What's in a Title? Setting, Narrator, and Mimesis in Del Tredici's "A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight"
Abstract
Narrative theory has experienced fruitful if somewhat controversial adaptations to music. Carolyn Abbate has adroitly revealed several difficulties in applying literary concepts to music, most notably with narrative time and lack of a past tense. This study applies aspects of literary and musical narrative theory to one of David Del Tredici’s early Joyce songs, “A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight.” In this article, I explore how mimetic representation of objects from the song’s title creates a diegetic narrative with a past tense. An examination of the narrative elements reveals a long-range teleology through the song’s structure.
References
Abbate, Carolyn. “What the Sorcerer Said.” 19th-Century Music 12, no. 3 (Spring, 1989): 221–230.
———. Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Almén, Byron. A Theory of Musical Narrative. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.
———. “Narrative Archetypes: A Critique, Theory and Method of Narrative Analysis.” Journal of Music Theory 47, no. 1 (Spring, 2003): 1–39.
Berger, Karol. “Diegesis and Mimesis: The Poetic Modes and the Matter of Artistic Presentation.” The Journal of Musicology 12, no. 4 (Autumn, 1994): 407–433.
Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978.
Cone, Edward T. The Composer’s Voice. The Ernest Bloch Lectures. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.
Culler, Jonathan. “Story and Discourse in the Analysis of Narrative.” In The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981.
Del Tredici, David. David Del Tredici: Joyce Settings, Scherzo. CRI American Masters, 1995. New World Records, NWCR 689. Previously released as analog discs: SD 243 (1970), SD 294 (1973), and SD 492 (1983); and as cassette: ACS 6004 (1985).
———. Night Conjure-Verse. New York: Boosey & Hawkes, 1989.
Earls, Paul. “David Del Tredici: Syzygy.” Perspectives of New Music 9, no. 2 – 10, no. 1 (Spring/Summer–Autumn/Winter, 1971): 304–313.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957.
Gann, Kyle. Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Holloway, Robin. “David Del Tredici before Alice.” In Essays and Diversions, II. London: Continuum, 2007.
Klein, Michael L. “Debussy’s ‘L’Isle Joyeuse’ as Territorial Assemblage.” 19th-Century Music 31, no. 1 (Summer, 2007): 28–52.
Kramer, Lawrence. “Music Narratology: A Theoretical Outline.” Indiana Theory Review 12 (Spring–Fall, 1991): 141–162.
Maus, Fred Everett. “Music as Narrative.” Indiana Theory Review 12 (Spring–Fall, 1991): 1–34.
Moravec, Paul. “An Interview with David Del Tredici.” Contemporary Music Review 6, no. 2 (1992): 11–22.
Prince, Gerald. A Grammar of Stories. The Hague: Mouton, 1973.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Rockwell, John. All American Music: Composition in the Late Twentieth Century. New York: Knopf, 1983.
