Musical analysis

Musical analysis can be defined as a process attempting to answer the question "how does this music work?". The method employed to answer this question, and indeed exactly what is meant by the question, differs from analyst to analyst. According to Ian Bent (Bent, 1987), analysis is "an approach and method can be traced back to the 1750s ... it existed as a scholarly tool, albeit an auxiliary one, from the Middle Ages onwards."

Analytical situations

Analysis is an activity most often engaged in by musicologists and most often applied to western classical music, although music of non-western cultures and that of an oral tradition, rather than written, is also often analysed. An analysis can be conducted on a single piece of music, on a portion or element of a piece or on a collection of pieces. A musicologist's stance is his or her analytical situation. This includes the physical dimension or corpus being studied, the level of stylistic relevance studied, and whether the description provided by the analysis is of its immanent structure, compositional (or esthesic) processes, perceptual (or poietic) processes (Nattiez 1990: 135-6), all three, or a mixture.

Related Topics:
Musicologist - Classical music - Oral tradition - Esthesic - Poietic

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Stylistic levels may be hierarchized as an inverted triangle:

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• universals of music
• system (style) of reference
• style of a genre or an epoch
• style of composer X
• style of a period in the life of a composer
• work

:(Nattiez 1990: 136, he also points to Nettl 1964: 177, Boretz 1972: 146, and Meyer)

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Nattiez outlines six analytical situations, preferring the sixth:

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:(Nattiex 1990: 140)

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Examples:

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• "tackles only the immanent configuration of the work." Allen Forte's musical set theory
• "proceed from an analysis of the neutral level to drawing conclusions about the poietic." Reti's (1951: 194-206) analysis of Debussy's la Cathédrale engloutie
• the reverse of the previous, taking "a poietic document -- letters, plans, sketches -- ... and analyzes the work in the light of this information." Paul Mie's "stylistic analysis of Beethoven in terms of the sketches (1929)."
• the most common, grounded in "perceptive introspection, or in a certain number of general ideas concerning musical perception ... a musicologist ... describes what he or she thinks is the listener's perception of the passage." Meyer's (1956: 48) analysis of measures 9-11 of Bach's C minor fugue in Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier.
• "Begins with information collected from listeners to attempt to understand how the work has been perceived ... obviously how experimental psychologists would work."
• "The case in which an immanent analysis is equally relevant to the poietic as to the esthesic." Schenkerian analysis, which, based on the sketches of Beethoven (external poietics) eventually show through analysis how the works must be played and perceived (inductive esthesics).

Compositional analysis

Jacques Chailley (1951: 104) views analysis entirely from a compositional viewpoint, arguing that, "since analysis consists of 'putting oneself in the composer's shoes,' and explaining what he was experiencing as he was writing, it is obvious that we should not think of studying a work in terms of criteria foreign to the author's own preoccupations, no more in tonal analysis than in harmonic analysis."

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Perceptual analysis

On the other hand, Fay (1971: 112) argues that, "analytic discussions of music are often concerned with processes that are not immediately perceivable. It may be that the analyst is concerned merely with applying a collection of rules concerning practice, or with the description of the compositional process. But whatever he aims, he often fails -- most notably in twentieth-century music -- to illuminate our immediate musical experience," and thus views analysis entirely from a perceptual viewpoint, as does Edward Cone (1960: 36), "true analysis works through and for the ear. The greatest analysts are those with the keenest ears; their insights reveal how a piece of music should be heard, which in turn implies how it should be played. An analysis is a direction for performance," and Thomson (1970: 196): "it seems only reasonable to believe that a healthy analytical point of view is that which is so nearly isomorphic with the perceptual act."

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Analyses of the immanent level

Analyses of the immanent level include analyses by Alder, Heinrich Schenker, and the "ontological structuralism" of the analyses of Pierre Boulez, who says in his analysis of the Rite of Spring (1966: 142), "must I repeat here that I have not pretended to discover a creative process, but concern myself with the result, whose only tangibles are mathematical relationships? If I have been able to find all these structural characteristics, it is because they are there, and I don't care whether they were put there consciously or unconsciously, or with what degree of acuteness they informed understanding of conception; I care very little for all such interaction between the work and 'genius.'"

Related Topics:
Heinrich Schenker - Pierre Boulez - Rite of Spring

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Again, Nattiez (1990: 138-9) argues that the above three approaches, by themselves, are necessarily incomplete and that an analysis of all three levels is required. Jean Molino (1975a: 50-51) shows that musical analysis shifted from an emphasis upon the poietic vantage point to an esthesic one at the beginning of the eighteenth century (Nattiez 1990: 137).

