Musical and Narrative Structure

Mozart's little Minuet in F from Don Giovanni has a simple form. After a 3-measure introduction, the main theme runs through several measures, and then repeats exactly. A second theme follows, and is again repeated identically, and the piece ends with a double repetition of the main melodic theme.

This piece provides a helpful way of thinking through issues concerning the structural analysis of texts, and particularly of narratives. A central starting question for structural analysis is how to recognize the seams or divisions within a text. A common problem is to subdivide a text into units that are too small to be useful. But if we think of the text musically, and think of narrative flow as analogous to the flow of a musical theme, we can avoid this problem.

In one sense, every note of the Minuet is a subunit of the whole, but analyzing the piece in this manner does not give a sense of how it's put together. In another sense, every measure is a subunit of the whole, but again this subdivision is not very illuminating. At the end of the second measure of the melodic theme, Mozart returns to the chord with which he began, but this two-measure sequence is again too small to illuminate the whole structure. All of these small units are important for analyzing the structure of the melodic theme, but they are too small to give us a sense of the structure of the whole piece.

What we need to hear or see in order to get a sense of the musical structure is the arc, the rise and fall, of the musical theme. In Mozart's piece, the completion of one melodic arc is signaled by a return to the beginning and the repetition of the same theme. So, the first important subunit of the minuet is the statement of the melodic theme, or perhaps the double-statement of the theme. The rest can be analyzed in the same fashion: AABBAA.

Translating this to the analysis of texts: The words are analogous to the notes, the measures are analogous to sentences, and the two-measure sequence is analogous perhaps to a paragraph. To get the structure of a narrative text, we need to feel the arc of an episode. For instance, suppose you were analyzing the structure of 1-2 Sam, and you come up to 1 Sam 4. The text might be subdivided very finely, based on changes in subject matter and changes of scene: Israel at war (4:1-3); Israel sends for the ark (4:4); the ark arrives (4:5); the Philistines fear and encourage themselves (4:6-9); the Philistines defeat Israel (4:10-11); man of Benjamin reports to Eli (4:12-18); Phineas' wife gives birth (4:19-22); and so on. These genuinely are units of the text, and might be useful for discerning the internal structure of these chapters, but there is clearly a continuous story over several chapters concerning the ark, its capture, the Lord's war against Dagon (ch 5) and the ark’s return (ch 6). Missing the unity of that "episode" means missing one of the key points of the narrative, which is about the exile and exodus of the Lord's throne.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, October 25, 2005 at 08:03 AM

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