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Construction Of Music In Jerome Bruner's Narrative In Music

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Narrative in Music
In 1878, the great Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky composed the opera Eugene Onegin, a riveting and tragic tale about a young woman who falls in love with a man named Onegin, only to marry a prince in the end and leave Onegin in despair. When an individual watches a performance of Eugene Onegin, the production bombards their senses. Lights, motions, costumes, but most importantly music. Imagine you are sitting in the back of the Bolshoi Theater in Russia, watching Eugene Onegin for the first time, you are sitting in the back, in a high balcony far from the actors. At the climactic moment where Onegin cries out in despair for his unattainable love, people around you weep, you feel sad too. However, the opera is in Russian, you cannot understand a single word, nor can you see the expressions and movements of the actors very well. How does music elicit such a reaction, and how does one define a ‘climax’ in music? Using Jerome Bruner’s The Narrative Construction of Reality, I will identify and analyze three main qualities that make music a powerful narrative. All ten of Bruner’s qualities of a narrative arise in music but I will focus on the three most important. These are narrative diachronicity, hermeneutic composability and canonicity and breach. Also, I will differentiate music’s narrative character from a ‘universal language’ as it is often called. It is important to differentiate the two because many people have noticed that music causes an

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