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Nonformalized analyses

Nattiez distinguishes between nonformalized and formalized analyses. Nonformalized analyses, apart from musical and analytical terms, do not use resources or techniques other than language. He further distinguishes nonformalized analyses between impressionistic, paraphrases, or hermeneutic readings of the text (explications de texte). Impressionistic analyses are in "a more or less high-literary style, proceeding from an initial selection of elements deemed characeristic," such as the following description of the opening of Claude Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun: "The alternation of binary and ternary divisions of the eighth notes, the sly feints made by the three pauses, soften the phrase so much, render it so fluid, that it escapes all arithmetical rigors. It floats between heaven and earth like a Gregorian chant; it glides over signposts marking traditional divisions; it slips so furtively between various keys that it frees itself effortlessly from their grasp, and one must await the first appearance of a harmonic underpinning before the melody takes graceful leave of this causal atonality." (Vuillermoz 1957: 64)

Related Topics:
Hermeneutic - Claude Debussy - Gregorian chant - Keys - Atonality

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Paraphrases are a "respeaking" in plain words of the events of the text with little interpretation or addition, such as the following description of the "Bourée" of Bach's Third Suite: "An , an initial phrase in D major. The figure marked (a) is immediately repeated, descending through a third, and it is employed throughout the piece. This phrase is immediately elided into its consequent, which modulates from D to A major. This figure (a) is used again two times, higher each time; this section is repeated." (Warburton 1952: 151)

Related Topics:
Figure - Third

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"Hermeneutic reading of a musical text is based on a description, a 'naming' of the melody's elements, but adds to it a hermeneutic and phenomenological depth that, in the hands of a talented writer, can result in genuine interpretive masterworks.... All the illustrations in Abraham's and Dahlhaus's Melodielehre (1972) are historical in character; Rosen's essays in The Classical Style (1971) seek to grasp the essence of an epoch's style; Meyer's analysis of Beethoven's Farewell Sonata (1973: 242-68) penetrates melody from the vantage point of perceived structures." He gives as a last example the following description of Franz Schubert's Unfinished Symphony: "."

Related Topics:
Melody - Phenomenological - Sonata - Franz Schubert

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Formalized analyses

Formalized analyses propose models for melodic functions or simulate music. He (Meyer?) distinguishes between global models, which "provide an image of the whole corpus being studied, by listing characteristics, classifying phenomena, or both; they furnish statistical evaluation," and linear models which "do not try to reconstitute the whole melody in order of real time succession of melodic events. Linear models ... describe a corpus by means of a system of rules encompassing not only the hierarchical organization of the melody, but also the distribution, environment, and context of events, examples including Chenoweth's (1972, 1979) explanation of "succession of pitches in New Guinean chants in terms of distributional constraints governing each melodic interval," Herndon's (1974, 1975) transformational analysis, and Baroni and Jacoboni's (1976) "grammar for the soprano part in Bach's chorales when tested by computer ... allows us to generate melodies in Bach's style."

Related Topics:
Soprano - Chorale

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Global models are further distinguished as analysis by traits, which "identify the presence or absence of a particular variable, and makes a collective image of the song, genre, or style being considered by means of a table, or classificatory analysis, which sorts phenomena into classes," one example being Helen Roberts' (1955: 222) "trait listing", and classificatory analysis, which "sorts phenomena into classes," examples being Kolinski's (1956) universal system for classifying melodic contours. Classificatory analyses often call themselves taxonomical. "Making the basis for the analysis explicit is a fundamental criterion in this approach, so delimiting units is always accompanied by carefully defining units in terms of their constituent variables."

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Intermediary analyses

Nattiez lastly proposes intermediary models "between reductive formal precision, and impressionist laxity." These include Schenker, Meyer (classification of melodic structure in 1973: Chapter 7), Narmour, and Lerdahl-Jackendoff's "use of graphics without appealing to a system of formalized rules," complementing and not replacing the verbal analyses. These are in contrast to the formalized models of Babbitt (1972) and Boretz (1969). According to Nattiez Boretz "seems to be confusing his own formal, logical model with an immanent essence he then ascribes to music," and Babbitt "defines a musical theory as a hypothetical-deductive system ... but if we look closely at what he says, we quickly realize that the theory also seeks to legitimize a music yet to come; that is, that it is also normative ... transforming the value of the theory into an aesthetic norm ... from an anthropological standpoint, that is a risk that is difficult to countenance." Similary, "Boretz enthusiastically embraces logical formalism, while evading the question of knowing how the data -- whose formalization he proposes -- have been obtained." (167)

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