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Musical Stimulacra Are Narrative(s): Music beyond Sound in Concert Program Notes
In the narrow sense, musical stimulacra (sic) are passages of fiction that, through narrative form or content, prompt readers to experience music vicariously, in a variedly intense mode of mental simulation. Coined for my eponymous 2021 book in order to capture and foreground some cognitive dimensions of reading fiction—particularly the kind that invokes music in one way or another (see Delazari xiv-xviii)—the term can be stretched to a much broader use. This chapter extends the initial meaning of musical stimulacra to embrace non-fictional verbal accounts of music. More particularly, it addresses concert program notes—annotations of musical works written by or adapted from music critics and printed on leaflets or in booklets distributed in the audience. As musical stimulacra, such notes tell the reader about the music on the program before, during, or after the act of listening and thus contribute to the ubiquitous cycle of internalization and externalization of stories theorized by Manfred Jahn in 2003. The writers construct a brief verbal narrative about the announced composition to express their concept of that music, which has been accumulated previously from their hearing of and relevant narratives around it. By pointing out selected technical, affective, and/or narrative properties of the piece and contextualizing it amidst the circumstances of its creation, annotations stimulate readers to simulate those properties internally, building a mental image of that music to stand along with the external performance. The relations between words and music are reciprocal, since both affect, inform, and correct one another. The reader who listens becomes the listener who reads, and/or vice versa. Since the equivalence between the performed piece and the annotated composition is assumed, verbal and musical notes intermingle.