Music and Narrative Since 1900

This comprehensive volume offers a wide-ranging perspective on the stories that art music has told since the start of the 20th century. Contributors challenge the broadly held opinion that the loss of tonality in some music after 1900 also meant the loss of narrative in that music. To the contrary, the editors and essayists in this book demonstrate how experiments in approaching narrative in other media, such as fiction and cinema, suggested fresh possibilities for musical narrative, which composers were quick to exploit. The new conceptions of time, narrative voice, plot, and character that accompanied these experiments also had a significant impact on contemporary music. The repertoire explored in the collection ranges across a wide variety of genres and includes composers from Charles Ives and the Pet Shop Boys to Thomas Adès and Dmitri Shostakovich.

Michael L. Klein is Professor of Music Studies at Temple University and author of Intertextuality in Western Art Music (IUP 2004).

Nicholas Reyland is Senior Lecturer in Music, Film Studies and Media, Communications, and Culture at Keele University. He is author of Zbigniew Preisner’s Three Colors Trilogy: Blue, White, Red: A Film Score Guide (2011).