Sunteți pe pagina 1din 8

Musical analysis

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Musical analysis is the attempt 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,
and according to the purpose of the analysis. According to Ian Bent (Bent, 1987), analysis is "an approach
and method [that] can be traced back to the 1750s ... [though] it existed as a scholarly tool, albeit an
auxiliary one, from the Middle Ages onwards." A.B. Marx was influential in formalising concepts about
composition and music understanding towards the second half of the 19th century.
The principle of analysis has been variously criticized, especially by composers, such as Edgard Varse's
claim that, "to explain by means of [analysis] is to decompose, to mutilate the spirit of a work" (quoted in
Bernard 1981, 1).

Contents
1 Analyses
2 Techniques
2.1 Discretization
2.2 Composition
3 Analytical situations
3.1 Compositional analysis
3.2 Perceptual analysis
3.3 Analyses of the immanent level
3.4 Nonformalized analyses
3.5 Formalized analyses
3.6 Intermediary analyses
4 Divergent analyses
5 References
6 Further reading
7 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 which seeks to describe
all tonal classical works as elaborations ('prolongations') of a simple contrapuntal sequence. Ernst Kurth
coined the term of 'developmental motif'. Rudolph Rti 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 which produce music, and vice versus. The insights gained from the social considerations
may then yield insight into the methods of analysis, and vice versa.

Edward Cone ("Analysis Today") 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." (Guck cited in Bauer 2004, p. 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 Gyrgy Ligeti inaccessible,(Lerdahl 1988, 235) while Rainer Wehinger (1970) created a
"Hrpartitur" 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 composition often expresses "display[s] an
analytical impulse" but where "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".(BaileyShea
2007) This analytic bent most obviously in recomposition including the mash-ups of popular music.

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: 135-6), 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, he also points to Nettl 1964: 177, Boretz 1972: 146, and Meyer)
Nattiez outlines six analytical situations, preferring the sixth:

Poietic processes
1

2 x

6 x

Esthesic processes

Inductive
poietics

x
External
poietics
x

3 x

Immanent
structures of the
work
x
Immanent
analysis
x

x
Inductive
esthesics
x

x
External
esthesics
=
x
=
x
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's
(1951: 194-206) analysis of Debussy's la Cathdrale engloutie
3. 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)"
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's (1956: 48) analysis of measures 9-11 of Bach's C minor fugue in
Book I of the Well-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, 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."

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 (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: 138-9) 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).

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)
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 "Boure" 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 thtre;
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 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 [which] when tested by computer ...
allows us to generate melodies in Bach's style."
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."

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 hypotheticaldeductive 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."
Similarly, "Boretz enthusiastically embraces logical formalism, while evading the question of knowing how
the data -- whose formalization he proposes -- have been obtained." (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 Pellas et Mlisande:

Debussy Pelleas et Melisande prelude opening.

Play

are analyzed differently by Leibowitz, Laloy, van Appledorn, and Christ. 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 and Christ analyses
the succession as D:I-VII.
Nattiez (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 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 Bb, interpreting it as a traditional tertian extended chord.

Debussy's Plleas et Mlisande 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 Plleas et Mlisande] 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 Plleas et Mlisande. 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' (1974: 69). Making one's
procedures explicit would help to create a cumulative progress in knowledge." (177)

References
BaileyShea, Matt (2007). "Mignon: A New Recipe for Analysis and Recomposition
(http://mto.societymusictheory.org/issues/mto.07.13.4/mto.07.13.4.baileyshea.html#FN3REF%7CFill
eted)", Music Theory Online Volume 13, Number 4, December 2007.
Bauer, Amy (2004). "Cognition, Constraints, and Conceptual Blends in Modernist Music", in The
Pleasure of Modernist Music, Ashby, Arved, ed.
Bent, Ian (1987). Analysis. London: McMillan Press. ISBN 0-333-41732-1.
Bernard, Jonathan. 1981. "Pitch/Register in the Music of Edgar Varse." Music Theory Spectrum 3:
125.
Nattiez, Jean-Jacques (1990). Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music (Musicologie
gnrale et smiologue, 1987). Translated by Carolyn Abbate (1990). ISBN 0-691-02714-5.
Blacking, John (1973). How Musical Is Man?. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Cited in
Nattiez (1990). Cited in Nattiez (1990).
Laloy, L. (1902). "Sur deux accords", Revue musicale. Reprinted in La musique retrouve. Paris:
Plon, 1928, pp. 11518. Cited in Nattiez (1990).
Lerdahl, Fred (1988/1992). Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems, Contemporary Music
Review 6 (2), pp. 97121.
Liebowitz, R. (1971). "Pellas et Mlisande ou les fantmes de la ralit", Les Temps Modernes, no.
305:891-922. Cited in Nattiez (1990).
Marx, A.B: Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition I-IV [1837-47].

Van Appledorn, M.-J. (1966). "Stylistic Study of Claude Debussy's Opera Pellas et Mlisande".
Ph.D. Diss., Eastman School of Music. Cited in Nattiez (1990).
Christ, William (1966), Materials and Structure of Music (1 ed.), Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice
Hall, ISBN 0-13-560342-0, OCLC 412237 (https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/412237) LCC MT6 M347
1966 (http://catalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?
Search_Arg=MT6+M347+1966&Search_Code=CALL_&CNT=5). Cited in Nattiez (1990).
Stein, Deborah (2005). Engaging Music: Essays in Music Analysis. New York: Oxford University
Press. ISBN 0-19-517010-5.
Satyendra, Ramon. "Analyzing the Unity within Contrast: Chick Corea's 'Starlight'". Cited in Stein
(2005).
Cone, Edward. "Analysis Today", Music: A View from Delft", pp. 39-54. Cited in Satyendra.

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 0-81085887-8.
Kresky, Jeffrey (1977). Tonal Music: Twelve Analytic Studies. ISBN 0-253-37011-6.
Poirier, Lucien, ed. (1983). Rpertoire 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 (http://www.harmony.org.uk/book/musical_analysis.htm)
Benoit Meudic, IRCAM, Musical Pattern Extraction: from Repetition to Musical Structure
(http://recherche.ircam.fr/equipes/repmus/RMPapers/CMMR-meudic2003.pdf)
Morphogenesis of chords and scales (http://www.lamadeguido.com/morphogenesis.htm) Chords and
scales classification
Application of virtual pitch theory in music analysis (PDF)
(http://www.lamadeguido.com/artangles.pdf)
iAnalyse (http://ianalyse.pierrecouprie.fr), a musical analysis aided software by Pierre Couprie
Mapping Tonal Harmony (http://mdecks.com/mapharmony.html), app to study harmonic functions
and progressions in all keys
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Musical_analysis&oldid=658750076"
Categories: Musical analysis
This page was last modified on 22 April 2015, at 21:48.
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may
apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia is a
registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.

S-ar putea să vă placă și