Music, multimodality, and narrative viewpoint: Beowulf in performance
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Connor Page
Abstract
This article examines a solo musical/dramatic performance of the Old English poem Beowulf. Drawing on recent literature on multimodal communication, conceptual blending, and music cognition, it specifically discusses musical means of constructing and manipulating narrative viewpoint, exploring how sound and embodied performance influence and create the meanings of verbal narrative. Blending analysis, focused as it is on the integration of disparate input concepts into one blended space and the meaning-making potential of this process, lends itself naturally to the interaction of various modes of communication. In Benjamin Bagby’s Beowulf, the embodied, preformative resources of oral storytelling—particularly musical sound—structure narrative viewpoint in ways not afforded by the text alone, and thus support the process of story-construction. The famously ambiguous “Unferð Episode,” a dialogic exchange incorporating complex viewpoint phenomena and embedded narratives, exemplifies how such manipulation of viewpoint constrains and guides interpretation. As this article demonstrates, Bagby’s storytelling tools—verbal delivery, musical organization, gesture, posture—do not merely communicate a sequence of events but define the ways characters, narrators, and audience members negotiate, view and construe the stories constituted by those events.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Barbara Dancygier for her assistance with early drafts of this essay, Charles Morrow, Jon Aaron, and Benjamin Bagby for their kind permission to reproduce material from the 2006 video-recording of Beowulf, and Multimodal Communication's anonymous reviewers for their valued feedback.
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© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Reliability in the identification of metaphors in (filmic) multimodal communication
- Music, multimodality, and narrative viewpoint: Beowulf in performance
- Hybrid Indo-Trinidadian identities and tasty food: a multimodal critical discourse analysis of ‘Doubles with Slight Pepper’
- Multimodal metaphors and sexism in Arabic cartoons depicting gender and gender relations during COVID-19
- book-review
- Review of: Theo van Leeuwen (2022) Multimodality and identity. Routledge
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Reliability in the identification of metaphors in (filmic) multimodal communication
- Music, multimodality, and narrative viewpoint: Beowulf in performance
- Hybrid Indo-Trinidadian identities and tasty food: a multimodal critical discourse analysis of ‘Doubles with Slight Pepper’
- Multimodal metaphors and sexism in Arabic cartoons depicting gender and gender relations during COVID-19
- book-review
- Review of: Theo van Leeuwen (2022) Multimodality and identity. Routledge
