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on the representation of events, because it directs our attention to one of the chief reasons for our interest in narratives: the agents at their center. These agents need not be human, but they do need to perform intentional actions. Comparing Strauss’s Don Quixote to Stravinsky’s Octet, I argued that narratives concern particular agents performing particular actions. As such, themes, pitches, and instrumental parts are not strong candidates to be the agents of narratives, but they may be rendered more particular if listeners use their imaginations. Composers of works of instrumental music express their intention that their work presents a story by inviting listeners to imagine that musical features, such as themes or instruments, represent agents. In most cases, this invitation is made through extramusical means, such as the work’s title and accompanying program or pictures, which serve to guide listeners’ imaginative escapades.⁴²

      Putting it all together, I propose the following definition: A narrative is an utterance intended to communicate a story, which necessarily involves representing particular agents exercising their agency through particular intentional actions. Due to music’s lack of semantic specificity in comparison with literature or theater, successfully conveying a story in a work of instrumental music typically involves a suggestive title and a program that clarifies what the music is intended to represent. Thus, the category of narrative music overlaps with that of program music—music intended to represent or evoke extramusical phenomena—but not precisely. Debussy’s La mer (1905) and Honegger’s Pacific 231 (1923) both fall into the latter category but not the former. Although both are representational and, furthermore, represent a change in state—of the sea and of a train gradually picking up speed, respectively—they do not represent any sentient beings and thus are not narratives under the proposed definition.⁴³

      In the next chapter, my focus shifts from instrumental music to opera and musical theater, exploring what is involved in conveying a story in a musical drama.

      Notes

      1. Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), ch. 1, 48–56.

      2. Ibid., x, xii–xiii, 11–13.

      3. Ibid., 57–60.

      4. Another scholar who is dismissive of music’s narrational abilities is Jean-Jacques Nattiez, “Can One Speak of Narrative Music?” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 115, no. 2 (1990): 240–57.

      5. Byron Almén, A Theory of Musical Narrative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 40. Almén’s definition is based on James Jakób Liszka, The Semiotic of Myth: A Critical Study of the Symbol (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).

      6. Susan McClary, “The Blasphemy of Talking Politics during a Bach Year,” in Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance, and Reception, ed. Susan McClary and Richard Leppert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 25, 28, 36.

      7. Almén, Theory of Musical Narrative, 25.

      8. McClary, “Talking Politics,” 40.

      9. Almén, Theory of Musical Narrative, 39.

      10. Ibid., 32–35, 41.

      11. Peter Kivy, “Action and Agency,” in Antithetical Arts: On the Ancient Quarrel between Literature and Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009), 119–56.

      12. Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in Image—Music—Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 155–64.

      13. Some music scholars treat the score as the composer’s product (e.g., Michael Talbot, “Introduction,” in The Musical Work: Reality or Invention? ed. Michael Talbot [Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 2000], 6), but if that were true, music appreciation would bear greater similarity to the appreciation of literature than it does.

      14. For an interpretation that is more firmly grounded in the historical influences on Bach’s work, see Michael Marissen, The Social and Religious Designs of J. S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), ch. 3. I contrast McClary’s and Marissen’s interpretations in Nina Penner, “Intentions in Theory and Practice,” Music & Letters 99, no. 3 (2018): 452–53.

      15. David Davies defends a process-based understanding of works in Art as Performance (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), which focuses on visual art. There are other accounts that recognize aspects of a work’s context as integral to work identity. Concerning music, the most influential of these was proposed by Jerrold Levinson, “What a Musical Work Is,” in Music, Art, and Metaphysics: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011 [1980]), 63–88, who includes the composer’s identity and the date of composition as part of work identity. I share Davies’s concern that Levinson’s account does not import enough contextual information into work identity. For a proposed synthesis of Davies’s and Levinson’s views, refer to Andrew Kania, Review of Art as Performance by David Davies, Mind 114, no. 453 (2005): 140–41. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) has been influential in encouraging music scholars to consider the process of composition (what he calls poiesis), not merely the finished the product (the trace or neutral level). Nattiez’s inclusion of the process of reception (esthesis) as part of work identity is one major difference between his position and the foregoing philosophical ones.

      16. Penner, “Intentions in Theory and Practice.” The quotations refer to William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” Sewanee Review 54, no. 3 (1946): 468–88; Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image—Music—Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142–48. Another recent musicological critique of anti-intentionalism is Edmund J. Goehring, Coming to Terms with Our Musical Past: An Essay on Mozart and Modernist Aesthetics (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2018), ch. 3.

      17. Paisley Livingston, Art and Intention: A Philosophical Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 7. Livingston’s account is based on Alfred R. Mele, “Deciding to Act,” Philosophical Studies 100, no. 1 (2000): 81–108; Alfred R. Mele, Springs of Action: Understanding Intentional Behaviour (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

      18. Absolute intentionalists include E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967); William Irwin, Intentionalist Interpretation: A Philosophical Explanation and Defense (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999); William Irwin, “Authorial Declaration and Extreme Actual Intentionalism: Is Dumbledore Gay?” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 73, no. 2 (2015): 141–47; P. D. Juhl, Interpretation: An Essay in the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, “Against Theory,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (1982): 723–42; Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, “Against Theory 2: Hermeneutics and Deconstruction,” Critical Inquiry 14, no. 1 (1987): 49–68. Kathleen Stock, Only Imagine: Fiction, Interpretation, and Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), defends extreme intentionalism but only with respect to fictional content (what one ought to imagine is true in the story).

      19. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 70–71; Jerrold Levinson, “Intention and Interpretation in Literature,” in The Pleasures of Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 175–213. Although Edward T. Cone does not use the term implied composer in The Composer’s Voice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), he has acknowledged that his concept of the “complete” or “implicit musical persona” is “something very like Booth’s implied author.” Fred E. Maus et al., “Edward T. Cone’s The Composer’s Voice: Elaborations and Departures,” College Music Symposium 29 (1989): 77. The implied composer is often invoked by music semioticians; for example, Eero Terasti, Signs of Music: A Guide to Musical Semiotics (Berlin: Mouton, 2002), 73–76. See also Seth Monahan’s

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