Musical Stimulacra Are Narrative(s): Music beyond Sound in Concert Program Notes

This chapter explores the contribution of verbal texts to the narrative potential of untexted music. It argues that concert program notes may conditionally become vehicles of musical narrativity insofar as their readers at classical music venues are prepared to identify the content of each annotation as the content of the annotated piece. Program notes are regarded as musical stimulacra (sic): they stimulate the readers’ interest in the annotated music and encourage them to simulate each composition mentally. Providing readers with verbal narratives about the musical works on the program, these supplementary verbal surrogates of music can be considered as prompts or cues of musical narrativity because they affect the way listeners make sense of the performed compositions in storylike terms. Even a minimal impact of program notes on the readers’ sensitivities may allow for classical music to be heard and remembered more distinctly than would otherwise be the case. The chapter addresses several
samples from the St. Petersburg Philharmonia library collection of program notes to illustrate the basic narrative strategies program annotators adopt – most importantly, mapping the music on the background storyline of the composer’s life and work and representing tonal procedures and features as acting and visible narrative entities.