . has no other temporality than what it borrows, metonymically, from its own reading.6
Citing Genette, Shlomit Rimmon-Kenan adds that both story-time and
text [discourse]-time may in fact be no more than pseudo temporal,7
while according to Nelson Goodman most of the time the reordering
accomplished by the discourse does not basically change the narrative: . . . narrative reordered in any way at all is still narrative.8 As for
Barbara Herrnstein Smith, she questions other theorists implication
that prior to and independent of the narrative in question there
4 See, for example, Gerald Prince, A Dictionary of Narratology (Lincoln, NE, 1987), 58; and idem,
Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative (Berlin, New York and Amsterdam, 1982), 4.
5 See, for example, Seymour Chatman, What Novels Can Do that Films Cant (and Vice
Versa), On Narrative, ed. Mitchell, 11736 (p. 118), and his book on narrative, Story and Discourse:
Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1978); Shlomit Rimmon-Kenan,
Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London and New York, 1989), 44: time in narrative fiction
can be defined as the relations of chronology between story and text [i.e. discourse]; Grard
Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY, 1980), 33
(quoting Christian Metz: one of the functions of narrative is to invent one time scheme in terms
of another time scheme); and so on. As is well known, the terms story and discourse are transformations of the Russian Formalists original distinction between fabula and sjuzet.
6 Genette, Narrative Discourse, 34.
7 Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction, 44.
8 Nelson Goodman, Twisted Tales; or Story, Study, and Symphony, On Narrative, ed. Mitchell,
99115 (p. 111). Goodman, however, recognizes and gives examples of cases in which not every
narrative will survive every reordering (ibid.).
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existed some particular determinate set of events in some particular

determinate (untwisted) order or sequence. Instead she proposes that
the basic stories . . . of narratives are often not abstract, disembodied,
or subsumed entities, but quite manifest, material, and particular
retellings . . . of those narratives, constructed, as all versions are, by
someone in particular, on some occasion, for some purpose, and in
accord with some relevant set of principles.9 In other words, she minimizes the role of the double-time structuring in the production of
narrative, giving priority to the conditions under which any narrative
is produced and perceived. And whereas for Frank Kermode story and
discourse manifest themselves in narrative as two intertwined processes
(the presentation of a fable and its progressive interpretation (which
of course alters it)), for Paul Ricoeur narrative function is inextricably
linked with temporality, which indeed constitutes the ultimate referent in the narrative activity.10 In so far as the discourse elicits a configuration from a succession or makes the succession of events into
significant wholes unfolding between beginnings and endings, thus
involving the concept of recollection, narrative discourse (or the time
of fable-and-theme as Ricoeur calls it) is more deeply temporal than
the mere chronological succession of events (or episodic narrative).
The concept of narrators voice or point of view has similarly been
seen as essential by some theorists and questioned by others. While
Genette accords a very important role to Voice,11 Mieke Bal considers
that the difference in perspective or focalization (the name she gives
to vision or point of view) between a first-person narrative and a
third-person narrative is minimal, and that the signs which signal the
switches of focalization from one level to another can remain
implicit.12 Referring to the presence (or absence) of the narrating
voice, Karol Berger suggests that those presented worlds from which
a personage is absent [certain still-life paintings and, implicitly, music]
and artistic presentations in general encourage a fortiori the illusion
of a human presence behind the works rhetoric.13
Needless to say, depending on the models of narratology that musicologists have adopted, the approaches to, and definitions of, music as
narrative are just as diverse. For example, to define the narrative quality
in Mahlers Ninth Symphony, Anthony Newcomb has devised a conception that combines Ricoeurs notion of narrative activity, the Russian
Formalists idea of plot archetype and the musical features which
Adorno found responsible for the novel-like quality of Mahlers music,
9 Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories, On Narrative, ed.
Mitchell, 20932 (pp. 224, 21314).
10 Frank Kermode, Secrets and Narrative Sequence, On Narrative, ed. Mitchell, 7997 (p. 82),
and Paul Ricoeur, Narrative Time, ibid., 16586 (pp. 1745). Both arguments are much more
complex, but I have selected here minimal information related to the topic of the double-time
structuring.
11 See his chapter entitled Voice in Narrative Discourse, 21262.
12 Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto, 1985; 2nd edn, 1997),
1423, 1578.
13 See Karol Berger, Diegesis and Mimesis: The Poetic Modes and the Matter of Artistic Presentation, Journal of Musicology, 12 (1994), 40733 (pp. 4312).
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specifically the composers loosening of formal schemata and the behaviour of his themes as characters. For Newcomb, the narrative quality
of Mahlers music comes most powerfully from the intersection of
formal paradigm, thematic recurrence and transformation, and . . . plot
archetype, which together reproduce a quest paradigm characteristic
of the Romantic Bildungsroman.14 Fred Maus, on the other hand, sees the
narrative quality of music from a perceivers point of view, likening the
succession of musical events as a series of fictional actions to the activity
of following actions in a play or a novel.15 And Robert Samuels regards
musical narration as a semiotic enterprise most effective at enhancing
hermeneutically the analytical project when it is constructed at the
intersection of different levels of reference and different sorts of
codes.16 His view of the musical discourse in the context of a general
textuality enables him to state that a musical text . . . is not a mere
sequence of sounds any more than a literary work is a sequence of
words, and thus it can be included among all other discourses.17
Very influential for the questioning of the validity of narratological
approaches to music is Carolyn Abbates book Unsung Voices, where she
rejects musical narrative as a result of mere listening in terms of plot
paradigm, event-sequence or reordering. More specifically, in her criticism that music lacks the ability to narrate because it does not have a
past tense she joins Jean-Jacques Nattiezs position that narrative features, rather than residing in the musical work, emerge from our own
narrative impulse, so that in itself, . . . music is not a narrative and any
description of its formal structures in terms of narrativity is nothing but
superfluous metaphor.18 Instead, Abbate narrows down the signs of
narrative in music to rather a voice with a characteristic way of speaking, and thus limits the musics ability to narrate to rare moments
that can be identified by their bizarre and disruptive effect.19 And
14 Anthony Newcomb, Narrative Archetypes in Mahlers Ninth Symphony, Music and Text:
Critical Inquiries, ed. Steven Paul Scher (Cambridge, 1992), 11836 (pp. 11819). For Adornos
formulation, see Theodor W. Adorno, Mahler: Eine musikalische Physionomik (Frankfurt am Main,
1960), 1001; see also the entire Chapter 4, Roman (pp. 85111), and Chapter 8, Der lange
Blick, esp. pp. 20016; trans. Edmund Jephcott as Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy (Chicago, 1992).
15 Fred Everett Maus, Music as Narrative, Indiana Theory Review, 12 (1991), 134 (p. 14). He
also provides a good discussion of the problems surrounding the notions of story and discourse
as applied to music; see esp. pp. 214.
16 Robert Samuels, Mahlers Sixth Symphony: A Study in Musical Semiotics (Cambridge, 1995), 155.
17 Robert Samuels, Music as Text: Mahler, Schumann and Issues in Analysis, Theory, Analysis
and Meaning in Music, ed. Anthony Pople (Cambridge, 1994), 15263 (p. 153).
18 Carolyn Abbate, What the Sorcerer Said, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the
Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ, 1991), 3060 (p. 52). Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Can One Speak of
Narrativity in Music?, trans. Katharine Ellis, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 115 (1990),
24057 (p. 257); originally published as Peut-on parler de narrativit en musique?, Canadian
University Music Review: Alternative Musicologies/Les musicologies alternatives, 10 (1990), 6891.
Samuels flatly contradict[s] one of Carolyn Abbates best-known and most productive observations that music seems not to have a past tense by citing Mahlers Fourth Symphony, which
Adorno hears in the past tense. See Samuels, Music as Text, 154. The past tense as essential for
narrativity has also been questioned by certain literary critics. Prince observes that the preterit
in a fictional narrative is not primarily an indicator of time, since the past tense in which the
events are narrated is transposed by the reader into a fictive present (cited from Mendilow). See
Prince, Narratology, 289.
19 Abbate, What the Sorcerer Said, 48, and Musics Voices, Unsung Voices, 329 (p. 29).
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Lawrence Kramer shares with her the view that narrative in music consists of unusual, disruptive processes rather than normative ones,
and can be found only in musical works that explicitly call attention to
their own contingent, historical, rhetorical character.20
While by no means comprehensive, the above sampling should give
a sense both of the diversity of approaches to music narrativity and of
the problems that each approach may involve. These interrogations of
the dangerous liaisons (as Lawrence Kramer calls them)21 between
music and narrative have prompted scholars to question and articulate
their positions more carefully. A summary of the major warnings raised
by narrative interpretations of music would include: first, that music
lacks the semantic basis of the other disciplines (such as literature or
film) in which narrative has been theorized (e.g. Samuels, Nattiez);22
second, that the few structural principles contributing to narrative that
music might have in common with other disciplines (time sequence,
accumulation of tension and resolution, etc.) are not sufficient for the
condition of musics narrativity (e.g. Abbate, Maus); and third, that the
story/discourse tension and a narrators voice or point of view which
define narrative are absent in music (e.g. Maus).
Many of these objections have been neutralized or softened by other
scholars views. Leo Treitler and Fred Maus, for example, each in his
own way, have defended musics capability of conveying ideas related
to non-musical states and events. Since the language we use in our socalled purely musical analyses is already imbued with metaphors and
tropes describing musical phenomena in terms similar to those of
everyday actions, the gap between music communicating intrinsic or
intramusical ideas and extramusical (including narrative) ones is
not as significant as it may seem.23 Moreover, many scholars agree that
any narrative interpretation of a text literary, historical or visual is
a construction requiring a narrative frame of mind.24 Therefore, the
criticism that a narrative interpretation of a musical text is only a
figment of our narrative impulse does not necessarily demonstrate
musics non-narrativity any more, or less, than that of any other field.
Ultimately, this questioning brings a more informed acknowledgment
of the disciplinary boundaries of narrative, to which the musical narratological enterprise was originally conceived as an antidote. By
turning back full circle, we must acknowledge the differences, yet make
them work profitably for both fields: rather than prove similarities, we
can validate attempts to study those differences, and thus legitimate
20 Lawrence Kramer, As if a voice were in them: Music, Narrative, and Deconstruction,
Music as Cultural Practice 18001900 (Berkeley, CA, and London, 1990), 176213 (p. 189).
21 Lawrence Kramer, Dangerous Liaisons: The Literary Text in Musical Criticism, 19th Century
Music, 13 (198990), 15967.
22 Nattiez, Can One Speak of Narrativity in Music?, 244.
23 See Maus, Music as Narrative, and Leo Treitler, Language and the Interpretation of
Music, Music and Meaning, ed. Jenefer Robinson (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1997), 2356 (esp.
pp. 4550).
24 See, for example, Samuels, Mahlers Sixth Symphony, 135, but also Hayden White, The Value
of Narrativity, and Wendy Steiner, Pictures of Romance: Form against Context in Painting and Literature (Chicago, IL, 1988).
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further inquiries into them. The major question that remains to be

answered for each case of narrative reading of music is whether an analytical methodology based on the analogy between music and narrative
would bring significantly more interesting results than what conventional music analysis has already been doing for instrumental music
seeing musical events as part of a motivated musical plot. As Abbate
asks: if any event-sequence or any text that induces mental comparisons with a paradigm can be defined as a narrative, or, in other words,
if all music is narrative, what is the value of a critical methodology that
generates such uniformity and becomes a mere machine for naming
any and all music?25 Similarly leading questions, such as Mauss What
are the shared qualities that attract music scholars to certain works as
examples of musical narrative? or, in other words, What are the conditions under which we need to invoke narrativity in our analyses, or
under which our narrative impulse is stronger? remain pertinent
today. And these questions, in turn, need to be answered in a historical
context. Thus we would accomplish what Leo Treitler has recommended in the quotation cited at the beginning of this article, revealing the history contained within the works themselves, that is, . . .
reading the historical nature of works from their internal constitution.
Or, as Lawrence Kramer has put it: To speak credibly of narratography in music we need to relate musical processes to specific, historically
pertinent writing practices.26
This study brings yet another attempt to analyse potential narrative
qualities of music. My approach is based on two premises. First, since
literary narratological theories are just as much interpretative critical
extrapolations about texts as are our attempts to talk about music in
narrative or cultural terms, the demonstration of musics narrativity
through an analogy with literary narrative is legitimate. And, second,
inquiries into the narratological properties of music must be steeped
as deeply as possible in questions specific to our discipline, that is, they
must translate inspiring questions from other disciplines into questions
that only we can ask and answer. Therefore, it is not necessary to apply
these theories wholesale; rather, it is only by understanding how music
narrative is similar to, and different from, other kinds of narrative
structures, and how various musics differ in their degree of narrativity,
that we can profitably develop new ways of discussing musical discourse
specific to our discipline.
To demonstrate the potential of application of narrative models to
music, I have chosen to compare two case-studies the first movements of Beethovens Sixth (Pastoral) Symphony and of Mahlers
Ninth Symphony, both in sonata form as representing, respectively,
the differences between Classical and late Romantic narrative
25
Abbate, Unsung Voices, xi.

