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."

Other analyses

Some analysts, such as Donald Francis Tovey (whose Essays in Musical Analysis are among the most accessible musical analyses) have presented their analyses in prose. Others, such as Hans Keller (who devised a technique he called functional analysis) used no prose commentary at all in some of their work.

Related Topics:
Donald Francis Tovey - Essays in Musical Analysis

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There have been many notable analysts other than Tovey and Keller. One of the best known and most influential was Heinrich Schenker, who developed Schenkerian analysis, a method which seeks to reduce all tonal classical works to a simple contrapuntal sequence. Rudolph Réti is notable for tracing the development of small melodic motifs through a work, while Nicolas Ruwet's analysis amounts to a kind of musical semiology.

Related Topics:
Heinrich Schenker - Schenkerian analysis - Tonal - Contrapuntal - Rudolph Réti - Motif - Nicolas Ruwet - Semiology

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Musicologists associated with the new musicology often use musical analysis (traditional or not) along with or to support their examinations of the performance practice and social situations in which music is produced and which produce music, and vice versus. The insights gained from the social considerations may then yield insight into the methods of analysis, and vice versus.

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Metaphor and figurative description may be a part of analysis, and a metaphor used to describe pieces "reifies their features and relations in a particularly pungent and insightful way: it makes sense of them in ways not formerly possible." Even absolute music may be viewed as a "metaphor for the universe" or nature as "perfect form." (Guck cited in Bauer 2004, p.131)

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