A Musical Approach to Mikhail Bakhtin’s Theory of Carnivalesque.

Mikhail Bakhtin introduced the concept of the carnivalesque to literary criticism. The idea of the carnivalesque is rooted in folk culture, when festivity suspends everyday life’s structures, such as occupations, norms, and power dynamics within a community. A carnival creates a moment where these structures are less pronounced and more dynamic. Bakhtin writes: “Carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions” (p. 10). Bakhtin formulated this concept in his examination of the works of François Rabelais and Fyodor Dostoevsky to study the ways in which novels mirrored this structural suspension.

The concept of the carnivalesque has inspired some studies in music. Set Reena applies the carnivalesque to explain the superimposition of genres, such as sonata and rondo, and polyphonic and heterophonic mentality in Mahler’s Symphony No. 9, Rondo-Burleske movement. Stephen Roger uses the same concept to study Berlioz’s Le Carnaval romain. Francesca Draughon and Raymond Knapp suggest a carnivalesque approach in Mahler’s first symphony to represent the reversal of social structures. Polyphony in these musical instances is not just the relationship between voices of a composition, but it is also the way in which multiple musical constructs or approaches are superimposed on each other.

While the heterogeneity of multiple musical approaches suspends the centrality of a single musical construct (e.g., a genre, style, form, etc.), on a meta-level, tonality still dictates the larger sonic regulations. Therefore, the carnivalesque approach has only suspended some of the structural norms, rather than a holistic superimposition of all, as is the case in the essential carnival, where a festive event emerges from a holistic contribution. The carnivalesque characteristic is perhaps more pronounced in performances of recent genres of new music and experimental music, where musical composition encompasses the enacted and embodied aspects of a performance-based composition. Anthony Braxton, in his Ghost Trance Music works, for instance, creates a ceremonial multiplicity and superimposition of musical structures, bringing the agency of multiple musicians into compositions that become dynamic musical events, ones that suspend the centrality of tonality and the composer's voice.