Lawrence Kramer, Musical Narratology: A Theoretical Outline, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley, CA, 1995), 98121 (p. 101).
26
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capabilities.27 In spite of (or in opposition to) the known programmatic

meanings associated with both works (Beethovens overt, Mahlers
speculatively imposed), I look at these movements as pure instrumental
music, unencumbered by texts, programmes, biography or narratives
explicitly or elusively provided by the composers or by critics. This focus
helps to establish criteria for defining higher or lesser degrees of narrativity in these musical works. To relate musical processes to specific,
historically pertinent writing practices (as Kramer puts it), I start with
an evaluation of the background changes in musical practice during
the nineteenth century, suggesting that a purely musical basis is generally responsible for the increasingly narrative condition of Romantic
instrumental music, with Mahlers as an extreme case. Subsequently, I
organize the two main large sections of the article according to the narratological concepts of story and discourse. Under the heading
Story, I abstract from the two works the musical events themselves
and analyse their meanings from the simplest to the more complex
from explicit to implicit semiotic levels (morphological, syntactic and
semantic) as a demonstration of what makes them events. And under
Discourse, I examine the particular mode of unfolding (the presentation) of these events within the musical formal discourse of the
respective movements and the capabilities of the discourse itself to
produce meanings through gestural and intertextual connotations
and through temporal manipulations. The discussion will locate the
degrees of narrativity in the two pieces in the interaction between the
semantic capabilities of the events of the story and the discursive
techniques employed by the two composers. This approach situates the
origins of meaning in musical processes based in the musical features
anchored in the historical context, consciously leaving behind some of
the older premisses of music story-making from which we are more
removed.28 Ultimately, one of the principal aims of this study is to
demonstrate that narrative interpretations of music are triggered not
only by what Jean-Jacques Nattiez calls the narrative impulse, but also
by the special qualities of the music itself.29 This narrative-based model
will show aspects of music ignored by conventional analysis, and will
allow musical works to reach the hermeneutic textual opening that will
better inscribe them among other cultural discourses of their time.
27 My choice of the Pastoral Symphony as representative of Classical stylistic features should
not imply a statement about Beethovens style in general, since, of course, other of his symphonies
such as the Third or the Fifth are closer to the Romantic ideal. Implicit in my choice is the idea
that if narrative characteristics were to appear in a Classical symphonic piece, they would most
likely show themselves at their strongest in a programmatic piece. Although I do not consider the
programme here, the piece serves better than others my purpose of illustrating how the differences in musical characteristics between the Pastoral Symphonys Classical features and Mahlers
Ninth influence the different degrees of their narrativity. Particular pieces by Mozart or Haydn
might present higher degrees of narrativity than the piece I have chosen, but these other cases
should be studied on their own.
28 Such premisses include biographical, psychological and contextual situations that might
enter into narrative interpretations of music.
29 Nattiez, Can One Speak of Narrativity in Music?, 245. As mentioned above, he believes that
narrative interpretations of music are artificial constructions of the critics, superfluous
metaphors triggered by what he identifies as their narrative impulse. See also note 18 above.
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BACKGROUND: NINETEENTH-CENTURY MUSICAL PRACTICE
As some scholars have pointed out, in nineteenth-century instrumental

music the role played in the production of meaning by the local surface
detail becomes gradually more important than that of the underlying
tonal argument. In Rose Subotniks words, essentially nonimplicational musical parameters . . . other than harmony, such as melody,
dynamics, and timbre establish a series of analogous structures, what
seem to be other, autonomous layers of meaning. . . . This emphasis on
the broad structure, or total, concrete configurations . . . helps to
obscure the temporal connections of tonal argument and to limit the
latter as a source of meaning.30 This shift of emphasis can be attributed to changes in two main musical domains: the nature of the thematic materials and the ways in which they are combined to form a
musical discourse.
In later Romantic instrumental works, for example, the number of
thematic and motivic materials used increases, and the relationships
between these materials take over some of the structural role played in
Classical music by the tonal syntax.31 Moreover, in line with the nineteenth-century broadening of stylistic interests, these materials are
often highly referential and thus more heterogeneous. This is particularly the case with Mahler, in whose works the overt use of allusions and
borrowings from various low and high genres, as well as of topics from
older and newer music, engenders multiple levels of referentiality,
resulting in an unprecedented semantic saturation in which notions of
topics, gestures, character, rhetoric and genre become essential for the
definition of those materials.32 This referentiality also leads to a
stronger differentiation, and thus to a higher morphological and
30 Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Romantic Music as Post-Kantian Critique: Classicism, Romanticism, and the Concept of Semiotic Universe, On Criticizing Music: Five Philosophical Perspectives, ed.
Kingsley Price (Baltimore, MD, 1981), 7498 (pp. 845). In a different context, Leonard B. Meyer
has made a similar observation. He distinguishes between primary parameters, which he calls
syntactic because they depend on syntactic constraints (melody, rhythm, harmony), and
secondary parameters, which he calls statistical because they can have only a statistical characterization (dynamic level, tempo, texture, timbre, rate of activity, register, etc.). Thus he writes:
As rejection of convention led to a weakening of syntax . . . secondary parameters became more
and more important for the generation of musical processes and the articulation of closure. See
his Style and Music: Theory, History, and Ideology (Philadelphia, PA, 1989), 1416. Also relevant is
his following statement: Complementing the trend toward syntactically weakened harmonic and
tonal relationships was an increase in the relative importance of secondary parameters in the
shaping of musical process and the articulation of musical form (p. 303).
31 Leonard Meyer has also recognized this: The increasing importance of motivic relationships
during the nineteenth century was in part a response to a gradual attenuation of the structuring
provided by tonal syntax. See ibid., 271.
32 This is not to say that music prior to Mahlers was semantically empty. Kofi Agawu has shown
an unsuspected richness and variety of topics in, for example, Mozarts instrumental music. See
his Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music (Princeton, NJ, 1991). Also, as James
Webster observes: In the eighteenth century, these gestural aspects of music were understood
as part of a more general quality that has since become unfamiliar to us: that of rhetoric. . . . [E]very
instrumental work was composed and understood within a context of genre, Affekt, and topoi
(topics), which in principle enabled its ideas and gestures to be located within a network of
traditional associations, including dance types and distinctions of social status. See James
Webster, Haydns Farewell Symphony and the Idea of Classical Style (Cambridge, 1991), 125. For other
analyses of the variety of topics present in Mozarts, Beethovens and Haydns music, see Leonard
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semantic individuality of the units of meaning. Hence, the definitions

and functions of themes and motives are affected more than before by
their semantic, rather than syntactic, import.33
Concerning their mode of unfolding, these new types of materials
entail new connective techniques that compensate for the decline of
conventional syntax and supplement the lack of traditional tonal plots.
Although the large-scale structural pillars may still be articulated by
recognizable conventional formal and tonal outlines, their importance
is often undermined by the diversified import of information carried
by the events filling the spaces in between. The multitude of thematic
building-blocks cannot be contained within the older boundaries; they
create their own freer formal patterns, which sometimes contradict the
expected coincidences of form and content. The typical functioning of
sections as thematic or developmental often becomes blurred,
because of changes in the methods of both thematic exposition and
developmental procedure. On the other hand, the developing variation
which traditionally underpinned developmental and transitional sections is now transformed, as Dahlhaus has shown, by Brahms, Liszt and
Wagner into a means of introducing thematic material,34 which in turn
is then often worked out through varied repetition or thematic transformation. Much more than the developmental variation which had
constituted the principal means of development early in the nineteenth
century, varied repetition highlights semantic individuality: unlike the
formers syntactic fragmentation, which removes from the materials
their original semantic affiliations, the latters operation through the
recurrence of thematic materials as wholes subjected to character transformations depends on, and reinforces, the semantic dimension. It is
on the basis of these processes of thematic transformation that programme music has achieved some of its primary semantic goals.
In addition to these syntactic changes, new processes and strategies
participate in the musical discourse. Pieces are characterized by the
existence of several often antagonistic discourses, each defined
more by gestural parameters (Meyers secondary and Subotniks
nonimplicational musical parameters) than by the overall harmonic
scheme.35 The various temporal orders concurrently unfolding
Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form and Style (New York, 1980); Wye J. Allanbrook, Rhythmic
Gesture in Mozart (Chicago, IL, 1983); and Robert Hatten, Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN, 1994). The difference, as I
see it, between Mahlers and Classical musics referentiality is that while most topics in Classical
music are an intrinsic part of the contemporary vocabulary, and therefore their recognition and
interpretation are most often direct and univalent, some of the topics used by Mahler are anachronistic within the prevalent contemporary musical styles, so that their relationship with their
context is more complex and thus generates multivalent levels of semantic meanings.
33 Although these characteristics are most valid for Mahlers music, the origins of these changes
can be observed earlier in the century, for example in Beethovens late works and in the music
of Schubert, Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner.
34 Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley, CA, 1989),
256.
35 Leonard Meyer uses the distinction between scripts and plans to characterize the difference between Classical and Romantic discourse. Script is a structure which forms an interconnected whole, in which the individual parts are very dependent on one another. Plans, on the
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encourage polysemic interpretations of the musical discourse itself. On

the whole, in Subotniks words, once tonality ceases to function as a
universal norm, music clearly loses its capacity to project itself as a semiotically autonomous structure. . . . The romantic musical work seems
to shift from an abstractly logical to an empirical, and in many ways linguistic, ideal of meaning.36 In other words, the more individualized
and semantically articulated the materials become, and the freer they
remain from specifically musical forms, the more natural or closer to
more general mental patterns (among which are narrative patterns)
the music is likely to sound.
NARRATIVE INTERPRETATION: STORY AND DISCOURSE
In light of the above discussion I propose that the two musical categories that changed during the nineteenth century the nature of the
musical materials and their way of unfolding can be said to correspond to the most commonly posited basic dichotomy necessary for a
literary narrative: the story (variously called fabula, histoire or the
narrated) and the discourse (variably called sujet, rcit or the narrating).37 According to most narratologists, story designates the
content (the signified) of the narrative, or the narrated events
abstracted from their disposition in the text and reconstructed in their
chronological order. To abstract the story from a narrative means to
isolate the events from the discourse in which they actually occur and
to describe them as nondiscursive, nontextual given[s], something
other hand, are repositories for general information that will connect events that cannot be
connected by use of an available script or by a standard causal chain expansion. He then uses the
opposition between the Classical (syntactic) scripts, based on primary (learnt, conventional)
parameters of music, and Romantic (statistical) plans, based on secondary parameters which
shape experience with minimal dependence on learned rules and conventions. See Meyer, Style
and Music, 245, 2089. According to this view, the syntactic script of sonata form stipulates tonal
and functional relationships more than plans do. On the contrary, in Romantic music forms and
processes are increasingly shaped by secondary parameters and, therefore, are based on plans,
not on scripts (p. 246). When plans are preferred, script constraints become burdensome and,
therefore, non-coincidence between the statistical and syntactic climax is a characteristic of
Romantic music (p. 308).
36 Subotnik, Romantic Music as Post-Kantian Critique, 82, 84. In what I see as an argument
akin to Subotniks observation of a shift to a linguistic ideal of musical meaning, Daniel K. L.
Chua traces the origins of the turn of music into language to the end of the sixteenth century
in the shift of music from the quadrivium to the trivium, that is, from the immutable structure
of medieval cosmos to the linguistic relativity of rhetoric, grammar and dialectics. This, in turn,
he states, led the Romantics to reverse the process by turning language into music, thus establishing the new ontology of instrumental (absolute) music. It was the stylistic relativity inherent
in the trivium and the heterogeneous form of discourse of instrumental music that prompted
Friedrich Schlegels analogy between the method of the novel and that of instrumental music.
See Chua, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge, 1999), 345, 6872.
37 This dichotomy originates in the work of the Russian Formalists. For various definitions see,
for example, Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History, Doctrine (The Hague, 1965); Seymour
Chatman, Story and Discourse; Genette, Narrative Discourse; Prince, Narratology and A Dictionary of
Narratology; Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca, NY,
1981), esp. Chapter 9, Story and Discourse in the Analysis of Literature, 16987; Rimmon-Kenan,
Narrative Fiction; and Bal, Narratology.
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which exists prior to, and independently of, narrative presentation, and
which the narrative then reports.38 The discourse consists of the
means (the signifier) by which the content is communicated in the
actual text, that is, the mode of unfolding of the events, or the representation of these events in the process of telling .39 As mentioned
earlier, some critics view the narrative signification of a text as depending on the tension created between the temporal aspects of its story
(the events of which it is made) and those of the discourse or unfolding in which the events are embedded in that particular text.
Accepting for now at face value the proposed analogy between music
and literary narration, we may say that the same is true for music: both
the nature of the materials and the type of discourse used by a composer will determine how the piece will sound, and will contribute to
the differentiation of one piece from another in terms of their narrativity. But how can the musical materials and their sequence in the
piece be closer to, or further away from, the narrative categories of
story and discourse? For, following Abbates and Nattiezs warnings, it
is not enough just to call (as we often do) metaphorically the musical
materials musical events, and the sequence of their unfolding in the
work discourse. A thorough examination of Beethovens and Mahlers
materials from their simplest morphological structure to their more
complex semantic levels of meaning, and of the ways in which they
unfold in the two sonata-form movements, will demonstrate that,
according to this analogy, Mahlers piece has a higher degree of narrativity than Beethovens.
STORY
A description of the thematic materials of a musical piece parallels in

many ways a similar abstraction of the events of a story from the
actual narrative in which they are embedded. Such a parallel is even
more persuasive in music if we recognize the multi-levelled semiotic
meanings of the musical materials, starting from the most basic
morphological level and proceeding to the next what I call syntactic and semantic levels. Note that here we are moving vertically or paradigmatically from one level of meaning to another within each event,
and we are not accounting (yet) for the horizontal or syntagmatic temporal unfolding of events. A brief comparison between the types of
materials used by Beethoven in the first movement of his Pastoral
Symphony (as representative of the Classical type) and those used by
Mahler in the first movement of his Ninth Symphony (a late Romantic
38 Culler, The Pursuit of Signs, 171. An example of events in the story would be: mother kills
father; mother is arrested; son commits suicide. It can be argued that composers themselves
conceive thematic materials as the basic events from which they build a narrative, as often they
sketch those materials and then work out how to present them in sequence.
39 Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction, 3. One example of discursive emplotting of the previous
events would be: Right before the son committed suicide, his uncle told him that his mother was
in prison because she had killed his father.
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work) will serve as a starting-place for the illustration of how the differences in the nature of the thematic events between the two composers
works contribute to different narrative discourses in the respective
pieces.40
In both movements the first themes are clearly related to the smaller
cells appearing in the first bars of the respective symphonies. But the
relationship between cells, motives and themes is different in each case.
In Beethoven (see Example 1), the cells and motives appear from the
very beginning within theme 1 and as part of, or belonging to, the
theme. Cells ag are of a wide variety and, although related, are clearly
defined through stable primary parameters of interval content, rhythm
and/or implied harmony, or through combinations of those parameters. Once defined, these features characterize the respective cells
every time they are used, and give them a stable structural definition,
whether they are incorporated within motives and themes or used
separately as fragmented materials for transitions or developmental
working out.41 Cell a, for example, is defined through both contour
and rhythm, and it preserves this morphological definition whether it
is used as part of the theme or sequentially as part of the transition at
bars 54ff. Cell b seems to have a mostly rhythmic definition, as does cell
c, whereas both cell d and its appendix, e, preserve their intervals and
rhythm when they reappear in the development section. The definition
at the level of the cell is projected onto the larger-unit levels of motives
and themes, whose similarly clear, unambiguous (most often symmetrical) morphological features remain stable. It is perhaps because of
the variety of possibilities presented by such morphologically stable
(and thus easily recognizable) yet versatile small entities that the
materials of the symphonys theme 1 are the only ones used in the
development section, in contrast with the materials of theme 2, based
mostly on cell h, which is less distinguishable morphologically and,
perhaps for this reason, meaningful only in the context of theme 2 as
a whole, not for developmental purposes (see also Table 1).
The relationship between, and interdependence of, these materials,
particularly as exemplified by theme 1, embodies Schoenbergs notion
of developing variation.42 Schoenberg suggests that the relationship
between cells, motives and themes presupposes a development or
growth of the basic cells into motives and themes through developing
variation, which in turn requires the themes to assume further
developments, elaborations or solutions, without which they are not
40 For other general comparisons between the nature of Beethovens and Mahlers music, see
Paul Bekker, Gustav Mahlers Sinfonien (Meisenheim, 1921; repr. Tutzing, 1969), 1123; and
Adorno, Mahler: Eine musikalische Physionomik, 87ff.
41 Adorno situates the classical conception of the symphony with its well defined, well circumscribed diversity in the concern for economy originating in the Aristotelian and Cartesian
rationalism. See Mahler: Eine musikalische Physionomik, 100.
42 Arnold Schoenberg, Fundamentals of Musical Composition, ed. Gerald Strang and Leonard
Stein (Boston, MA, and London, 1967), 8ff. For further discussions of the principle of developing variation, see Walter Frisch, Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, CA, 1984), and Michael Musgraves review of the same book in Journal of the American
Musicological Society, 38 (1985), 631.
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Example 1. Beethoven, Symphony no. 6, first movement, themes 1

