Musical analysis
Musical analysis is the study of musical structure in either compositions or performances. According to music theorist Ian Bent, music analysis "is the means of answering directly the question 'How does it work?'". The method employed to answer this question, and indeed exactly what is meant by the question, differs from analyst to analyst, and according to the purpose of the analysis. According to Bent, "its emergence as an approach and method can be traced back to the 1750s. However it existed as a scholarly tool, albeit an auxiliary one, from the Middle Ages onwards."
The principle of analysis has been variously criticized, especially by composers, such as Edgard Varèse's claim that, "to explain by means of is to decompose, to mutilate the spirit of a work".
Analyses
Some analysts, such as Donald Tovey have presented their analyses in prose. Others, such as Hans Keller used no prose commentary at all in some of their work.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 that seeks to describe all tonal classical works as elaborations of a simple contrapuntal sequence. Ernst Kurth coined the term of "developmental motif". 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.
Musicologists associated with the new musicology often use musical analysis along with or to support their examinations of the performance practice and social situations in which music is produced and that produce music, and vice versa. Insights from the social considerations may then yield insight into analysis methods.
Edward T. Cone argues that musical analysis lies in between description and prescription. Description consists of simple non-analytical activities such as labeling chords with Roman numerals or tone-rows with integers or row-form, while the other extreme, prescription, consists of "the insistence upon the validity of relationships not supported by the text." Analysis must, rather, provide insight into listening without forcing a description of a piece that cannot be heard.
Techniques
Many techniques are used to analyze music. 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".Discretization
The process of analysis often involves breaking the piece down into relatively simpler and smaller parts. Often, the way these parts fit together and interact with each other is then examined. This process of discretization or segmentation is often considered, as by Jean-Jacques Nattiez, necessary for music to become accessible to analysis. Fred Lerdahl argues that discretization is necessary even for perception by learned listeners, thus making it a basis of his analyses, and finds pieces such as Artikulation by György Ligeti inaccessible, while Rainer Wehinger created a "Hörpartitur" or "score for listening" for the piece, representing different sonorous effects with specific graphic symbols much like a transcription.Composition
Analysis often displays a compositional impulse while compositions often "display an analytical impulse" but "though intertextual analyses often succeed through simple verbal description there are good reasons to literally compose the proposed connections. We actually hear how these songs resonate with one another, comment upon and affect one another... in a way, the music speaks for itself". This analytic bent is obvious in recent trends in popular music including the mash-ups of various songs.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 of unnotated oral traditions 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 processes, perceptual processes, all three, or a mixture.Stylistic levels may be hierarchized as an inverted triangle:
- universals of music
- *system of reference
- **style of a genre or an epoch
- ***style of composer X
- ****style of a period in the life of a composer
- *****work
Examples:
- "...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 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, "stylistic analysis of Beethoven in terms of the sketches"
- The most common, grounded in "perceptive introspection, or in a certain number of general ideas concerning musical perception... a musicologist... describes what they think is the listener's perception of the passage",, 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 eventually show through analysis how the works must be played and perceived
Compositional analysis
Perceptual analysis
On the other hand, Fay 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 T. Cone, "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: "It seems only reasonable to believe that a healthy analytical point of view is that which is so nearly isomorphic with the perceptual act."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, "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 his conception; I care very little for all such interaction between the work and 'genius'."Again, Nattiez argues that the above three approaches, by themselves, are necessarily incomplete and that an analysis of all three levels is required. Jean Molino shows that musical analysis shifted from an emphasis upon the poietic vantage point to an esthesic one at the beginning of the eighteenth century.
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. Impressionistic analyses are in "a more or less high-literary style, proceeding from an initial selection of elements deemed characteristic," 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".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 anacrusis, an initial phrase in D major. The figure marked 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 is used again two times, higher each time; this section is repeated."
"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 are historical in character; Rosen's essays in The Classical Style seek to grasp the essence of an epoch's style; Meyer's analysis of Beethoven's Farewell Sonata penetrates melody from the vantage point of perceived structures." He gives as a last example the following description of Franz Schubert's Unfinished Symphony: "The transition from first to second subject is always a difficult piece of musical draughtsmanship; and in the rare cases where Schubert accomplishes it with smoothness, the effort otherwise exhausts him to the verge of dullness. Hence, in his most inspired works the transition is accomplished by an abrupt coup de théâtre; and of all such coups, no doubt the crudest is that in the Unfinished Symphony. Very well then; here is a new thing in the history of the symphony, not more new, not more simple than the new things which turned up in each of Beethoven's nine. Never mind its historic origin, take it on its merits. Is it not a most impressive moment?".