Music and Narrative Revisited: Degrees of Narrativity in Beethoven and Mahler
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study presents an attempt to pin down the potential narrative qualities of instrumental, wordless music. Comparing as case-studies two pieces in sonata form–the first movements of Beethoven's ‘Pastoral’ Symphony (as representative of Classical narrative possibilities) and of Mahler's Ninth Symphony (as representative of its composer's idiosyncratic treatment of those in the late nineteenth century) –I propose a ‘narrative’ analysis of their musical features, applying the notions of ‘story’, ‘discourse’ and other concepts from the literary theory of, for example, Genette, Prince and Barthes. An analysis at three semiotic levels (morphological, syntactic and semantic), corresponding to denotative/connotative levels of meaning, shows that Mahler's materials qualify better as narrative ‘events’ on account of their greater number, their individuality and their rich semantic connotations. Through analysis of the ‘discursive techniques’ of the two pieces I show that a weaker degree of narrativity corresponds to music in which the developmental procedures are mostly based on tonal musical syntax (as in the Classical style), whereas a higher degree of narrativity corresponds to music in which, in addition to semantic transformations of the materials, discourse itself relies more on gestural semantic connotations (as in Mahler).
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it