and 2, showing motives.
theme 1
Allegro ma non troppo

a
cresc.
g
41
theme 2
67
8va
72
100
i
etc.
fulfilled. In other words, in Beethoven neither the themes nor the

motives are self-determined: the themes are bound to the consequences which have to be drawn from the implications suggested by the
cells and motives,43 and the cells and motives are always perceived as
parts of the larger units within which they were originally embedded.
43
Schoenberg, Fundamentals, 103.
th. 1
abcdef
pastoral topic;
dance
F major
exposition
themes
motives
narrative content/
function
key
sonata form
1
trans.
54
fuller
lyrical
topic
th. 2
67
viV/V C major
abcdeg a
th. 1
29
crowds
go away
ie
closing
100
151
ab c
development
B
D
retrans.
AV/F
ab f
237
abcdefc
th. 1
279
fuller
346
lyrical
topic
trans. th. 2
abcdeg a
th. 1
312
recapitulation
209
V/F V/B
191
pastoral
topic
ab
163
cyclic repetitive gradual intensifications,

nature, onomatopoeic cuckoo sounds
ab
[th. l materials]
139
6, FIRST MOVEMENT: OVERALL FORMAL AND TONAL OUTLINE

414
ie
e c a/e
440
512
relaxed contentment
abce
421
V/B B
closing coda
372
8:53 am
bar nos.
BEETHOVEN, SYMPHONY NO.
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TABLE 1
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While both themes and motives display strong morphological and syntactic definitions, semantic autonomy occurs only at the level of the
themes, not of the motives. This can be seen in the Beethoven
example, where throughout the developing variations the motivic
fragments retain their morphological and syntactic individuality
without, however, changing their character, and it is only in the recapitulation, when they get reassembled in the theme, that the whole
regains its broader, semantic meaning. The new synthesis provided by
the themes in the recapitulation, however, would have not achieved a
fulfilment of the themes promises, as it were, had the themes not been
broken down and shown the potentials of their component parts, from
which they eventually rose again. Thus a great part of the fulfilment of
the promise of the themes, or, in other words, the musical dramatic
argument in such a piece, depends not so much on the acquisition of
new characters or meanings by the cells and motives as on the syntactic working out and resolution of the implications of the themes, which
gain dramatic dimensions through the situations provided by the tonal
plot.44 This is why the tonal plot in Classical music can be said to be
the main provider of narrative design.
The main materials of the first movement of Mahlers Ninth Symphony show quite a different morphological definition. Mahler uses a
larger amount of thematic material, which can be divided into two
types: three basic (longer) themes and several distinct (shorter)
motives (see Examples 2 and 3). While, as in Beethoven, the materials
are organically interrelated, their relationship is realized here through
freer, less obvious connections: the cells shared by the main themes and
motives are amorphous, non-rhythmicized intervals originating in the
introduction (see, for example, the pervading descending major
second, and the ascending third in motive X and theme a). Still unlike
Classical themes, the smaller motivic units from which Mahlers themes
spin out do not have fixed definitions, but contain only basic intervallic cells in various orderings. Theme a, for example, proceeds from the
descending major second f 'e' and expands upwards through the
minor third f 'a' , then to the fourth b' (all of which are also present
in motive X). While this pattern within the themes reproduces the
process of accumulation from small cells to ever larger units from the
developing variation principle, the amorphous nature of the constitutive parts and their unpredictable, free combinations within the themes
contradict a traditional clear-cut, unequivocal structural definition.
Even the apparently regular rhythmic patterning of the theme in bars
711 breaks off after bar 11, and the motivic combinations unfold in
asymmetrical, freer, spinning-out gestures, which render difficult
further symmetrical divisions of the themes continuation up to the
first imperfect cadence at bar 17.
44
This corresponds to Meyers script.
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Example 2.
Mahler, Symphony no. 9, first movement, themes ac.
theme a
2
13
theme b
2
29
cresc.
dim.
33
cresc.
theme c
54
cresc.
58
etc.
cresc.
A similar situation characterizes the second theme (theme b; see

Example 2), as well as future appearances of the themes within the movement: general shapes remain recognizable, yet details of the motivic
combinations vary each time. As Adorno puts it, while the general
profile of the Mahlerian themes stays generally intact, the smallest
elements are so variable and unstable that the themes become forms
with mobile motivic content.45 In addition, since most of the time the
themes are not broken down and developed in the conventional sense
45
Adorno, Mahler: Eine musikalische Physionomik, 117, 118.
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Example 3.
M, W.
Mahler, Symphony no. 9, first movement, motives X, Y,

Y
2
hn
hp
2
X
M'
vlns
2
39
i (D min.)
W
2
44
trp.
D: I 6/4/V
(V)
M
2
92
vln, fl.
B : vii/ii
V3
V9
W
96
(B ): I 6/4
but return episodically as slightly transformed refrains (always at the

same pitch-level theme a in D major, theme b always with the same
pitches), they never lose their semantic identity. Unlike Beethovens
themes, Mahlers do not project or gain fulfilment by being reassembled
after having been dismantled. They are and remain autonomous and
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independent throughout, they exist in and for themselves, and they are
transformed into other versions of their own selves rather than into parts
of themselves.46 Through their component units, which vary in size and
content, never remain exactly alike and are freely combined, the themes
gain a rhapsodic, improvisatory quality, which contributes to their
semantic individualization and clearly distinguishes them from the more
formal, syntactic individuality that Classical themes project.
Also drastically contrasting with the economy of materials in
Beethoven, in Mahler a large number of independent motives used
along with the themes but not originating in them play important structural functional roles (see X, Y, M and W in Example 3). These motives
are not strictly derived from the fragmentation of the themes, that is,
they are not parts of the themes and do not appear as such within them.
Though organically connected with the themes by sharing with them
many of the amorphous cells and contours mentioned above (especially the descending major-second appoggiatura), these motives act as
separate, self-contained, well-individualized entities, which coexist in
parallel with, or are superimposed upon, the themes, and interact with
them as independent partners. Whereas the intervallic content of some
motives (X and Y) is more stable than that of others (M and W) they
still remain always individualized, especially in terms of secondary parameters (contour, rhythmic outline, timbre, type of attack, texture),
which in turn endow them with specific syntactic functions. This stable
association of a minimal set of characteristics with a typical functioning
of a motive renders these materials syntactically and semantically more
autonomous and self-contained. As we shall see, unlike in Beethoven,
much of the plot of the movement depends on various levels of interplay among the main themes and these motives as hierarchically equal
units of meaning.
In many traditional analyses the description of thematic materials
would stop at the morphological or syntactic musical levels of definition
reached at this point. However here I consider musical formations as
multi-levelled signs, which signify beyond their morphological and syntactic definitions at a level that I call semantic. This will enable us to
see that to the morphological difference between Beethovens and
Mahlers materials corresponds also a strong semantic differentiation.
While it is rather difficult to show how music can convey semantic input
or, in other words, how musical formations can represent or stand for
ideas other than musical, there exist more or less recognized codes
according to which both composers and listeners associate by convention certain musical ideas with extramusical concepts. These codes
may be syntactic, as part of a system of organization such as the tonal
system, or semantic, on the basis of references to notions shared with
experiences outside music.
46 In this respect they resemble more Schoenbergs definition of melody, which extends itself
by continuation rather than by elaboration; All these restrictions and limitations produce that
independence and self-determination because of which a melody requires no addition, continuation
or elaboration. Schoenberg, Fundamentals, 102.
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Roland Barthess concepts of denotation and connotation seem

helpful for bridging the gap between the musically specific (morphological or syntactic) description and what may seem subjective readings
of semantic meanings. Barthes presents a two-level semiotic system: a
first level, at which relationships between the signified and signifier are
one-to-one and explicit, and can be decoded through denotation, and
a second level, at which the entire signs of the first system become the
signifiers, which get attached to various other signifieds, creating an
infinite chain of referential, associative meanings that can be said to lie
implicitly within the first, denotative level. These meanings (which I
call semantic) are connotative signs which, by moving through a series
of signifying chains from the original sources to music, allow meanings
shared by music with other domains of reality to be transformed into
musical meanings. The understanding and interpretation of how these
meanings originated, in turn, requires historical knowledge.47 For
Barthes, connotation is the way into the polysemy of the classic text,
to that limited plural on which the classic text is based; rescuing the
connotations of a text, finding their lost origins, is what makes it possible to read its infinite meanings.48
Although Barthess theories about the importance of the connotative
levels of meaning apply mostly to language, literature, myth and other
signifying systems, the analogy with music is not far-fetched. The noun
rose at the denotative level means for everyone the flower of that
name; then syntactically it may act as a subject; and at the connotative
level it may mean blood to one person or love or optimism to
another. So may a waltz motive simply be or denote certain pitches
and rhythms; it may denote an opening motive at a syntactic denotative level; but it may also suggest a whole gamut of additional functions,
moods or dance associations at the connotative level.49 The endowment
47 For definitions of denotation and connotation in the sense used here see, for example,
Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York, 1967),
8994; idem, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York, 1974), 611; and Umberto Eco, A
Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington, IN, 1976), 547. I am adapting the sense of these terms by
considering denotative the most basic syntactic musical features that any trained musician would
recognize. It is not always possible to draw a strict delineation between the syntactic and semantic
levels, since some of the concepts we use in describing the specifically musical syntactic processes
consist anyway of metaphors or analogies to the outside world. While in some situations we must
content ourselves with acknowledging the ambiguity, most important in defining the signification
of the observed phenomenon is making a decision about the relative weight of the purely musical
components (tonality, rhythm, melody, etc.) and the referential (extramusical) ones. (On this
subject see, for example, Fred Everett Maus, Music as Drama, Music Theory Spectrum, 10 (1988),
5673.) For other views on semantic signification in music see, for example, Jean-Jacques Nattiez,
Y a-t-il une digse musicale?, Musik und Verstehen, ed. Peter Faltin and Hans-Peter Reinecke
(Cologne, 1973), 24757; Monroe C. Beardsley, Understanding Music, On Criticizing Music, ed.
Price, 5573; and Kofi Agawu, Playing with Signs, 235. Agawus concept of introversive semiosis
(borrowed from Jacobson) would correspond to my morphological and syntactic (denotative)
levels, while his extroversive semiosis would correspond to my semantic (connotative) level.
48 Barthes, S/Z, 8.
49 Music lacks denotation in the traditional sense of the word; it has mostly syntactic denotation. Charles Rosen also recognized this when he wrote: Musical phonemes act directly without
first being strained through an abstract system of denotation. See his Art has its Reasons, New
York Review of Books, 17 June 1971, 38. However, I would disagree with Rosen when in the same
review he states that what it [music] lacks is a vocabulary. I hope that this will become clear in
the discussion below.
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of musical structures with affects, characters or topics, for example,

