By james art Interconcept talk No. 4 by Mike Wheeler “The case of music” (Narrative and Cognition Lab)
The Narrative and Cognition Lab c Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities invites you to an online and in-person conversation presented by Mike Wheeler at Institute of Medical Humanities, Durham University on 28 November 2024 12:00pm – 1:30pm with a finger buffet during the break.
Narratological analysis of music exploits the relationship between (a) the sequential organization of events in a literary plot and (b) the sequential organization of musical elements in a textless piece of music. It then uses the theoretical toolbox of literary narrative theory and adapts this toolbox to the study of such music. This is a well-trodden path that has given theorists new and productive access to, for example, the relationship between the structural and expressive features of music.
The present conversation will begin with a somewhat idiosyncratic walk down that road—”idiosyncratic” in the sense that it will be tailored to our later concerns. These concerns will emerge from bringing to the fore two things: (i) recent psychological research on the narrative nature of music listening (especially the work of Margulies and her associates) and (ii) a potentially useful but troubling concept of implicit narrative. The end result will be a conception of narrativity that rejects the tempting dichotomy that a phenomenon is either a quality wholly present in a work of art or a gloss imposed on a work of art by the mind of a reader or listener.
Rather, the picture is this: implicit narrative is a phenomenon distributed across the brain, body, and world, in cognitive ecologies of a particular nature, and narratives are enacted in such ecologies. This picture is as applicable to literature and self-narratives as it is to music.
This event is free to attend.
Scaling details will be released closer to the event.