Abstract

Music in all times and places has produced alterations of consciousness in those who experience it. Instrumental music of the romantic era connected music and consciousness in a much more specialised way: many composers of that era, in alignment with physicians and poets of their day, created works that, without the aid of text, chart the experience of undergoing an alteration of consciousness. a model is proposed here of the succession of elements that composers characteristically used to construct such a narrative in wordless music. This succession of elements is designed: 1) to suggest the presence of a protagonist in whose consciousness the narrative can be located; 2) to establish a break leading from the protagonist’s default state of consciousness (one that is tied to the here and now) to an altered state (such as dream or fantasy or trance); 3) to portray the nature of that altered state; and 4. to evoke a reemergence from the altered state of consciousness to the hereandnow state, with perhaps lingering residues of the altered state.
This model reveals what unites the consciousness narratives of composers like Berlioz, who spelled out their narrative programs in words, with those of composers like Chopin, who barely suggested programs even in their titles, and those of composers like
Schumann and Tchaikovsky, who experimented with varying methods and degrees of divulging or not divulging a narrative program. The model provides means for identifying common narrative strategies as well as distinguishing features of a highly varied set of
works, all issuing from a shared exploration of the workings of human consciousness. Analysis here focuses on two works: Schumann’s Piano Trio in D Minor, op. 63, and Chopin’s Polonaise-Fantaisie, Op. 61.