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Musical analysis

Musical analysis is the study of musical structure in either compositions or performances


(DeVoto 2003). It "is the means of answering directly the question 'How does it work?'" (Bent
1987, 5). 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 Ian Bent (1987, 6), "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."
Adolf Bernhard Marx was influential in formalising concepts about composition and music
understanding towards the second half of the 19th centuryPederson
( 2001).

The principle of analysis has been variously criticized, especially by composers, such as Edgard
Varèse's claim that, "to explain by means of [analysis] is to decompose, to mutilate the spirit of a work" (quoted Bernard
in 1981, 1).

Contents
Analyses
Techniques
Discretization
Composition
Analytical situations
Compositional analysis
Perceptual analysis
Analyses of the immanent level
Nonformalized analyses
Formalized analyses
Intermediary analyses
Divergent analyses
See also
References
Further reading
External links

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.

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
("prolongations") 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 (traditional or not) 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 Cone (1989,) 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." (Guck 1994, 71) Even absolute music may be viewed as a, "metaphor for the universe," or nature as, "perfect
form" (Dahlhaus 1989, 8, 29 cited in Bauer 2004, 131).

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 (1990), necessary for music to become accessible to analysis. Fred Lerdahl (1992, 112–13) 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 (Lerdahl 1988, 235) while Rainer Wehinger (1970) created a "Hörpartitur" or "score for listening" for the
piece, representing different sonorous effects with specific graphic symbols much like atranscription.

Composition
Analysis often displays a compositional impulse while compositions often "display an analytical impulse" (BaileyShea 2007, [8]) 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 [different musical settings of Goethe's Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt]
resonate with one another, comment upon and affect one another [...] in a way, the music speaks for itself" (BaileyShea 2007, [7]).
This analytic bent is obvious in recent trends in popular music including the
mash-ups of various songs [see (BaileyShea 2007, [8])].

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 (or poietic) processes, perceptual (or esthesic) processes (Nattiez 1990, 135–36),
all three, or a mixture.

Stylistic levels may be hierarchized as an inverted triangle:

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, who also points to Nettl 1964, 177, Boretz 1972, 146, and Meyer)

Nattiez outlines six analytical situations, preferring the sixth:

Poietic Immanent structures Esthesic


processes of the work processes
1 ♦
Immanent analysis
2 ♦ ← ♦
Inductive poietics
3 ♦ → ♦
External poietics
4 ♦ → ♦
Inductive esthesics
5 ♦ ← ♦
External esthesics
6 ♦ ←→ ♦ ←→ ♦
Communication between the three levels

(Nattiez 1990, 140)

Examples:

1. "...tackles only the immanent configuration of the work."Allen Forte's musical set theory
2. "...proceed[s] from an analysis of the neutral level to drawing conclusions about the poietic." Reti (1951, 194–206),
analysis of Debussy's la Cathédrale engloutie
3. The reverse of the previous, taking "a poietic document—letters, plans, sketches— ... and analyzes the work in the
light of this information." PaulMie (1929), "stylistic analysis of Beethoven in terms of the sketches"
4. 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"
Meyer
(1956, 48), analysis of measures 9–11 ofBach's C minor fugue in Book I of theWell-Tempered Clavier
5. "Begins with information collected from listeners to attempt to understand how the work has been perceived ...
obviously how experimental psychologists would work"
6. "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, ar
guing 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 harmonic
in analysis."

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 [or she] 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."

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 (Boulez 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 [the composer's] understanding of his conception; I care very little for
all such interaction between the work and 'genius.'"

Again, Nattiez (1990, 138–39) 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 centuryNattiez
( 1990, 137).

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 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 causalatonality" (Vuillermoz 1957, 64).

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 (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).

"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: "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 (as in the slow
movement of the otherwise great A minor Quartet). 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?"Tovey
( 1978, 213–1990, 162–163).

Formalized analyses
Formalized analyses propose models for melodic functions or simulate music. 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 the explanation of
"succession of pitches in New Guinean chants in terms of distributional constraints governing each melodic interval" by Chenoweth
(1972, 1979), the transformational analysis by Herndon (1974, 1975), and the "grammar for the soprano part in Bach's chorales
[which,] when tested by computer ... allows us to generate melodies in Bach's style" by
Baroni and Jacoboni (1976,).

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 "trait listing" by Helen Roberts (1955, 222), and classificatory analysis, which "sorts
phenomena into classes," examples being the universal system for classifying melodic contours by Kolinski (1956). 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 carefullydefining units in terms of their constituent variables."Nattiez (1990, 164)

Intermediary analyses
Nattiez lastly proposes intermediary models "between reductive formal precision, and impressionist laxity." These include Schenker,
Meyer (classification of melodic structure in Meyer 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 thevalue of the theory into an aestheticnorm ... from an anthropological standpoint, that is
a risk that is difficult to countenance." Similarly, "Boretz enthusiastically embraces logical formalism, while evading the question of
knowing how the data—whose formalization he proposes—have been obtained"Nattiez
( 1990, 167).

