Thanks to William Benzon for his very informative response to Amy Ione's
questions about meaning and narrative in music.
I have a couple of additional suggestions:
1. Besides the book he recommended, there is another very important
book on this topic, Diana Raffman's _Language, Music, and Mind_. I have
a summary account of it on the website where my summary of Currie's book
is also posted. You can find it at
http://www.hfac.uh.edu/cogsci/Raffman.html. Raffman talks not just
about syntax (which is the focus of Lerdahl and Jackendoff) but also
semantics. Her focus is on trying to pin down the notion of musical
ineffability. I can send a plain text summary if someone cannot access
the web.
2. There has been a surprising amount written lately about FILM music.
I'm afraid most of my specific references are in my office and I'm at
home but I can gather them later for anyone who's interested. Peter
Kivy, Jerrold Levinson, and Jeff Smith have articles on this topic in
various recent volumes, including Carroll and Bordwell's _Post-Theory_,
the Murray Smith anthology _Film Theory and Philosophy_, and the Carl
Plantinga edited volume _Passionate Views_. There is some focus on
narrative in music in these articles and on how it relates to narrative
in film, e.g., how do certain scenes work to rely on musical rather than
verbal depiction of some sort, and so on. Similarly, this is a topic of
importance writing about opera. Levinson has an article "Song and Music
Drama" on this topic. Many of these articles go into very deep and, to
me, murky waters about the nature of musical depiction and musical
expression. (I don't mean to criticize them, I just mean to say, I
don't always feel able to understand or assess them, not knowing enough
about music). But anyway, it does make sense that both film and opera
music might be more "narrative" (if any music is). I would think that
studies of Wagner's music might be especially relevant on this point
since each leitmotiv does have both a depictive and sometimes a kind of
narrational (if that's a word) role. (There is an incredible Parsifal
website that lists the leitmotives and they include things like
"fighting," "nature's healing," "atonement," and even "desire for
redemption." These sound pretty narrative to me! The site is at
http://home.c2i.net/monsalvat/menu001.htm) For a pop version, think of
the leitmotives in the _Star Wars_ trilogy. Some go with characters but
some go with actions or adventures.
By the way, a while back someone questioned whether Gregory Currie could
be a cognitive scientist given that he's a philosopher. This is a false
dichotomy. The field of cognitive science is inherently
interdisciplinary and includes people from diverse disciplines including
philosophy, primatology, psychology, neuroscience, engineering, computer
science, optometry, and many more. Any volume of key essays or basic
readings in cognitive science is bound to include essays by philosophers
(Dennett, Fodor, the Churchlands, etc. all spring to mind). Not all
cognitive scientists work in labs wearing white coats and doing MRIs
etc. I have heard that Currie, in point of fact, HAS recently been
hanging out in the London lab of someone from a more traditional
scientific field where autism is studied in a very serious way, but I
don't remember where or whose lab exactly. I can find out if this
matters to anyone.
Cynthia Freeland
Philosophy
University of Houston
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