can easily be explained through this mechanism. Connotations are not
just personal or subjective associations left at the discretion of the interpreter; rather, they are intrinsic meanings rooted in conventions. Even
though they originate in what Chomsky calls the more subjective individual performance of the respective interpreter, they belong to a
specialized ideological and cultural system of competence which precedes and generates the respective individual performance and, therefore, they are accepted intersubjectively.50
To acknowledge connotative meanings does not mean that music signifiers represent or stand for extramusical signifieds in a direct, denotative relationship. Although connotative meanings allow broader
readings of semantic signification in music, they very seldom amount
to precise portrayals of reality (the closest to that are imitative onomatopoeic sounds). For music, even when it relies on referential meanings, remains basically a self-referential system, in which the majority of
connotations are shared intertextually, that is, through references of a
musical text to other musical texts.51 The roots of topics, genres or style
borrowings can be traced back to their origins through the infinite
chains of intertextual connotations. The reading of these kinds of conventionally grounded intertextual connotations enables us to
qualify the semantic import of the materials described above.
Adding now to Beethovens and Mahlers thematic materials their
characterization at the semantic level of meaning will complete the
description of these materials as events in the story as part of our narratological analysis, and will highlight the differences between them
already encountered at the morphological and syntactic levels. From the
first bars of the Pastoral Symphony, most morphological/syntactic features such as the drone Fc in the violas and cellos, the simple theme as
sweet and soft as the air of May itself (as Sir George Grove described
it),52 the instrumentation (first violins, then horn, and then, for the
repeat of the theme, oboe), the rhythm, the predominance of major
keys and the insistence on the subdominant harmony connote
notions of simplicity, folk-dance music, outdoors or countryside.53 Such
50 See Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (Berkeley, CA, 1977), 89, 158. Chomskys
concepts of competence/performance coincide with those of langue/parole used by Saussure in
his linguistics.
51 For definitions and applications of intertextuality, see, for example, Julia Kristeva, Semiotike:
Recherches pour une smanalyse (Extraits) (Paris, 1968), 525; Michael Riffatterre, Intertextual
Representation: On Mimesis as Interpretive Discourse, Critical Inquiry, 11 (1984), 14162; Culler,
The Pursuit of Signs, 10018.
52 George Grove, Beethoven and his Nine Symphonies (3rd edn, London, 1898; repr. New York,
1962), 1923.
53 In fact, such associations are not iconic or isomorphic, in the sense that the shapes of the
music do not correspond somehow to actual objects in nature (the closest Beethoven gets to
iconic signs is through the birdcalls and the thunder and lightning imitated later in the
symphony). They, too, depend on a process of conventionalization, whose origins might be found
in older pastoral music. The most immediate associations, then, are of music with other music;
in other words, they are intertextual connotations. Beardsley, following Nelson Goodman,
pointed out that music exemplifies properties rather than objects. See Beardsley, Understanding Music, 68, and Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis, IN, 1968), 52.
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connotations are associated by listeners familiar with eighteenthcentury musical conventions with a whole musical tradition of representation captured in the notion of the pastoral topic, actually
explicitly suggested by Beethoven in his title.54 The phrase structure and
the fermata in the first rendition of the materials connote syntactically
the action of question/answer, or a slow gathering of forces, which then
get properly on their way with the second, fuller and continuous rendition of the theme from bar 37 on. Yet the pastoral topic basically continues throughout the entire movement. (This scarcity of topics is not
necessarily found in all Classical music.)55 In other words, the only
predominant semantic area in the movement is the pastoral, with the
exception of the second theme (bars 67ff.), which is more lyrical than
the first. Slight variations of this topic occur in the development section,
with an emphasis on the dance character because of the insistence on
the rhythmic pattern of cell c, on which most of the development is
based. But even so, by virtue of its use as an isolated syntactical unit disjointed from its original context, and having become just a syntactic
building unit, cell c does not bring in any additional semantic connotations; it is its repetitive use governed by tonality which are features
of the discourse that gives direction to the developmental tonal plot.
By contrast, matching their different morphological structure,
Mahlers materials present an entirely different semantic definition
(see again Examples 2 and 3). Each theme projects its own, welldefined semantic features. Theme a, a pianissimo, legato, lightweight
4/4 regular pondering theme in an Andante comodo tempo, with its
pretence at conventional balance buried underneath slightly exaggerated embellishments and asymmetrical improvisatory gestures, and
with the violin sound coming out of Viennese salon music, connotes a
serene, pass atmosphere, nicely described by Diether de la Motte as
Gromtterchen.56 As de la Motte points out, one can even detect a
trivial, or naive, sense in this theme, especially in its consequent
phrase (bars 1825), where a more obvious symmetry is preserved, and
where the variation technique verges on banality. These references to
old-fashionedness bestow upon the theme a quality of reminiscence.
The slow pace of unfolding in a gesture of gradual accretion and the
improvisatory quality are suggestive of speech, more exactly of telling
or evoking, continuing the epic once-upon-a-time tone of the introduction.57 And, moreover, to follow de la Mottes observations, the fact
54 My understanding of the pastoral topic corresponds closely to that discussed by Hatten in
Musical Meaning in Beethoven, 91111. For definitions of topics, see the references to Agawu, Ratner
and Webster, in note 32 above.
55 See in note 32 above references to the variety of topics in Classical music. For my purpose
here I chose an extreme case where, probably for programmatic reasons, Beethoven insists on
only one topic. The wider variety of topics one might find, for example, in instrumental works of
Mozart does not invalidate the points made here about narrative, even though the degree of
narrativity in those works might, paradoxically, be higher than in this programmatic work.
56 Diether de la Motte, Das komplizierte Einfache: Zum ersten Satz der 9. Sinfonie von Gustav
Mahler, Musik und Bildung, 3 (1978), 14551 (pp. 1456).
57 See also Adorno, Mahler: Eine musikalische Physionomik, 201 (trans. Jephcott, Mahler: A Musical
Physiognomy, 155): Telling of the past, the wholly epic voice is heard. It begins as if something
were to be narrated, yet concealed.
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that in its periodic returns the theme never comes back identically or,
in other words, that each occurrence of the theme is a unique event
reproduced only partially thereafter, accentuates the listeners sense of
reconstituting past memories throughout the movement.58
Theme b introduces a completely different semantic world: a world
of anxiety, contortion, imbalance, striving and musical dissonance,
characteristic of late nineteenth-century art-music, related to that of
Brahms, or even to Schoenbergian expressionism (see Example 2). It
greatly resembles theme a in its principles of construction (similar cells,
gradual accretion, presence of the major second), and the syntactic
similarities between themes a and b play an essential role for the structural unification of the piece; yet the respective semantic worlds
attached to each of the two themes remain highly contrasting, even in
their subsequent appearances, and even though each is slightly transformed every time. One semantic transformation of theme b is particularly noticeable at its return in the recapitulation (at bar 372),
where after four bars it takes off on its own into a slower, misterioso
section of free dissonant counterpoint, losing its original aggressiveness
and outlining a meditative, self-reflective state of mind (see Example 4).
The number of materials which play more or less important roles in
this movement is larger than in a typical first movement of a symphony,
and this underlines the variety of semantic fields. Even the more incidental materials that Mahler introduces in a movement often simplistically designated as being in sonata form have strong semantic
definitions. Theme c, for example (see Example 2), acts at first as a
tonal intrusion of B major within the D major first-theme area.
Morphologically it is characterized by a monotonous rhythmic movement in quavers, which towards the end wanders into remote harmonic
areas, only to return abruptly to theme a in D major, thus confirming
its parenthetical role within the still predominant first-theme area. The
combination of the mechanical movement and the aimless harmonic
meandering connotes a circular, undirected motion which perfectly
corresponds with the futile detour this section accomplishes functionally. More important, theme c introduces a new semantic idea different from any of the previous ones: in this and especially other guises,
such as a related passage resembling a hurdy-gurdy tune (see Example
8a below), it connotes a static, mechanical, disorientated, alienated
world.
The unusually large number of independent motives which, as I have
mentioned, have a crucial participation in the unfolding of this movement are very strongly characterized at the three semiotic (morphological, syntactic and semantic) levels. Motive X and Y are first
embedded in a six-bar introduction, which connotes intertextually an
enigmatic broad semantic spectrum: it presents the quasi-incongruous
combination of an exotic pentatonic march rhythm (motive X plucked
58 Newcomb detects a similar quality: The transformation of experience by memory is in fact
one of the essential messages of narrative and of Mahlers Ninth. See his Narrative Archetypes,
132.
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Example 4. Mahler, Symphony no. 9, first movement, misterioso variation of theme b.
376
Pltzlich bedeutend langsamer und leise

misterioso
obs.
fl.
dim.
Eng. hn
morendo
hns
378
espress.
obs.
vln I solo
picc.
fl.
380
in the harp) with a familiar tonal Romantic horn call (Y), yet distorted
by the stopping technique, all presented within a strong heterophonic
setup (see Example 5). The staggered repetitive opening As (cello and
horn) and the ritual march-like formulas of X and Y connote the
annunciatory power of magic or ritual formulas, an effect equivalent
to a rhetorical opening such as the once upon a time of a tale, which
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Example 5.
Mahler, Symphony no. 9, first movement, introduction.
Andante comodo
hns
vla
vlc.,
hp
vln II
pizz.
must have inspired its identification by Adorno with an epic gesture

that seems to announce from the outset: Listen carefully! Now I am
going to play something the like of which you have never heard
before!59
Even the descending major second f ' e' (see Examples 2 and 3)
takes on a special semantic significance: it is in itself an enigmatic event
to which much of the semantic meaning of the movement owes tribute.
From a strictly harmonic point of view, the voice-exchange resulting
from the descent f ' e' heard concomitantly with its transposed contrapuntal inversion ab, both supported by a VI bass line, provides the
linear and harmonic paradigm that pervades the entire movement
the superimposition of tonic and dominant functions at every cadence
(see Example 6). Yet the unsettling result of these contradictory func^ ^
tions, as well as of the long postponement of the resolution of the 32
59 Adorno, Mahler: Eine musikalische Physionomik, 85 ( Jephcotts translation emended). Donald
Mitchell ascribes a similar incantatory, ritualistic function to the opening musical gesture of Der
Abschied in Das Lied von der Erde. See his Gustav Mahler: Songs and Symphonies of Life and Death
(Berkeley, CA, 1985), 355.
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Example 6.
adigm.
Page 217
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Mahler, Symphony no. 9, first movement, harmonic par-
vln 7
hn
hp
vlc.
8
D: V 6
2
I 65
3
descent linearly to 1 until the last bar of the movement (even there
appearing in a different register), connotes a longing similar to that
of the last ewig in Der Abschied from Das Lied von der Erde, which contributed to the interpretation of this movement as Mahlers
Farewell.60
Motives X and Y (used separately throughout the movement) constantly convey their semantic associations. Motive X undergoes slight
morphological transformations that temporarily change its semantic
definition: its distorted intervals at the beginning of the development
section (bars 10816) bring the connotation of trouble or disturbance,
while its ritual march quality is redefined in the retransition (bars
327ff.) through the accented repeated pounding of its first four notes,
accompanied by fortissimo trumpet signals, suggesting a funereal
quality which Mahler dutifully marked in the score Wie ein schwerer
Konduct. Motive Y, combining its signal quality with the fact that its
pitches unabashedly proclaim the tonic (its opening fourth consists of
the fifth and first scale degrees of a key), gains the semantic connotations of victorious call, achievement, arrival, which appropriately
are always coupled with its syntactic function of securing every single
arrival at a new key.
The recognizable (yet malleable) morphological shapes of motives
M and W (in Example 3) give each a denotative identity but, most
important, the shared secondary parameters of the motives (trumpet
or horn timbre, strong syncopated rhythmic outline) trigger semantic
connotations associated in the context of post-Wagnerian rhetoric with
some versions of trumpet calls or horn signals. The signal connotations
coupled with the specific harmonic functions participate in the semantic functioning of each motive. Moreover, most of the time the two
60 For a detailed consideration of the conditions that entered into the formation of what I call
the farewell myth of Mahlers Ninth Symphony, see my The Farewell Story of Mahlers Ninth
Symphony, 19th Century Music, 20 (19967), 14466.
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motives M and W work as a pair, one following the other, and in tandem
have the function of pushing forward or leading to other events.
What I have done so far is to isolate the events of the story from the
discourse, just as if they existed prior to and independently of narrative presentation. In a blunt simplification, we could enumerate the
components of this movements musical story, that is, the events
which the discourse unfolds (or recounts): a complex ritualistic
announcement implying both Western and non-Western (thus modernistic) sonorities, yet in a context that suggests reminiscence rather
than presentness; an old-fashioned Biedermeier world, contrasted with
a modernistic, stormy, disturbed world; an erring, ultimately confused
and alienated world; and numerous signals (intertextually related to
Romantic symbols) leading from one world to another.
It is this strong semantic and functional definition of materials in
Mahler that is responsible to a great extent for rendering them closer
to the quality of events in a narrative and thus for what we perceive
as the narrative quality of his music in general. For this definition
renders Mahlers materials (as opposed to Beethovens) compatible
with two important characteristics of narrative events: an event which
is individualized will contribute more to narrativity than one which is
not, and narrativity is a function of the discreteness and specificity of
the (sequence of) events presented.61 Thus, the more numerous basic
materials in Mahler by comparison with Beethoven, the diversity of
themes and motives and their syntactic and semantic autonomy, as well
as the heterogeneous juxtaposition of the many worlds invoked (as
opposed to the single world in the Pastoral), reinforce the degree of
narrativity in Mahler.
To be sure, there is an essential difference between musical and
verbal narrative events: musical events cannot fulfil the quality of verbal
events as propositions, or, more exactly, they are missing the topiccomment structure of propositions about the world represented.62
While Mahlers music can talk about (or suggest) the idea of a Biedermeier world, it cannot make a proposition such as The Biedermeier world is powerful. This inability is probably best explained by
Jean-Jacques Nattiez, when he states that it is not within the semiological capabilities of music to link a subject to a predicate.63 This
does not prevent Mahlers materials from uttering contents and their
transformations other than the ones defined exclusively on musical
grounds, but they are closer to the types of events called by Gerald
Prince stative, that is to say, ones that constitute a state.64 Musical
materials having become signifying units with clear connotative meanings appear as presentations (or fictive retellings) of states or situations of the real world. Moreover, since each state or situation is a
61
Prince, Narratology, 149.

