Music, Sound, and the Moving Image

Inside/Outside the Klein Bottle

Music in Narrative Film, Intrusive and Integral

Music, Sound, and the Moving Image (2012), 6, (1), 9–19.

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3828/msmi.2012.3
Language
English
Pages
11

Abstract

Music does not narrate, since it lacks one of the minimal constituents of a narrating act: it does not produce perception of deictically shifted action, taking place in a space-time different from that of communication. It can, however, functioning alongside other components of narrative, contribute strongly to the establishment of narrativity, that property of discourse by virtue of which it can be both story and presentation of story at the same time. Narrativity is so constituted that the traditional distinction between story told and that story's telling cannot be sustained in analysis; the form of the Klein bottle serves as a means of envisaging the continuity of these two discursive functions. Tropings of discourse that establish narrativity may be classified as metaleptic and cognitively dissonant, respectively infractions of the storyworld-communication world boundary and infractions of representational encoding. In narrative film as it has developed, music contributes in relatively straightforward ways to troping for cognitive dissonance, but forms a more distinctive part of narrative's metaleptic troping. Here it assists in the production of thresholds resembling the storyword-communication threshold within the storyworld's own space-time, and in the mapping of story development from a vantage point higher than that from the action as directly presented is imputedly seen.

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Davis, Nick