Divergent analyses
Typically a given work is analyzed by more than one person and different or divergent analyses are created. For instance, the first two
bars of the prelude to Claude Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande:

Debussy Pelleas et Melisande prelude opening. Play

are analyzed differently by Leibowitz (1971), Laloy, van Appledorn, and Christ (1966). Leibowitz analyses this succession
harmonically as D minor:I-VII-V, ignoring melodic motion, Laloy analyses the succession as D:I-V, seeing the G in the second
measure as an ornament, and both van Appledorn andChrist (1966,) analyses the succession as D:I-VII.
Nattiez (1990, 173) argues that this divergence is due to the analysts' respective analytic situations, and to what he calls transcendent
principles (1997b: 853, what George Holton might call "themata"), the "philosophical project[s]", "underlying principles", or a prioris
of analyses, one example being Nattiez's use of the tripartitional definition of sign, and what, after epistemological historian Paul
Veyne, he calls plots.

Van Appledorn sees the succession as D:I-VII so as to allow the interpretation of the first chord in measure five, which Laloy sees as
a dominant seventh on D (V/IV) with a diminished fifth (despite that the IV doesn't arrive till measure twelve), while van Appledorn
sees it as a French sixth on D, D-F♯-Ab-[C] in the usual second inversion. This means that D is the second degree and the required
reference to the first degree, C, being established by the D:VII or C major chord. "The need to explain the chord in measure five
establishes that C-E-G is 'equally important' as the D-(F)-A of measure one." Leibowitz (1971,) gives only the bass for chord, E
indicating the progression I-II an "unreal" progression in keeping with his "dialectic between the real and the unreal" used in the
analysis, while Christ explains the chord as an augmented eleventh with a bass of B♭, interpreting it as a traditional tertian extended
chord.

Debussy's Pélleas et Mélisande prelude, measures 5–6. Play

Not only does an analyst select particular traits, they arrange them according to a plot [intrigue].... Our sense of the component parts
of a musical work, like our sense of historical 'facts,' is mediated by lived experience." (176)

While John Blacking (1973, 17–18), among others, holds that "there is ultimately only one explanation and ... this could be
discovered by a context-sensitive analysis of the music in culture," according to Nattiez (1990: 168) and others, "there is never only
one valid musical analysis for any given work." Blacking gives as example: "everyone disagrees hotly and stakes his [or her]
academic reputation on what Mozart really meant in this or that bar of his symphonies, concertos, or quartets. If we knew exactly
what went on inside Mozart's mind when he wrote them, there could be only one explanation". (93) However, Nattiez points out that
even if we could determine "what Mozart was thinking" we would still be lacking an analysis of the neutral and esthesic levels.

Roger Scruton (1978, 175–76), in a review of Nattiez's Fondements, says one may, "describe it as you like so long as you hear it
correctly ... certain descriptions suggest wrong ways of hearing it ... what is obvious to hear [in Pélleas et Mélisande] is the contrast
in mood and atmosphere between the 'modal' passage and the bars which follow it." Nattiez counters that if compositional intent were
identical to perception, "historians of musical language could take a permanent nap.... Scruton sets himself up as a universal, absolute
conscience for the 'right' perception of the Pélleas et Mélisande. But hearing is an active symbolic process (which must be
explained): nothing in perception is self-evident."

Thus Nattiez suggests that analyses, especially those intending "a semiological orientation, should ... at least include a comparative
critique of already-written analyses, when they exist, so as to explain why the work has taken on this or that image constructed by
this or that writer: all analysis is a representation; [and] an explanation of the analytical criteria used in the new analysis, so that any
critique of this new analysis could be situated in relation to that analysis's own objectives and methods. As Jean-Claude Gardin so
rightly remarks, 'no physicist, no biologist is surprised when asked to indicate, in the context of a new theory, the physical data and
the mental operations that led to its formulation' Gardin (1974, 69). Making one's procedures explicit would help to create a
cumulative progress in knowledge." (177)

See also
List of music software (Section: Music analysis software)