See ibid., 61.
63 Nattiez, Can One Speak of Narrativity in Music?, 244.
64 See Prince, Narratology, 623: Events can be defined as stative, when they constitute a state
. . ., or active, when they constitute an action. . . . The proportion of active and stative events in a
narrative is an important characteristic of that narrative.
62
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discrete, well-individualized unit, the change from one state to another

reproduces the mechanism of modification of states of affairs which
characterizes the creation of narrative events in fiction.65
The description of musical materials with all their multiple levels of
meaning, including the semantic levels, offers a solution to the objection that music cannot be narrative because it does not have meanings
as literature does: it has its own musical meanings which, hence, qualify
its materials broadly speaking as events. But even though Mahlers
materials are more likely to be perceived as events than Beethovens,
is strong semantic definition in itself a sufficient condition for narrativity? One can argue that Mozarts materials are also rich in semantic
connotations, even though it might be more difficult to become fully
aware of them because we are so removed from the topics of his time.
Here is where the literary notion of discourse may help elucidate why,
despite possibly similarly rich semantic definitions of musical events,
Classical and Romantic styles might differ drastically in terms of their
narrativity.
DISCOURSE
Let us recall that the most general definition of discourse given by

literary critics is the expression, the means by which the content [the
story] is communicated or the verbal representation [of these
events] in the act of telling.66 In the discourse, we are moving along
the horizontal, temporal, syntagmatic unfolding of the multi-levelled
events abstracted in the story. Theories of narrative discourse, such as
Genettes, show not only that the events of the story are carriers of
narrative meanings, but also that the discursive strategies in themselves
produce levels of meaning. The way in which events are embedded
within the discourse (many or few, occurring quickly or slowly one after
another, or with gaps in between) will articulate a faster- or slowermoving narrative, a greater or smaller degree of suspense, and so on,
and thus will provide narrative means of signification that would
usually not be noticed by other kinds of stylistic analysis. It is not difficult to conceive that the strategy chosen by a writer of a novel deciding
how the events will follow one another and, therefore, what ultimate
shape the narration will take is in many ways similar to the strategy of
a composer deciding in which temporal order to use the thematic
materials, how many times and according to which general plan.67
65 According to Gerald Princes A Dictionary of Narratology, there are two types of narrative statements with which the discourse states the story, corresponding to the stative and active events:
stasis statements and process statements (pp. 77, 90).
66 Chatman, Story and Discourse, 19, and, for example, Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction, 3.
Other definitions include: the discursive presentation or narration of events (Culler, The Pursuit
of Signs, 170); the symbolic presentation of a sequence of events connected by subject matter and
related by time and a text which refers, or seems to refer, to some set of events outside itself
(Robert Scholes, Afterthoughts, On Narrative, ed. Mitchell, 2008 (p. 205)); and the representation of at least two real or fictive events or situations in a time sequence, neither of which presupposes or entails the other (Prince, Narratology, 4).
67 I will deal later with the claim that the causality and/or chronology linking the events of
the story in a literary narrative is lacking in music.
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While a composers strategy in a highly conventionalized system such

as tonality during the Classical period is to a large degree predetermined (cf. Meyers script and my Beethoven example), a late-Romantic composer like Mahler is more likely to present unusual, unexpected
discursive narrative techniques to give direction and finality to a
piece. Not only the nature of the events, but also the musical discourse
itself becomes toward the end of the nineteenth century closer to
narrative or, as Subotnik has put it, closer to the linguistic ideals of
meaning.
But what discursive characteristics make one narrative stronger than
another? According to Gerald Prince, the principles that give a passage
a higher degree of narrativity than another include: more numerous
events, the coexistence of several time sequences (or the impression of
time changes), the presence of conflict, a perceived complete structure
with a beginning-middle-end sequence, more discrete fundamental
specific states, and so on.68 A comparison between Beethoven and
Mahler will, again, illustrate how the differences between their discursive techniques contribute to a higher or lesser degree of narrativity.
Discursive syntax and functions
In Beethoven the thematic materials are, as we have seen, reduced to
two basic themes, which appear in their complete form only a few
times: theme 1 at bars 1 and 29 in the exposition and at bars 279 (with
an interpolation) and 312 in the recapitulation; and theme 2 at bar 67
in the exposition and at bar 346 in the recapitulation (see Table 1
above). When they recur, they are morphologically almost unchanged.
Thus, whatever the semantic definition these events might have (theme
1 is dance-like, pastoral, theme 2 lyrical), their discursive embedding
does not bring many additional semantic dimensions, since there are
no transformations of these events from one state to another, and they
are not set in any changed or conflict-ridden situations. The rest of the
movement is built on the smaller syntactic cells belonging to the
themes, which are set in motion through intensive repetition within the
clear large-scale structure of the movement. Under the discursive strategy of repetition (developmental variation), modified only through
occasional changes in the secondary parameters (dynamics, texture,
instrumentation), the cells do not change their semantic definition,
and therefore the major signifying events consist of articulation points
through tonal arrivals at carefully prepared (expected) new key areas.
(For the following overall formal considerations, see Table 1.)
For example, the transition (bars 5466) is entirely based on transposed successions of cell a leading tonally from the tonic F to the dominant C major; the beginning of the development section (bars 13950)
consists first of sequences of cells ab modulating from the dominantseventh chord C7, to V7 of IV (F7), which then resolves and settles in IV
68
Prince, Narratology, 145ff.
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(B major) at bar 151, where the entire following section of 24 bars is

based on insistent repetitions of a motive reiterating the rhythmic
formula of motive c. Even the larger-scale unfolding of the development section is fashioned according to several almost identical cycles,
reproducing the same idea of discursive repetition from the lower level
of the motive to the larger level of sections, sequencing the same repetitive phrases of motive c from B major (bars 15162) to D major (bars
16390), restarting the cycle from ab in G major (191208), c in G and
then in E major (20936) and then again from the beginning in A
major (237ff.), until the retransition at bar 243, where finally the thematic materials change to motive f. Indeed, the principle of quasimechanical repetition (which is an element of discourse) plays an
important semantic role in reinforcing some of the connotations that
the thematic materials themselves carried: through the insistent discursive repetition the playful, naive, mindless pastoral content is gradually supplemented here by a maniacal frenzy leading close to
intoxication. Yet, despite this detour, there is no drastic change of
semantic field, as the role of cell c remains mainly syntactic. Thus,
because of the scarcity of events and their lack of contrast or unexpected dramatic emplotting, the general ideas of the movement do not
form a plot of semantic (referential) changes of events, characters or
transformations of moods but, rather, a syntactic plot in which the
motivic structure through developing variations is made meaningful
within the traditional tonal plot of a Classical sonata-form design, and
is subordinated to only one general idea or topic, the pastoral. To
basic materials that have mostly a syntactic (and not semantic) relationship corresponds a musical discourse whose signification manifests
itself mainly at the level of musical syntax, and thus has a weaker degree
of narrativity.69
Do Mahlers musical discursive means (see Table 2) have a higher
degree of narrativity?70 Syntactically, at the largest scale, the apparent
three-part sonata-form mould intersects with the varied appearances of
theme a (in its original key, D major) followed sooner or later by theme
b, a pattern which engenders five large waves of free strophic variations.
This is coupled with the purely musical tonal structure, which comprises two large-scale processes: the returns of D major together with
the a refrain; and getting further and further away from the tonic by
thirds (to B , the second key area, G and B major) until coming back
to it in the recapitulation. As an immediate consequence, instead of a
69 I do not mean to say that Beethovens movement lacks expressivity, or that the various
sections of the development do not bring in various moods and emotions. It is just that in terms
of what the materials are about, the referentiality to the outside world is reduced to a very few
references. In Subotniks terms, this movement presents a universe closer to the abstractly logical
. . . ideal of meaning.
70 Both Nattiez and Abbate support the idea of music miming or imitating narrative, rather
than being one. See, for example, Abbate, Unsung Voices, 27, and Nattiez, Can One Speak of
Narrativity in Music?, 257. I, however, think that texts are not narratives but, rather, may have
and/or project narrative qualities or characteristics, and in this respect music is not that
different.
MW
aNarrative
strophes
B
(th. 3?)
64
wandering
reflections
54
strophe II
th. 1
function: N = nucleus section; C = catalyser section; S = static section.
strophe I
EXPOSITION
th. 1
th. 2
Sonata
Form
Intro.
key
47
V/B B /g6
triumph
MYMW Y
92
th. 2?
B
80
Intro.
fragmentation,
distortion
108
B
C7
hurdyregaining
gurdy
forces
alienation
174
strophe III
DEVELOPMENT
148 160
V/G
184
V/E
196
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narrative
S
function
(discourse)a
XY
ritualistic, old times,

expressionist victorious
exotic
recollection angst
calls
nostalgia
27
narrative
content
(story)
motives
themes
9, FIRST MOVEMENT: OVERALL MULTI-LEVELLED FORMAL VIEW
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MAHLER, SYMPHONY NO.
TABLE 2
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W/a/b
234
d7
WY
285
MW
295
308
strophe IV (no b)
V/D Dd D V/E B
b
V/B B V/B
climax impasse,
disintegration
279
269
a
347
c
365
Intro./
retrans.
B
strophe V
398
(S)
angst,
tamed
Brahms signals
372
RECAPITULATION
th. 1
(th. 3?)
th. 2
distortion, old times more

gradual
assured
restoration
short
interlude
314
V/D
MW
408
434
disintegration
lingering
remnants,
disintegration
454
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impasse,
passionate energy,
disintegration
then slow
crumbling,
crawling
211
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TABLE 2 continued
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typically musical tripartite structure, the movement appears as a looser

concatenation of many episodes, some launched by the remnants of
the sonata-form rhetoric (e.g. bar 80, the final establishment of the
second key area, B major; bar 108, the beginning of the development;
and bar 347, the beginning of the recapitulation), some instigated by
the five attempts to reinstate the initial Biedermeier world of theme a,
and some leading from the sonata-form pointers to the arrivals of a (see
Table 2). Not only does each of these episodes invoke different worlds
according to the materials of which it consists, but also each of these
worlds (or situations) undergoes transformations each time it appears,
thus gaining additional layers of connotations.71
Unusual in this discursive organization is its episodic nature, which
loosens the syntax and the schematic rhetoric of sonata form. Moreover, the irregular, non-strict returns of the a materials introduce an
organization and type of discourse that is normally associated not with
symphonic forms but, rather, with song or, on a larger scale, with
epic.72 As in these and other paratactic genres such as nursery rhymes
and folksongs, the fixed elements of the recurrent materials in this discursive structure allow between them an almost infinitely expandable
and contractible number [of events] in which the central [events]
may be omitted or rearranged without affecting the thematic coherence of the whole.73 Here, at the intersection of the purely musicalsyntactical processes with the connoted concepts originates the
multi-levelled discourse that enforces the musics narrativity.
Though the return of the materials five times gives a sense of insistent repetition, they are varied every time and, unlike the short cells
repeated one after another in Beethoven, they convey the idea of different time-frames and transformations. Moreover, the varied returns
gain a sense of invocation, which works together with the improvisatory, oral-tradition quality of theme a and with the past-orientated
connotations of the materials, suggesting the pastness of events
recounted, hence supplying the distancing and objectification characteristic of narrative genres.
Yet the strong sense of invocation of the old world by the returns of
the refrain a is strikingly at odds with their tonal function, for the
recurrence itself represents not tension, but the relaxation phase of the
tonal motion.74 Therefore, the main tonal significative processes
71 Unlike Adorno and Newcomb, who see the themes and their transformations as characters
in a novel, as beings that are constantly evolving and yet constantly identifiable with themselves,
. . . they shrink, expand, even grow old (quoted from Adorno in Newcomb, Narrative Archetypes, 119), I find that the personification and anthropomorphization of the themes stretches
too far the narrative impulse, as the analogy is too general and human behaviour could then be
extended to any themes. I feel that my concept of worlds is more concretely grounded in the
semantic connotations of the materials themselves, and can thus more easily be historically and
intersubjectively justified.
72 The same union between remnants of older forms (strophic variation, sonata form) and an
irregular form (the combination of strict and free, as Donald Mitchell calls it) is active in Der
Abschied. See Mitchell, Gustav Mahler, 344ff.
73 Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago, IL, and London,
1968), 99.
74 Leonard Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago, IL, and London, 1956), 151.
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coincide not necessarily with these returns but, on the contrary, with
the episodes between the returns, which play a more active role in the
discourse than the returns themselves. In other words, there is a discrepancy between the structural time outlined according to musical
laws and the narrative time outlined by the semantic plot within which
the materials as events are inscribed. Here enter into play the differentiated functions that themes and motives assume, and an interesting
crossing takes place between on one hand the epic structure and on
the other the behaviour and functioning of the musical events, which
act in ways similar to events in narrative fiction or to functions, as
identified by Roland Barthes.75 This fusion is closest to the genre of
epic narrative poem, in which a story is told in verse, not in prose
and the rhythms of the verse are associated with magic effectiveness,
but the content corresponds with that of prototypical stories.76
The thematic and tonal returns of the a and b thematic complexes
bring relaxation and stability. They act as events which orientate the listener, very much in the sense of what Barthes calls in literary narrative
the nuclei or cardinal functions. Since these nuclei a and b inaugurate and conclude an uncertainty, they are the hinges of the narrative, while in terms of the epic tradition they play the role of
incantation. On the other hand, creating the forward momentum
between these returns are the autonomous motives X, Y, M and W
(shown in Example 3 above). As mentioned earlier, these motives
behave as independent actions. Motive Y, for example, because of its
dominant-tonic melodic and harmonic outline, enhanced by the
semantic connotations of a victorious call, confirms important tonal
arrivals in the movement (D major, bar 47; B major, bar 83; G major,
bar 187; and B major, bar 285; and D major again in the recapitulation
(bars 41416)), not all of which would be structurally equal in musical
terms.77 Motives M and W, because of their rhythm and the harmony
they outline, connote decisiveness or positive action. Hence they function as elements that push forward or lead to other events, in a
similar way to the narrative units identified by Barthes in literary narratives as catalysers which fill in the narrative space separating the
hinge functions, accelerate, delay, give fresh impetus to the discourse,
summarize, anticipate and sometimes even lead astray.78
An additional subplot is outlined by the coupled motives M and W.
Since each can outline either dominant or tonic functions, the order
75
See Barthes, Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives, 937.

See Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger (Princeton, NJ, 1974), 542.
77 Mahler seems to have been thoroughly aware of this potential of motive Y from the earliest
stages of conception. The early orchestral draft of the symphony (probably finished on 2
September 1909) shows the Y motive used throughout the movement precisely with this function
and only subsequently added to the introduction as an afterthought.
78 Barthes, Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives, 95. Shlomit Rimmon-Kenan
calls these two types of events kernels and catalysts (Narrative Fiction, 16), while Seymour
Chatman calls the second type satellites (Story and Discourse, 53).
76
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and thus the overall expression of this sequence actually changes

depending on the tonal logic of the respective situation. Motive M twice
appears in its variant form M (see Example 3 above), which is a line
descending stepwise and outlining tonic harmony, whereas W follows
as a dominant preparing the return of theme a in the tonic. At their
first appearance as a conclusion to the second key area (bars 3947),
where they are coupled in the order MW, the sequence is not very
strong. Here the signal connotation of M is hardly noticeable, and it
is only W that provides the trumpet call or victorious announcement
connotations which render more effective the arrival of a and the
return to the tonic in bar 47. The same versions of the motives in this
order appear only once more in the movement, appropriately in the
corresponding place at the end of the recapitulation (bars 40814), but
this time both on a tonic pedal with a closing, yet not very dramatic,
effect. In both cases, the semantic functioning is perfectly adjusted to
support the respective discursive situation: the leading-to connotations are minimized, since in neither case (preparation for the repeat
of the first theme in the exposition, and recapitulation) is a strong
move rhetorically necessary. Throughout the development section,
however, the typical harmonic function of M is as a dominant preparation resolving to the dominant (iiV), preceding W, which becomes
the tonic resolution of the respective dominant (see, for example, bars
295300, where the progression occurs in B major). Such a rich,
directed harmonic activity coupled with the strongly individualized
connotations (victorious horn signals, fulfilment) maximizes the
semantic functioning of the motives as part of the discourse. The
motives are not simple syntactic fragments like Beethovens but, rather,
they fulfil specific narrative functions and determine in which direction the action and subsequent unfolding of events will go, adding a
semantic discursive (syntagmatic) level to the connotations already
existent in each event.
Gestural connotations
Another technique which increases the narrativity of Mahlers piece is
the way in which the looser syntactic tonal plot is also shattered, undermined and ultimately subordinated to other semantic processes resulting from musical discursive processes that invoke more universal (thus
semantic) concepts. Important in breaking the autonomy of a specifically musical discourse and in bringing it closer to the more concrete
or linguistic narrativity of the verbal medium are what I call gestural
connotations. The gestures themselves, homologous to structures or
processes from other domains of reality, often realized musically
through secondary parameters, explicitly signify at the connotative
level processes of accumulation, velocity, dissolution, disorientation,
etc., thus replacing the tonal goal-orientated plots of say, Beethovens
Pastoral. Added to the syntagmatic narrative plot of the movement
and most often combined with the semantic import of the materials,
such gestural connotations overshadow the tonal plot, accounting for
Subotniks series of analogous structures, what seem to be other,
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autonomous layers of meaning. The following examples will illustrate

these points (see again Example 2 and Table 2).
First, in the very relationship between the two main themes of the
sonata form, a and b, the thematic conflict results from the opposite
semantic connotations of the themes and not, as might be expected,
from a tonal conflict between them. At its first arrival, in bar 29, theme
b is articulated not by a tonal change but, rather, by a change of mode
from D major to D minor. The main contrast, then, is provided not by
the tonal polarity inherent in the tonal dynamics of a sonata form, but
rather by the semantic contrast between the themes (two worlds or
states juxtaposed and setting up a conflict), one which, however,
unifies them as two opposite sides of the same coin, as two components
of the same strophe (see Example 7a).
The first move away from the D tonic occurs to B major at bar 54,
through an unprepared, elided juxtaposition of D and B major (operated through the unexpected resolution of the dominant-seventh
chord of D major to B 6), and is thematically articulated not by the
second theme, but by theme c (see Example 2). In light of the lack of
tonal contrast between themes a and b at their first appearance, one
might expect such a turn to lead finally into the second theme, b,
especially because the ornamented descending second here recalls the
transition to the theme b materials at bars 256. Moving to a different
theme, c, creates suspense, as the c materials are closely related to a;
yet the semantic and gestural import of theme c is different, so that,
grounded by the new tonal arrival at B , it sounds as if this could be the
real second theme. To say the least, the impact of the sudden tonal
and thematic juxtaposition is striking and confusing: the introduction
of an unexpected world, grounded in an unprepared tonal soil, creates
yet another enigmatic subplot in this movement.
The enigma seems to be dispelling at bars 601, when c starts to
wander around in aimless gestures and then ultimately returns to a and
to D major. Retrospectively we begin to realize that this whole section
was parenthetical, with the B major key of the c materials subsidiary to
the prevailing D major harmony. So the semantic change, even though
short, introduces an additional new world or narrative event which
shatters the impact of the new key and prevents it from getting established. The consequences of this contamination materialize soon
thereafter as yet another new unexpected event arises: the return of a
in D major is now very short and already mixed with elements of c; and
soon afterwards it gradually dies away. This prompts yet another retrospective reconsideration of the role of c and of the short return of a,
both of which, while strongly eventful semantically, are at the same time
heard as a detour in a larger syntactic tonal process of moving toward
B major that started with c, returned briefly to a and finally establishes
B at bar 80 with the b materials. The potentially strong teleological
move to the contrasting key area of the exposition is extremely weakened by all the semantic and gestural changes mentioned. Semantic,
cognitive events are in constant conflict with the purely musical tonal
events, endowing the musical discourse with the distantiation required
for its perception as narrative.
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Example 7a. Mahler, Symphony no. 9, first movement, first transition

to and statement of theme b.
23
cl.
vln I
vln II
6
vla
vlc.,
cb.
bn, hn
26
Griffbrett
hn
Griffbrett
pizz.
28
theme b
3
6
vlc. 3
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Example 7a continued
31
dim.
G-Saite
cresc.
cresc.
cresc.
dim.
cresc.
vlc. div.
3
3
dim.
cresc.
34
cresc. molto
At the second appearance of the ab pair, theme b finally brings at bar

80 the definitive tonal move to B major, and therefore, according to
the sonata-form structure, this point is the most important tonal articulation of the exposition, corresponding to the beginning of the second
key area (see Example 7b). Yet a series of small events which in traditional analysis would count as secondary goes against the consideration of this tonal move as structurally determinative. Unlike the
surprising sudden tonal juxtaposition by which theme c first introduced B as a parenthetical key area enclosed within D major, this
arrival of the b materials and of the key of B major at bar 80 is slowly
prepared by gradually introducing B elements within a dissipating
texture that ultimately reduces the material of theme a to just one line
the descending second d c (bars 789). Also owing to the fact that
theme b outlines melodically the same pitches as the first time (the
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augmented chord with major seventh, a c ' f'g ', sounded just as dissonant in D minor as it does in B major), the local progression to B
is tonally so weak that the arrival of theme b is heard as hardly more
important than the first time. Undoubtedly, B and theme b are felt as
a new start, as a moment of regaining energy, not because of the new
B major key (whose components have already been heard in the
previous bars), but mostly because all these small events together
outline a change in gestural connotations from the process of dying
away preceding b to the gestural process of upward striving outlined
Example 7b. Mahler, Symphony no. 9, first movement, second transition to and statement of theme b.
74
fls., hn
fls.
ww.,
brass
hn
vlns
I, II
3
6
cresc.
6
6
vla,
vlc.
3
cresc.
bns,
cb.
cresc.
77
pizz.
bns
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Example 7b continued
80
Etwas frischer
theme b
ob., cl.
vln I
vlc., hp
dim.
arco
pizz.
bns, cb.
by b itself. The weak tonal impact is subordinated to the gestural connotations and to the semantic change in material, yet the two contrasting
worlds of a and b are still juxtaposed again: through musical means that
connote gesturally with the concreteness of language, a narrative statement is being made (or told) about the inability of tonality to be selfsufficient in Mahlers time, and the problematic continuum within
which the two contrasting worlds of the themes coexist. In these
respects this statement is historically grounded. An even broader connotative meaning can be inferred from the analogy of the concreteness
of such processes with life or organic processes gradual dissipation to
nothingness followed by gradual rising from nothingness may conjure
up numerous universal fictional plots.
The discourse made significant through gestural and semantic connotations is similarly crucial for the narrating quality of the beginning of
the development section (bars 108ff.). In the context of a static
harmony (a G /B pedal moving to G/B ) and a rarefied texture, the
fragmented motivic materials heard (the tolling opening rhythm in
octaves, motive X distorted, now outlining an augmented fourth, small
segments of themes c and b, and a distorted version of W), precisely
because they do not fulfil an active tonal role, draw attention to themselves as unique moments of narrative working out. The signifying
power of the passage lies in its telling or re-presenting through the
musical medium the states of disorientation, distortion and alienation.
After this long static section which inaugurates the development, these
ideas culminate in the next passage, bars 12947 (see Example 8a).
In a first subsection of this passage (bars 12935), a variant of the
erring theme c is superimposed with several melodic lines, each
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Example 8a. Mahler, Symphony no. 9, first movement, theme c transformed to connote a hurdy-gurdy tune.
Pltzlich sehr mig und zurckhaltend
fl.
129
ww.,
brass
(nicht eilen)
mit Dmpfer
vlc.
sempre
hp,
cb.
dim.
133
mit Dmpfer
hns
morendo
directed towards a different melodic goal whose implication is not fulfilled: the cello melody suggests B major, the X motive in the bass F
major (possibly as V of B ), and the melodic dissonance d"' c "' shrieking in the flutes does not seem to belong. Though these lines eventually converge towards D minor by bar 134, in their meanderings they
create dissonances which result in a general effect of out-of-tuneness.
The tonal action stops, and the sparse texture, combined with the
mechanically repetitive, monotonous rhythmic pattern of motive X in
the bass, connotes a hurdy-gurdy or barrel-organ type of music which,
at least since Schuberts Der Leiermann, is conventionally associated with
a semantic world of alienation, of strangeness, or even of desolation
and emptiness. Not insignificantly, Mahler sets the passage apart with
the indication Pltzlich sehr mig und zurckhaltend (suddenly
very moderate and held back, distant), thus highlighting its evocative
power. In this case the semantic connotations of the gestures are of a
generic intertextual order it is the connotation of hurdy-gurdy tunes
that contributes most to the discursive narrative power of this event.
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The second part of the passage is similarly endowed with an unusual

discursive meaning, but of a different kind: to replace the missing tonal
function of a dominant it relies on more physical, gestural connotations (see Example 8b). Over a tonic D minor pedal provided by a
variant of motive X in the harp and another variant in diminution and
tremolo in the cello, the violin line reaches in every bar a new upper
semitone, falling back down every time, until it very slowly and gradually arrives in bar 147 at the long desired f ', at which it remains. (It is
only in this bar that f ' is confirmed as the final melodic arrival,
Example 8b. Mahler, Symphony no. 9, first movement, gestural
process leading to arrival of theme a.
136
vla
vlns
I, II
vla
6
vln II
vlc.
sempre marcato
hp
139
142
Noch etwas zgernd, allmhlich bergehen zu
6
6
(vla, vlc. doubling)
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145
148
theme a
cls., bns
aber ausdrucksvoll
because once reached it is no longer denied.) Since the D minor pedal

in the bass does not change when the final goal, D major, is reached,
the syntactic tonal directional function is minimized and replaced by
the gestural directional force of the melodic line, reinforced by its
strong homologous connotations. Thus the passage stands out, more
than anything else, as a narrative episode which recounts the struggle
of the chromatically crawling melodic lines to reach a final goal.
As shown in Table 2, reliance on such gestural connotations is an
important part of Mahlers discourse. The gestural processes of disintegration, dissolution or crumbling are exploited throughout the movement, but particularly in the development section, to solve (or get out
of) impossible tonal situations. Again, such gestural homologies enable
listeners to hear the music as a discourse telling about such events or
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actions. The constant surprise at the sudden interruptions and turns the
discourse might take in each episode creates a meaningful unfolding of
successive happenings mimicking, if not the articulate propositions that
verbal discourse can sustain, at least a sense of the consequential, purposeful entangling of the worlds represented by the musical materials.
Temporal discursive processes
Grard Genette has defined and examined how temporal processes
such as duration, frequency, speed and order of events within the structure of discourse also produce narrative meanings.79 Applying his
insights into literary narrative discursive techniques to musical discourse reveals that such temporal manipulations also play a crucial role
in distinguishing higher or lower levels of narrativity in music. Unlike
in literary discourse, however, the tension in music can be said to exist
either between the discourse as presented in the musical text and an
ideal temporal discursive scheme (which could consist of older formal
models, generic schemes or an expected expressive pattern), or
between temporal parameters set in one way at the beginning of the
piece, and then transformed, distorted or played against throughout
the piece. The study of those temporal factors unveils processes that
are not usually discussed in traditional musical analysis (see Tables 1
and 2).
In Beethovens plot, the events generally follow the expected duration, frequency, speed and order associated with the scheme of sonata
form. Theme 1 and the first key area last for 54 bars; the transition is
short (bars 5466); theme 2 follows and establishes the dominant as
the second key area until the end of the exposition at bar 138. The
development lasts for 141 bars (bars 139278), and the recapitulation
(starting at bar 279) keeps intact the temporal parameters of events
from the exposition until the beginning of what we would call the coda,
at bar 414. Here, the insertion of an additional extension a detour to
theme 1 in the key of the subdominant B major brings a last burst
of energy, but again the discursive function of this change in duration
and frequency is best understood as a syntactic tonal emphasis leading
to the return of the tonic and to the final closing section, rather than
as an agglomeration of events producing a narrative climax. By examining Genettes temporal dimensions, we can observe that for most of the
movement the tensions between the equivalents of the two different
time orders are minimal, as the discourse unfolds according to a relatively uniform pace and with rather predictable thematic moves. In
other words, there is no conflict between the expected chronological
structural, syntactic sequence of events and the discourse cycles, or
between the story time and discourse time. The only occasions in
Beethoven when the degree of narrativity increases are when the discourse cycles do not correspond to the musical structural cycles: as
noted earlier, the unexpected unusual excessive repetitions during the
79
See Genette, Narrative Discourse, 33160.
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development section (frequency of events and their duration) generate discursive semantic meanings which add nuanced layers of dance
frenzy to the prevailing pastoral topic. But other than that, lack of
semantic conflict between the two structuring times contributes to the
lower level of narrativity in the Beethoven example.
In Mahler the durational and temporal discursive procedures are
more complex. Part of the duration ploy of Mahlers movement is an
increasing separation between sections a and b. This process begins
with the first presentation of a and b as two juxtaposed sections, and
continues with a gradual increase in the time-span between them. The
culmination of this process coincides with the climax of the movement
in the fourth strophe, where the section initiated by the a materials
occupies almost the entire duration, being continued only with the
motivic elements M, Y and W, instead of being followed by b. Finally,
the durational balance between a and b is brought back in the recapitulation. In addition to this gradual increase in separation, both the
a and b sections become shorter and shorter, as if eaten up by the
catalyser sections, which in turn become more and more active in the
delineation of the main narrative discourse. So the duration factor contributes to the shift of weight from the returns of the a and b strophes,
perceived as the main or stable materials of the piece, to the catalyser sections, which in fact provide the substance of the developmental
unfolding. While such processes may seem abstract in music, the
tension between the durational relationship suggested initially between
the two semantically defined worlds a and b and its subsequent
infringements and restabilization creates an additional discursive temporal semantic layer in the modification of events.
The frequency of events also contributes to the narrative discourse.
While in literature, as Genette shows, the narrative quality depends on
the differences between the number of times an event occurs in the
story and in the discourse, here the frequency of events occurring in
the musical discourse can be seen in tension with the other possibilities/probabilities of frequency that could have resulted according
to traditional schemes. The highest frequency of events in this case
of the catalyser motives in the climactic section (bars 279308) simulates the more concrete accumulation of events that produces narrative tension in literature, even though here it is more the gestural and
connotational semantic content than concrete facts that contributes to
this culminating function, which traditionally would have relied more
on tonal syntax. In general, Mahlers use of variable tempos, and thus
the great number of pauses, accelerations and decelerations, constantly
affects the unfolding of events in the freedom of their speed, which
renders the discourse more gestural, connotative of non-musical, more
universal concepts.
Finally, the flow of the musical discourse also depends upon the
order of events. Instead of an arguably causal or chronological order
of events in the story, the tension in music is between the potential
traditional ordering expected from the functioning of events in a firstmovement sonata form and the rules established by the specific events
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and discourse of this particular piece.80 The alternation between nuclei

