1. Analysis: Art or Science
- An Introduction
Read: Nicholas Cook’s A Guide to
Analysis.
1. Why do it?
2. History of Analysis up to 20th century
3. 20th century approaches
4. Some examples

2. Why bother?
" Is there is a point in doing analysis?
" What is it for?

3. Why do it ?
" To enable communication of ideas about a piece of
music. Speculation and discussion.
" To help performers to memorise extended scores.
" To judge how it would have been if the composer had
done something different. To recompose –
composers learn through analysis of past works.
" To aid aesthetic appreciation and evaluation.
" To see the work as whole – and operating on a
number of levels from the broad to the very detailed.
" Encourage attentive listening and inform the listeners
perception of sound.

4. Traditional Methods
" Music has always attracted speculation
– ideas of religion and cosmic harmony,
etc. The greeks did this. Plato and
Aristotle, etc. Aesthetics and use.
" Wish to classify music – scales, chords,
instruments. Ideas of comparative
musicology.
" In the 19th century this became more
scientific though still largely descriptive.

5. Melody and Harmony
" Music described in terms of themes, tonal
areas, and conformity to specific forms
(sonata form, binary, rondo, etc ) – text book
models.
" Example of Donald Tovey. Extended
programme note approach. Chronological
order, tabular format, constantly using
traditional terms (e.g. theme, transition) –
plenty of recourse to metaphor.

7. Metaphor
" A figure of speech by which a thing
is spoken of as being that which it
only resembles – I.e. when a
ferocious man is called a tiger.
‘The man is a tiger’.
" Example in music – ‘the melody
resembled a river meandering
gently and burbling over brooks
and shallows’. Does this really tell
us anything?

8. Hermeneutics
" Hermeneutics – ‘the science of
interpretation’.
" About the message or meaning in
music. ‘the piece can be read as a
descent into Hell and then the return to
the living’.
" May involve lots of metaphor. Non-
technical descriptive writing about music
that deals more with aesthetics rather
than with the ‘how’ of music. Is this type
of approach analytical in anyway or is it
the opposite approach?

9. Dissatisfaction with
traditional approach
" The traditional set forms (sonata form, etc) had never
really existed in pure form. Invention of 19th century
writers on music – A.B. Marx in particular.
" Thematic relations overplayed - tonal function
underplayed. Composers did think in terms of
contrasting keys – but not in terms of ‘second subject
theme’.
" Should not separate form and content. Traditional
approach does.
" It was the functional, not the historical aspects of
form, that really mattered.

10. Donald Tovey – 1944
Essays in Musical
Analysis
" ‘The slow movement, in A flat, is nobly
serious and mellow in sound, and has a
rich digression of Harmonies in its broad
transition passage to the dominant.
There are several pauses, but they are
for reflection, not for cadenzas. The
finale is terse, and more in the best
style on op.9.’

11. Harmony – the most important
aspect of content?
" Traditionally harmony is reduced to figured –
bass notation (6, 5/4 -3,etc), or some form of
Roman-letter description. I-iib-V7-I, etc.
" Both miss out large amounts of information –
register, harmonics, timbre, etc.
" Roman letter symbols – you have to decide
what key you are in and where transitions
occur. This involves analytical decisions that
can be arguable.
" Gives no clear idea of how the music works
and may complicate rather than reduce.

12. Schenkerian Analysis
" Includes both Schenker’s methods and the
application of his ideas in post-war period.
" He saw pieces as temporally unfolding (elaboration)
of the overtone series, and in particular of the major
triad (exists as the first five partials of the overtone
series).
" It aims to omit the essentials and highlight important
relationships.
" Reduce down into a series of structural levels –
ultimate background (chords or chord) of fundamental
structure, middle ground with highlighting of important
structural events, foreground with perceived melodic
events.

13. " A representation of Schenkerian
analysis (referred to as a Schenkerian
sketch or graph) uses musical notation
as its symbols, but all the symbols are
given new meaning. Symbols that
convey duration in conventional music
notation (for example, half notes and
quarter notes) no longer have these
meanings attached.

14. Notes that would only appear at the foreground
level might be shown as plain, filled-in
noteheads, with higher-level notes shown as
noteheads with stems, and finally adding beams
and open noteheads. Slurs also have a different
purpose. In addition to these symbols,
Schenkerian analysis also uses a few symbols
that are unique to this particular approach, such
as hook slurs, dotted slurs, diagonal lines
showing harmonic support and hierarchical
beaming.

15. Example

16. Jonathon Dunsby
Bach Bach, "Ich bin's,
ich sollte bussen,"

17. More Schenker
" Piece can then be deconstructed into a series
of graphs – which can be superimposed for
the full view.
" Does not show true rhythmic values and
developed its use of notation symbols. E.g.
Filled noteheads with tails, like crotchets
indicate middleground structures, and
connections between them can be seen by
following the line of the tails.

18. Shenkerian Sketch

19. Problems with it
" Developed for Western Art music which
emphasises harmony over other parameters.
" Developed for classical/romantic repertoire in
particular, and is not so good at anything
else.
" Where the piece does not get its meaning
from the relationship between its detail and its
whole, it begins to break down.

21. Other Forms
" 1. Psychological Approaches – how music is
experienced.
" 2. Formal approaches - coding into a new set
of symbols and deducing musical structure
from the patterns that these symbols make.
" Techniques of comparative analysis – based
on computer models and often developed for
computer processing.

22. Often the approach is a
composite
" To attempt a number of approaches or to develop
your own based on someone else's model.
" Problems associated with Popular Music and
Ethnomusicology where the relative importance of
musical parameters may be very different (melody
and harmony v. rhythm and timbre) and Western
notation inappropriate.
" Melograph and Computerised methods and tools.
" However as the real aim is to enable communication -
if the analysis does not do this it may fail.

27. Is it an art or science?
" Can it be right or wrong?
" Does the analysis fit the music?
" Does it say anything about the music that is of value?
Does it claim to be scientific and impartial or is it
subjective and reflect the interests of the analyst
rather than the music?
Does it communicate anything to anyone? Is it just a
few specialist (university academics) speaking
gobbledy-gook to other specialists (more university
academics).

28. How Can I Use
Analysis?
" To break down the piece into
constituent elements, so that it is
possible to describe its essential
elements and highlight distinctive
features. Be clinical and objective.
" Avoid a subjective narrative account.
" ‘At the third bar the oboe arrives with a
souring melody that echoes a birdlike
song across the serene waters of the
string accompaniment below’.

29. Essay Title
" Discuss some of the different
approaches available to the musical
analyst and comment on the merits and
demerits of the different methods.
" Cook and Mark Everest (1999) Rethinking Music,
Oxford, OUP
" Cook, N. (2000). Music, A Very Short Introduction.
Oxford, OUP.
" Cook, N. (1994). A Guide to Musical Analysis,
Oxford, OUP.

30. Next Week
" Klezmer.
" Bring instruments – anything that can
either play a melody or chord
accompaniment – guitars, accordions,
string instruments of any sort. Wind
instruments of any sort.
" There is no singing so singers must play
something.

31. Hora