Musical analysis

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,[9] necessary for music to become accessible to analysis. Fred Lerdahl[10] 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.[11] while Rainer Wehinger[12] created a "Hörpartitur" or "score for listening" for the piece, representing different sonorous effects with specific graphic symbols much like a transcription.

Analysis often displays a compositional impulse while compositions often "display an analytical impulse"[13] 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".[14] This analytic bent is obvious in recent trends in popular music including the mash-ups of various songs.[13]

Jacques Chailley 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."[21]

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 [or she] aims, he often fails—most notably in twentieth-century music—to illuminate our immediate musical experience,"[22] 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,"[23] 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."[24]

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,[25] "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 argues that the above three approaches, by themselves, are necessarily incomplete and that an analysis of all three levels is required.[26] Jean Molino[27] shows that musical analysis shifted from an emphasis upon the poietic vantage point to an esthesic one at the beginning of the eighteenth century.[28]

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 causal atonality".[29]

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."[30]

"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)[31] seek to grasp the essence of an epoch's style; Meyer's analysis of Beethoven's Farewell Sonata[32] 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?".[33]

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[34] the transformational analysis by Herndon,[35] 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.[36]

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,[37] and classificatory analysis, which "sorts phenomena into classes," examples being the universal system for classifying melodic contours by Kolinski.[38] 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."[39]

Nattiez lastly proposes intermediary models "between reductive formal precision, and impressionist laxity." These include Schenker, Meyer (classification of melodic structure),[40] 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 Milton Babbitt[41] and Boretz.[42] 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." Similarly, "Boretz enthusiastically embraces logical formalism, while evading the question of knowing how the data—whose formalization he proposes—have been obtained".[43]