and catalyser sections is ruled by the local normative requirements of
order, which can be either chronological (as set up at their first appearance) or logical (dictated by musical or more general principles of
rhetoric). Chronologically, the nuclei a and b as hinge sections must
alternate; but, logically, each must be followed by a catalyser propulsive
section so that the music can move forward. These requirements are
followed most thoroughly in the development section, where in
addition the static-type sections are subject to chronological and logical
requirements too: each catalyser section following theme b disintegrates into a static section which precedes and prepares the arrival of
a. This ordering highlights the disjunction between the naive worlds
of the catalyser signals and the sentimental worlds of themes a and b.
The exceptions to the potential, expected temporal order of a virtual
story time can be seen as parallel to what Genette calls anachronies
all forms of discordance between the two temporal orders of story
and narrative.81 The fact that there are two moves to B in the exposition (at bars 54 and 80) contradicts the normal story of a sonata form,
where usually the move to the second key area coincides with the
strongest move away from the tonic. The first sudden and striking
arrival of B at bar 54 with theme c introduces a static, parenthetical
section instead of a nucleus, while the second arrival of B at bar 80,
which is associated with a stable nucleus (theme b), is tonally weaker.
This discordance between the two temporal orders creates a discursive
suspense, dispelled only as the logical order is illusorily re-established
at bar 83: illusorily, because the rift is in fact not solved, but rather
displaced. When theme b arrives, it is immediately taken over by a
version of the catalyser W, and thus B , the new key, is established
strongly, not by the expected second theme, but by one of the active
motives whose function replaces that held traditionally by the themes.
A subtle connection underscores this interplay: the major sixth f'd"
which introduced B major the first time at bar 54 becomes now the
head of the W motive, as if it continued and finally accomplished something that was attempted, but not achieved, the first time by the intrusive theme c. As in a novel, the thread of the plot is left hanging for a
while, only to be retrospectively turned in a different direction.
Order at a lower motivic structural level is also used by Mahler
semantically, as a sign of thematic resolution or plot dnouement.
Adding yet another level of narrative, it appears in retrospect that one
of the processes being worked out in the development and resolved in
the recapitulation is the re-alignment of motives M and W in the right
chronological order, established at their first appearance, and in the
right key. During the development, this chronological succession of
80 Fred Maus seems to make a similar point when he writes: [Jonathan] Kramers gestural-time,
the order that can be reconstructed from the qualities of musical actions, amounts to ordering in
a story; piece-time is ordering in the discourse. See Maus, Music as Narrative, 31. He is referring
to the terms employed by Jonathan Kramer in his article Multiple and Non-Linear Time in
Beethovens Opus 135, Perspectives of New Music, 11 (1973), 12245.
81 Genette, Narrative Discourse, 40.
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motives MW is constantly undermined, and thus constitutes a sign that

the story is not yet finished. As illustrated in Examples 9ab, the final
reconciliation of the motives has been postponed by a long detour of a
plot that directly connects bar 196 (a first aborted resolution) with bar
295.
Example 9a (bars 196203 of the development section) shows one of
the climaxes based on motive M. That climax is aborted, as M resolves
neither motivically to its right continuation motive W nor tonally
to E , the locally implied tonal centre to which the movement
constantly alludes. Instead, it disintegrates in a gesture which is the
Example 9a. Mahler, Symphony no. 9, first movement, failed resolution of motive M to W (in E major).
M
196
vln I
vln II
vla
vlc.
199
dissolution
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Example 9a continued
201
brass, lower ww.
(dissolution)
203
D mi.
dissolution continued
brass, lower ww.
cb. only
equivalent of a discursive collapse, of a catastrophe, which provides a

postponement of the action. The interrupted sequence of events picks
up again some 90 bars later in the following climax (Example 9b, bars
293300), where it provides a momentary resolution, as M is followed
by the right motivic continuation into motive W, to the right local
key, here B major. But the resolution is illusory in so far as we are still
in the wrong key, B major. It is the discourse, through gestural connotations, which signals that the ordering resolution is tonally anomalous.
Motive M, asserting even further its function as a catalyser to lead
astray, atypically makes one more attempt to resolve in the wrong key,
B major, but this leads to its own destruction, since another resolution
in B major would have been tonally fatal for the movement. The only
way out of B major is the gestural disintegration of M into the
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introductory passage which will bring back D major and the recapitulation, via the introduction transformed into a funeral march. It is only
with the final alignment of the motivic sequence MW, also in the right
key, D major (recapitulation, bars 40813), that the complete resolution of the motivic order plot is achieved.
In a traditional tonal and formal analysis, the safe return to the home
key and the recapitulation of the materials are sure signs of closure. Yet
here we are far away from the safe unproblematic closure of the Pastoral Symphony, as the returning events are for a last time submitted
to such powerful discursive manipulations that the entire concept of
closure is undermined. The purely musical rules are transgressed at all
Example 9b. Mahler, Symphony no. 9, first movement, resolution of
motive M to W (in B major).
293
fl.
vlns
I, II
3
vla,
vlc.
cb.,
hns,
lower
ww.
M
295
cls., trp.
+ obs.
B:
vii/ii
vii 7
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297
vln I
cls.,
sempre
dim.
W
299
obs., cls., vln II
vla
cb.
pizz.
arco
levels. While the sequence ab comes back in the home key, in the right
order and at close distance, using temporal re-alignment as a sign of
resolution, as first phrase has lost its melody (it has only the
accompaniment) and, as Newcomb notices, the D major is much less
pure, as it is contaminated with F s, E s and B s.82 But the b themes
closural discursive effect is drastically affected now by what I would call
a semantic disclosure. In a last turn of events of a different kind, the
plot thickens by giving us the resolution of an enigma of which we may
or may not have been aware. The last, expanded and highly transformed, variation of theme b (bars 37690; see Example 4 above),
82
Newcomb, Narrative Archetypes, 123.
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Example 10. Comparison of Brahms, Symphony no. 1, second movement, bars 3943 (transposed from C minor to D minor), with Mahler,
Symphony no. 9, first movement, bars 3768.
Brahms
ob. 39
Mahler
fl.
ob.
376
marked conspicuously Pltzlich bedeutend langsamer und leise. Misterioso (Suddenly significantly slower and delicate. Mysterious), consists of a transparent yet free dissonant counterpoint in the winds,
which by its semantic nature resembles the type of static, non-directional, eerie, alienating passages from the family of theme c, particularly in its hurdy-gurdy version. Yet motivically and through the place
it occupies, the passage is related to theme b, the expressionistic, contorted, Brahms- and Schoenberg-like materials. Not only does this
passage fit syntactically and connect gesturally and semantically with
other similar worlds, it also manages to operate (for astute ears) as a
quasi-novelistic procedure, as an interruption decoding an enigma. On
closer examination, one detects here an actual denotation of the
Brahmsian connotations b has always had, as the passage contains a
clear quotation from the second movement of Brahmss First Symphony (see Example 10).83 The Brahmsian connotations first alluded
to become now a real pun, which in turn acts as a homage to Brahms.
The right order sequence MW which follows this interruption, as
in the exposition, has no annunciatory force because of the conjunctmotion version of motive M. This mollified version of the sequence
serves better as a sign for resolution. Yet, despite the slower tempo,
piano dynamics, and Mahlers indication sehr weich hervortretend, it
still preserves its original function as catalyser or leading to, except
that now it foreshadows the gestures of what it is announcing: the last
disintegrating version of a that has contributed to the much-discussed
farewell meaning of this movement. The endings effects of dissolution, disembodiment, falling apart (created through motivic and
83
To my knowledge, this quotation from Brahms has not previously been pointed out.
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tonal fragmentation, incompletion, thin texture, etc.) have been commonly observed. It is important, however, to point out that the mechanisms through which such qualities can be discerned involve the
morphological and syntactic transformation of the materials into
semantic units with clear meanings, that is, into narrative events whose
gestural connotations mimicking concrete phenomena from the
outside world suggest with such clarity mental concepts reducible to
the linguistic ideal of meaning that their figurations gain the status of
telling about or presenting these ideas.
But what are we to make of this ending in narrative terms? I cannot
go as far as Adorno and Newcomb in anthropomorphizing the thematic process as a character or protagonist growing old, nor would I
easily conclude, with Hayden White, that the story of this movement
(and of the symphony as a whole) is the affirmation of a desirability
of Romanticist purity over against the debilitating urgencies of
modernist corruption.84 Though both interpretations capture some of
the musical realities I have described, they both transfer the events and
actions onto an outside subject, onto an external agency that does
what the musical processes actually perform, as if music as action or
predicate needed an external agency as the subject who performs its
actions. It seems to me that there is not much in the music, as I hear
it, that justifies this appeal to external agency. The narrational knowledge is communicated, the possible story is enacted and at the same
time told, by its own materials.85 What we learn within the context of
the piece is that theme a returns slightly weakened, meshed together
with a few samplings of theme c, and that the dissonant and modernistic world of the previous appearances of theme b has its roots in
a real Brahms theme, whose even freer contrapuntal treatment shows
the intertextual legacies of the respective historical time and place. The
final return and gradual dissolution of a increase the nostalgia already
associated with theme a from the beginning, leaving it in a state of open
reflectiveness.86 What happens to these materials from the point of view
of discourse is equally important: the gestural outline of directional
diminution, or rarefied action, the temporal lingering on a with its own
structural elements disembodied, is in itself a discursive narrative procedure that Classical discourse would rarely have indulged in to end a
composition, and even then with clear signals that it is used for ironic
purposes, such as the final disintegration in Haydns Farewell Symphony.87
84 Hayden White, Commentary: Form, Reference, and Ideology in Musical Discourse, Music
and Text, ed. Scher, 288319 (p. 296); repr. as Form, Reference, and Ideology in Musical
Discourse, Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore, MD, and London, 1999), 14776
(pp. 1512). The page numbers in subsequent references refer to the first publication.
85 Ibid., 2934.
86 For a detailed discussion of the layers of meaning informing this ending, see my Is Mahlers
Music Autobiographical? A Reappraisal, Revue Mahler Review, 1 (Paris, 1987), 4763 (pp. 523,
60, and Examples 24).
87 By comparison, Schubert, who in his late Piano Sonata in B can be said to have originated
such lingering gestures, is less daring than Mahler in ending a piece with such mimetically disintegrating connotations.
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CONCLUSIONS: DEGREES OF NARRATIVITY
Throughout the above discussion I have tried to show that music, on

the basis of its distinct characteristics, may present qualities and processes that render it closer to, or farther from, the condition of narrative. Hence, to approach music with notions developed for narrative
literary theory enriches our understanding of how this music communicates meanings beyond what conventional analysis can offer.
Obviously, the point is not that music in itself constitutes a narrative in
the literary sense,88 but rather that, through its events and discourse,
it can present semblances of situations analogous to those presented in
stories. It constitutes a medium with narrative possibilities, understood
in the very general sense defined by Hayden White, as translating some
kind of knowledge into some kind of telling.89 This palpable content
suffices to constitute what White calls narrational knowledge the
kind of tacit knowledge necessary for the telling or following of
stories.90 I agree with White, up to a point, that this knowledge in
music consists in part of the projection of a possible story. I disagree
with him, however, when he states that [the] substance of [the
musical] narrative [is] without either concrete story elements or a
plot, thus assigning the content (story) of this narrative to its
[narrative] figuration itself , that is, collapsing together in music the
story and the discourse.91 I do not disagree that the concrete story
and plot are indeed missing in music. But, as we have seen, even in the
case of Beethovens Pastoral, where fewer events and fewer discursive moves render the music less narrative, there are still various
degrees of content and various degrees of discursive manipulations
that can be construed as narrative tensions by a listener aware of such
categories as characters, actions, events, conflict, development over
time, crisis, climax, denouement, and so on, and of the possible kinds
of relations among these without which storytelling and story hearing
would be inconceivable.92
This narrational knowledge is distinct from the conventional
musical knowledge gained from usual analytical methods. Furthermore, the quality of narrativity varies within different kinds of music,
according to some of the parameters discussed above. As summarized
by Gerald Prince,
the degree of narrativity of a given narrative depends partly on the extent
to which that narrative fulfills a receivers desire by representing oriented
temporal wholes (prospectively from beginning to end and retrospectively
88 Here I agree with Abbate and Nattiez that music does not constitute a narrative in the sense
of literature, but rather that it may at times mimic or create the illusion of a narrative. Yet, unlike
them, I do not see narrative as a superfluous metaphor in analysing music.
89 White, The Value of Narrativity, 1.
90 White, Commentary, 294.
91 Ibid., 293. Here White is in agreement with Nattiez, who writes: In music, connections are
situated at the level of the discourse, rather than the level of the story. See Can One Speak of
Narrativity?, 244. I disagree with both.
92 White, Commentary, 293.
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from end to beginning), involving a conflict, consisting of discrete, specific,

and positive situations and events, and meaningful in terms of a
human(ized) project and world.93
Thus, with Prince and Wendy Steiner, among others, I do not see narrativity as an either/or quality of music, but rather as a graduated spectrum within which certain texts present various degrees of narrativity.
In Steiners words,
[Narratologists] propound a syndrome of narrative characteristics, all of
which need not be in evidence for us to take a text as a narrative. One would
thus be able to speak of stronger or weaker narratives, according to the
number and selection of these characteristics in a work.94
Degrees of narrativity would also vary according to the narrative paradigms of various historical periods or genres. My comparison of
Beethoven with Mahler exemplified two of these possible cases.
But have we answered the objections against narrative in music raised
by the musicologists cited at the beginning of this study? To the objection that instrumental music does not have semantic meanings, my
article proposes that a lack of precise, propositional meanings does not
imply that musical events cannot convey informative utterances that
contain various kinds of knowledge (from personal to historical and
other). The richness of semantic connotational meanings in music has
been traditionally underestimated, and a search for those meanings
and an understanding of how they engender a stronger or weaker
narrative musical discourse is only beginning to be pursued.95
To the objection that music does not present the double-time structuring of story and discourse, I hope to have shown that aspects of
this tension do play a major role in defining the narrative qualities, or
lack of them, in a piece. Undoubtedly, in music the abstracted musical
events which potentially form the story cannot be said to have the
causal, logical or chronological sequence expected of narrative events
(for example: the mother killed the father; then and therefore she was
arrested; then and therefore the son committed suicide), and hence
do not seem to exist in an abstract story time.96 Indeed, there is no
causal, a priori necessity that the events (the themes and motives), even
as conceived prior to, and independent of, their discursive representation, should proceed in the order in which they occur in the movement this latter discursive order is the composers choice. Yet, just as
the causality of literary events abides by (or breaks) some conventional
historical paradigms, so the logic of musical thematic materials has
93
Prince, A Dictionary of Narratology, 64.

