Narrativity of Philip Glass's Minimalist Music in Operas Based on Literary Works (FWOTM922)

Narrativity of music has mostly been analysed in 18th and 19th-century musical works, in both purely instrumental compositions and music with text. With regard to opera, research usually considers the narrative function of music as subordinate to the functionality of the text. Moreover, operas under analysis are generally limited to those that are 'easily summarisable'. Alternatively, this project considers Philip Glass operas with (late 20th- and 21st-century) minimalist music,
which is largely defined as non-narrative. The repetitiveness of this music is an interesting case study to shed light on how music, together with libretti, still generates the basic narrative of the opera.
The main objective of this research project is to assess how minimalist music helps build the narrative of Glass operas. Another objective is to relate the complexity of the libretti's source texts to the degree of narrativity of the music and libretto in the opera. The hypothesis is that complex/straightforward literary source texts lead to a relative low/high degree of narrativity in music. As the narratological analyses include operas with premieres ranging from 1984 until 2014, it is the first comprehensive study of Glass operas that takes narrativity of music as a point of departure. Also innovative is the use of narratological concepts (Herman & Vervaeck 2009; Ryan
2014) and schemata (Ryan 2007) to analyse how and to what extent the music and libretto are narrative in each individual opera.

Keywords:OPERA

Disciplines:History of art