References
Babbitt, Milton. 1972. "Contemporary Music Composition and Music Theory as Contemporary Intellectual History". In
Perspectives in Musicology: The Inaugural Lectures of the Ph. D. Program in Music at the City University of New
York, edited by Barry S. Brook,Edward Downes, and Sherman Van Solkema, 270–307. New York: W. W. Norton.
ISBN 0-393-02142-4. Reprinted, New York: Pendragon Press, 1985. ISBN 0-918728-50-9.
BaileyShea, Matt (2007). "Filleted Mignon: A New Recipe for Analysis and Recomposition ". Music Theory Online 13,
no. 4 (December).
Bauer, Amy (2004). "'Tone-Color, Movement, Changing Harmonic Planes': Cognition, Constraints, and Conceptual
Blends in Modernist Music", inThe Pleasure of Modernist Music: Listening, Meaning, Intention, Ideology , edited by
Arved Ashby, 121–52. Eastman Studies in Music 29. Rochester: University of Rochester Press; W oodbridge: Boydell
and Brewer, Ltd. ISBN 1-58046-143-3.
Bent, Ian (1987). Analysis. London: McMillan Press.ISBN 0-333-41732-1.
Bernard, Jonathan. 1981. "Pitch/Register in the Music of Edgar arèse."
V Music Theory Spectrum3:1–25.
Blacking, John (1973).How Musical Is Man?. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Cited in Nattiez (1990).
Boretz, Benjamin. 1969. "Meta-Variations: Studies in the Foundationbs of Musical Thought (I)".Perspectives of New
Music 8, no. 1 (Fall–Winter): 1–74.
Boretz, Benjamin. 1972. "Meta-Variations, Part IV: Analytic Fallout (I)". Perspectives of New Music11, no. 1 (Fall–
Winter): 146–223.
Chailley, Jacques. 1951. La musique médiévale, with a preface by Gustave Cohen. Les grands musiciens 1. Paris:
Coudrier.
Chenoweth. 1972..
Christ, William (1966),Materials and Structure of Music(1 ed.), Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-
560342-0, OCLC 412237 LCC MT6 M347 1966. Cited in Nattiez (1990).
Cone, Edward. 1989. "Analysis Today". In Music: A View from Delft, edited by, 39–54. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-11470-5; ISBN 978-0-226-11469-9. Cited in Satyendra.
Dahlhaus, Carl. 1989. The Idea of Absolute Music, translated by Roger Lustig. Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press.
DeVoto, Mark. 2003. "Analysis".The Harvard Dictionary of Music, fourth editions, edited by Don Michael Randall.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.ISBN 0-674-01163-5.
Guck, Marion A. (1994). "Rehabilitating the incorrigible",Theory, Analysis and Meaning in Music, ed. Anthony Pople.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press:57-74.
Laloy, L. (1902). "Sur deux accords",Revue musicale. Reprinted in La musique retrouvée. Paris: Plon, 1928,
pp. 115–18. Cited in Nattiez (1990).
Lerdahl, Fred (1988/1992).Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems . Contemporary Music Review6, no.
2:97–121.
Leibowitz, René. (1971). "Pelléas et Mélisande ou les fantômes de la réalité", Les Temps Modernes, no. 305:891–
922. Cited in Nattiez (1990).
Marx, Adolf Bernhard. 1837–47. Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition I–IV .Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel.
Meyer. 1973..
Molino Jean. 1975a..
Molino Jean. 1975b..
Nattiez, Jean-Jacques 1990. Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music, translated by Caroline Abbate.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.ISBN 0-691-02714-5. French original: Musicologie générale et sémiologue,
Paris:, 1987.
Nettl, Bruno. 1964..
Pederson, Sanna. 2001. "Marx, (Friedrich Heinrich) Adolf Bernhard [Samuel Moses]". The New Grove Dictionary of
Music and Musicians, second edition, edited byStanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Publishers.
Reti, Rudolph. 1951. The Thematic Process in Music..
Rosen, Charles. 1971.The Classical Style..
Satyendra, Ramon. "Analyzing the Unity within Contrast: Chick Corea's 'Starlight'".
Cited in Stein (2005).
Scruton, Roger. 1978..
Stein, Deborah (2005).Engaging Music: Essays in Music Analysis. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
ISBN 0-19-517010-5.
Tovey, Donald Francis. 1978..
Van Appledorn, M.-J. (1966). "Stylistic Studyof Claude Debussy's OperaPelléas et Mélisande". Ph.D. Diss.,
Rochester: Eastman School of Music. Cited in Nattiez (1990).
Vuillermoz. 1957..
Warburton. 1952..
Wehinger, Rainer. 1970..

Further reading
Cook, Nicholas (1992).A Guide to Musical Analysis. ISBN 0-393-96255-5.
Hoek, D.J. (2007). Analyses of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Music, 1940-2000. ISBN 0-8108-5887-8.
Kresky, Jeffrey (1977). Tonal Music: Twelve Analytic Studies. ISBN 0-253-37011-6.
Poirier, Lucien, ed. (1983). Répertoire bibliographique de textes de presentation generale et d'analyse d'oeuvres
musicales canadienne, 1900-1980= Canadian Musical Works, 1900-1980: a Bibliography of General and Analytical
Sources. ISBN 0-9690583-2-2

External links
Example Musical Analyses showing the relationship between voice leading and chord progression patterns
Harmony.org.uk
Benoit Meudic, IRCAM,Musical Pattern Extraction: from Repetition to Musical Structure

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