Wendy Steiner, Pictures of Romance: Form against Context in Painting and Literature (Chicago,
IL, 1988), 9. For ways of articulating the degree of narrativity, see, for example, Prince: a passage
where the signs of the narrated [the story] are more numerous than the signs of the narrating
[the discourse] should have a higher degree of narrativity than a passage where the reverse is
true (Narrativity, 146).
95 I am by no means the only one proposing that wordless music has meanings. See, among
others, the works by Treitler, Maus, Agawu, Kramer and others cited throughout this article.
96 See Abbate, Unsung Voices, 524.
94
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some causal relationships implied in the historical generic conventions under which a piece is conceived. For example, it is possible that
events of a second-theme (feminine) type could precede those of a
first-theme (masculine) type, but this would lead to a more special
narrative discursive effect than the conventional sequence.
More to the point, in both literature and music the two levels of timestructuring interact with and contradict one another, and in both the
tension between them can be more or less present, thus influencing
the genres or pieces narrative capabilities. Moreover, both literary
and musical narratives rely on a construction that Barthes considers to
be the essence of how events can be narrativized: the post hoc, ergo
propter hoc fallacy, that is, the fictitious illusion of consecutiveness
and consequence created by discourse.97 In Barthess words, the
mainspring of the narrative activity is to be traced to that very confusion between consecutiveness and consequence, what-comes-after
being read in a narrative as what-is-caused-by.98
Just as in literary narrative the sequence of events presented by the
discourse creates the illusion that what comes after is caused by what
came before, in music too we ultimately perceive a causally related
narrative ordering in the time sequence of events chosen by the composer as meaningful, according to a historical logic inherent in the
respective piece, and not necessarily dependent on an abstract preordained temporal logic dictated by the events themselves. Neither in
music nor in literature does an event a priori presuppose or entail the
other.99 Yet in both cases the confusion between consecutiveness and
consequence would not be possible without an implicit, unstated
understanding of some normative idea of causality. This is why, in
music, the more the events and the discourse of the piece contradict
an expected order and make the listener constantly wonder what unexpected situation will occur next, the more narrative the music will be.
If I am correct, these are Lawrence Kramers unusual, disruptive
rather than normative, processes and Abbates moments that can be
identified by their bizarre and disruptive effect that inform the
rhetoric of musical narrativity. Here the comparison between
Beethoven and Mahler can be reformulated: the more the sequence of
events in the discourse relies on predictable, purely musical syntactical
procedures (such as traditional tonal and formal sequences of events),
the less narrative the result will be; and, vice versa, the more the discourse relies on unexpected, semantically autonomous gestures that
depend less on the conventional musical logic of the time than on
analogies with the non-musical world, the more the listener will provide
the missing associations, and thus the more narrative the music is.
Another feature of literary narrative that poses a challenge to the
narrative potential of music is the presence of a point of view from
97 Prince, Narratology, 40, and A Dictionary of Narratology, 76. Barthess ideas appear in Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives, 98100.
98 Barthes, Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives, 98.
99 Prince, Narratology, 4.
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which the story is told (as Mieke Bal calls it, the vision through which
the elements are presented) and of a narrator (the identity of the
voice presenting that vision).100 In literary narrative the events can be
told or presented from one or another persons point of view, and by
various fictional narrators. While the switch of point of view and voice
can significantly enrich the narrative quality of a text, clearly, because
of musics lack of the exact grammatical linguistic nuances that would
distinguish between, for example, the first and third person, or reflexive and passive verbs, such distinctions of point of view are less possible.
Yet the existence of voice and point of view can be intimated to
various degrees in music through other means. First, in the absence of
grammatically pointed propositions, the voice or point of view most
generally is absorbed into the composers compositional style; that is,
the narrated world is idiosyncratically told by means of the composers
unique voice. In this respect, the voice of the narrator/composer is felt
equally strongly in both Beethoven and Mahler: both works are able to
create the illusion of speaking from their composers own point of view,
through the worlds chosen to be presented and through the particular
means of presentation. Indeed, point of view and voice change drastically between works by the same composer, and between parts of the
same work. Beethovens voice changes between, say, the Third Symphony and the Pastoral, depending on whether he wants to present a
heroic character or a scene in the countryside (and this is independent of the titles or implied programmes of the two works); and so does
Mahlers, even between the movements of the Ninth. Second, whether
the voice of the narrator is the composers own or that of an exterior
character chosen to present the story can be suggested in only a few
cases, for example through moments of self-reflexivity, such as discursive intrusions, that the composer can create. When Mahler suddenly
brings in foreign worlds such as the hurdy-gurdy music or the Brahmsian quotation, or when the discourse suddenly collapses, the composers voice as agency is, paradoxically, felt to be stronger, yet more
objectified, more distanced, than if it presented worlds to which the
composers subjectivity belonged entirely. Similarly, in the famous
reflective episode of the third movement of the Ninth, a different
voice seems to speak in the reminiscence of the first movement.
Voice can occasionally also be rendered through orchestration, and
even the topics may be said to emphasize the point of view from which
a story is rendered. But in either case, the composers voice as the narrator should not be confused with the composer himself as the object
or subject of the presentation.
Distinguishing between pieces with stronger and weaker narrative
characteristics helps us to understand better the reception history of
various works, perhaps in light of the narrative expectations of the
time. In this regard, the detailed narrative interpretation, for example,
of Beethovens Third Symphony by A. B. Marx is not surprising, given
the stronger narrative and the disruptive features of the music. And,
100
See Bal, Narratology, 143.
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similarly, the readings of Mahlers Ninth in terms of stories have been

triggered at least in part by the music, even though other historical conditions such as biographical, sociological or cultural may also have
entered into the creation of those interpretations.101 Under the narratological guidelines, Adornos 1960 formulation It is not the music
wanting to recount something, but, rather, the composer making music
[act] as if someone was narrating102 appears all the more astoundingly perspicacious.
Studying the narrative implications of music is important not only
for reception, but also, and especially, for providing another tool to
untangle the broader implications of our understanding of music in
general. In light of Herrnstein Smiths suggestions, we should retain
the involvement of both the teller and the audience in the making of
discourse, of the social transaction in which both parties must share
a motivation and interest to participate. The stories people get out of
music depend just as much on the temporal tensions within as on the
sets of interest, motives, and constraints or on the historically located
competence of the two sides involved in the communication of a
story.103 In addition, from examining the influence upon music of
various characteristics of literary genres during certain historical
periods we may refine our understanding of why and how some musical
forms or genres may convey different types of narrational knowledge
from others and, among similar forms or genres, develop more
sophisticated ways of acknowledging various degrees of narrativity.
In view of the present study, we need to adjust, for example, the
reductive view that in [Mahlers] Ninth Symphony, the form of the
first [and last] movements is defined, above all, by duality.104 For, as
we have seen, in the first movement it is precisely the presence of
numerous and heterogeneous musical materials, and of multiple kinds
of processes through which these materials interact, that confers on
this music its narrative character. Music that can be too easily reduced
to just polarities or dualities will most likely be weak in narrative qualities. That composers were aware of this even before literary theorists
formulated the conditions necessary for narrativity is demonstrated by
nineteenth-century composers of programme music who explicitly
wanted their music to tell stories, and consequently employed what we
see today as narrative musical features: multiplicity and heterogeneity of themes with strong referential or mimetic semantic connotations,
freedom from formal and tonal constraints, avoidance of straightforward, monological discourse, episodic formal construction, and
musical processes imitating non-musical gestures. All these means of
resisting structure105 were instinctively used by Liszt and Strauss to
101
See my The Farewell Story of Mahlers Ninth Symphony.

Adorno, Mahler: Eine musikalische Physionomik, 86: Nicht Musik zwar will etwas erzhlen, aber
der Komponist will Musik machen, wie sonst einer erzhlt.
103 See Herrnstein Smith, Narrative Versions, 21314.
104 Julian Johnson, The Status of the Subject in Mahlers Ninth Symphony, 19th Century Music,
18 (19945), 10820 (p. 109).
105 Kramer, Musical Narratology, 99.
102
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make their symphonic poems closer to the linguistic ideal. It is interesting, then, to see that we could have learnt some of the rules devised
by literary narrative theorists about their medium from our own
medium music; and this, in turn, testifies once again to music being
part of the cultural practices of the nineteenth century. As Samuels
notices, expanding Derridas idea of general text to musical texts will
permit us to consider music as part of all other discourses and thus
avoid the ideological closure and isolation of the musical text, while
at the same time recognizing its specificity.106 Although music might be
supplying the signifiers of an act of narration, but not necessarily the
signifiers of [concrete] narrated acts,107 further study of musical
narrative can not only significantly enrich musical analysis, but also
lead the field of narratology to broader interdisciplinary investigations.
University of British Columbia
ABSTRACT
This study presents an attempt to pin down the potential narrative qualities of
instrumental, wordless music. Comparing as case-studies two pieces in sonata
form the first movements of Beethovens Pastoral Symphony (as representative of Classical narrative possibilities) and of Mahlers Ninth Symphony (as
representative of its composers idiosyncratic treatment of those in the late
nineteenth century) I propose a narrative analysis of their musical features,
applying the notions of story, discourse and other concepts from the literary theory of, for example, Genette, Prince and Barthes. An analysis at three
semiotic levels (morphological, syntactic and semantic), corresponding to
denotative/connotative levels of meaning, shows that Mahlers materials
qualify better as narrative events on account of their greater number, their
individuality and their rich semantic connotations. Through analysis of the
discursive techniques of the two pieces I show that a weaker degree of narrativity corresponds to music in which the developmental procedures are
mostly based on tonal musical syntax (as in the Classical style), whereas a
higher degree of narrativity corresponds to music in which, in addition to
semantic transformations of the materials, discourse itself relies more on gestural semantic connotations (as in Mahler).
106
107
Samuels, Mahlers Sixth Symphony, 140.

Ibid., 133.

Narativitate Beeth Mahler

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Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 126 (2001)

Royal Musical Association

Music and Narrative Revisited:

As with many theories, the formal definitions of narrative vary widely

MUSIC AND NARRATIVE REVISITED

existed some particular determinate set of events in some particular

MUSIC AND NARRATIVE REVISITED

further inquiries into them. The major question that remains to be

Abbate, Unsung Voices, xi.

MUSIC AND NARRATIVE REVISITED

capabilities.27 In spite of (or in opposition to) the known programmatic

BACKGROUND: NINETEENTH-CENTURY MUSICAL PRACTICE

As some scholars have pointed out, in nineteenth-century instrumental

MUSIC AND NARRATIVE REVISITED

semantic individuality of the units of meaning. Hence, the definitions

encourage polysemic interpretations of the musical discourse itself. On

MUSIC AND NARRATIVE REVISITED

A description of the thematic materials of a musical piece parallels in

MUSIC AND NARRATIVE REVISITED

Example 1. Beethoven, Symphony no. 6, first movement, themes 1

Allegro ma non troppo

fulfilled. In other words, in Beethoven neither the themes nor the

Schoenberg, Fundamentals, 103.

cyclic repetitive gradual intensifications,

6, FIRST MOVEMENT: OVERALL FORMAL AND TONAL OUTLINE

BEETHOVEN, SYMPHONY NO.

MUSIC AND NARRATIVE REVISITED

This corresponds to Meyers script.

Mahler, Symphony no. 9, first movement, themes ac.

A similar situation characterizes the second theme (theme b; see

Adorno, Mahler: Eine musikalische Physionomik, 117, 118.

MUSIC AND NARRATIVE REVISITED

Mahler, Symphony no. 9, first movement, motives X, Y,

but return episodically as slightly transformed refrains (always at the

MUSIC AND NARRATIVE REVISITED

Roland Barthess concepts of denotation and connotation seem

of musical structures with affects, characters or topics, for example,

MUSIC AND NARRATIVE REVISITED

MUSIC AND NARRATIVE REVISITED

Example 4. Mahler, Symphony no. 9, first movement, misterioso variation of theme b.

Pltzlich bedeutend langsamer und leise

Mahler, Symphony no. 9, first movement, introduction.

must have inspired its identification by Adorno with an epic gesture

MUSIC AND NARRATIVE REVISITED

Mahler, Symphony no. 9, first movement, harmonic par-

Prince, Narratology, 149.

MUSIC AND NARRATIVE REVISITED

discrete, well-individualized unit, the change from one state to another

Let us recall that the most general definition of discourse given by

While a composers strategy in a highly conventionalized system such

Prince, Narratology, 145ff.

MUSIC AND NARRATIVE REVISITED

(B major) at bar 151, where the entire following section of 24 bars is

function: N = nucleus section; C = catalyser section; S = static section.

ritualistic, old times,

9, FIRST MOVEMENT: OVERALL MULTI-LEVELLED FORMAL VIEW

MAHLER, SYMPHONY NO.

distortion, old times more

MUSIC AND NARRATIVE REVISITED

typically musical tripartite structure, the movement appears as a looser

MUSIC AND NARRATIVE REVISITED

See Barthes, Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives, 937.

and thus the overall expression of this sequence actually changes