Meropi Koutrozi, musicologist, MMus
A general definition of the term [analysis] as implied in common parlance might be: that part of the study of music that takes as its starting-point the music itself, rather than external factors. More formally, analysis may be said to include the interpretation of structures in music, together with their resolution into relatively simpler constituent elements, and the investigation of the relevant functions of those elements. In such a process the musical ‘structure’ may stand for part of a work, a work in its entirety, a group or even a repertory of works, in a written or oral tradition. The relationship between the structures and elements proposed by analysis, and experiential, generative and documentary perspectives on music, has circumscribed analysis differently from time to time and from place to place, and has aroused debate. In this definition of the term ‘music analysis’, Ian Bent and Anthony Pople raise the most fundamental issues which concern this field of musicological inquiry. To be more specific, they refer to concepts like ‘the music itself’, ‘interpretation’, ‘musical structure’ and several perspectives of music such as ‘experiential’, ‘generative’ and ‘documentary’. The debate around music analysis and its practice that Bent and Pople refer to, is what this essay is concerned with. The purpose is to outline the most important discourses on theory and analysis during the last decades.
Alastair Williams, defining the two main trends in musicological thought, structuralism and poststructuralism, mentions the most important representatives of each ideological movement. Structuralism, as a term which includes concepts of positivism and formalism in music analysis, is expressed in approaches like Schenkerian analysis, Forte’s pitch-class set analysis and paradigmatic analysis (Nicolas Ruwet, Jean-Jacques Nattiez et. al.). This formalistic approach which is orientated to the technical features of the piece and to the objective, abstract side of music, was strongly challenged mostly from 1980’s onwards by another ideological movement, the poststructuralism. In poststructuralism, music analysis is expressed within a broader frame, contextualized in cultural interpretation. Williams notes that ‘postructuralism challenges the idea that one can step behind a discourse to examine its underlying codes’ and that ‘for poststructuralism, a text is not an object with clearly defined boundaries that fix meaning, but an example of discourses’. Joseph Kerman, in 1980, publishes a radical and influential article on music analysis, which challenged strongly the ‘status’ of music analysis and its practice, titled ‘How We Got Into Analysis, and How to Get out Of’. Kerman highlighted the need of shifting the focus from formalism to criticism and suggested alternatives to the traditional approaches of music analysis. The concepts of criticism and music analysis have been linked earlier from Theodor Adorno, who, in a public lecture in 1969, titled ‘On the Problem of Music Analysis’ points out that ‘analysis […] it is not from interpretation that is derived, but from the work itself. […] Works need analysis for their ‘truth content’ to be revealed’. This statement may seems to represent a pure formalistic approach, though, a few lines later Adorno refers to criticism, as an extension of this journey towards this ‘truth content’ of the work, which he mentioned earlier: Analysis is to be understood as an organ not only of the historical momentum of the works themselves, but also of the momentum that pushes beyond the individual work. That is to say, all criticism which is of any value is founded on analysis. The last three decades, it is obvious a significant shift of interest towards criticism in music analysis. In the following paragraphs firstly I will discuss the main debates on issues of how analysis reflects a particular aesthetic perception of the concept of the art-work and issues of analytical prose and how influences our perception of music. Secondly I will refer to the concept of ‘interpretation’ in music analysis and at a third level I will present several approaches of the new musicology, which use music analysis as a means of cultural criticism.
Structuralistic analytical approaches may be considered as totally technical, objective and abstract, though this is not the absolute truth. Several scholars have been concerned to explore how an analysis reflects the analyst’s, subjective, personal involvement and perception of the work, orientated in particular aesthetic and historical background, even in the most extreme cases of ‘technical’ analysis, like for instance pitch-class set analysis.
Ruth Solie, in 1980, focusing on the concept of organicism in music, brings up the issue that a certain way of analytical narrative depicts a specific aesthetic perception of the musical work. She discusses aspects of Heinrich Schenker’s and Rudolf Reti’s works, in order to highlight how their perception of the musical work and, by extension, their analytical writing, depicts that their analytical thought is ‘offspring of the same metaphoric orientation in nineteenth-century aesthetics’, that of organicism. The concept of organicism in relation to art has its orientation back to Plato and Aristotle, though it became a substantial reference in the late eighteenth and nineteenth-century criticism. She points out that ‘the study of functional interrelationships of the many parts of the complex organicism calls for a new paradigm of thought fundamentally different from the old linear cause-and-effect model’. As Nicholas Cook observes the message of Solie’s article ‘was that organic unity represented not a universal criterion of value, but rather a historical construction of strictly limited applicability’. Solie puts the crucial question, which challenges this concept of organicism in a musical work by asking ‘why do works of art need such unity? What sort of organicism can serve as a model?’ This challenge to the fundamental principal of unity in musical works was further elaborated and developed by prominent music scholars later on, like Kofi Agawu, Daniel Chua, Joseph Dubiel, Kevin Kosryn, Jonathan Kramer et al. Morgan himself is also concerned with this ‘anti-unitarianism’ in music examines critically several earlier studies of the scholars mentioned and explores the concept of unity in music analysis in depth, in aesthetic, philosophical and practical levels. He points out that there are not all works necessarily amenable to unity-orientated analysis and that the analyst should be open towards disunity, and find new analytical perspectives to consider building effective analyses grounded on the claim of disunity, rather than ‘wash their analytical hands’.
Turning back to Solie’s article, we can observe that her arguments on organicism in music are based in a high degree on the criticism of several excerpts of analytical writing, and how this reflects a certain aesthetic orientation. She notes that ‘language is not merely reflective but actually constitutive of our awareness, constellations of language like surrounding the figure of the organicism tend to shape and control the observations of the analyst using them’. The issue of analytical language is thoroughly discussed from other authors later on; Marion Guck examines the role of prose in music analysis, and how this can regulate our perception of a work in a particular way. Guck argues that the language of a musical analysis creates particular ‘fictions’, which the author defines as ‘accounts of involvement in musical works’. In her attempt to ‘defamiliarize’ the conventional analytical language we all are used to, she gives effective examples of how the language of analysis influences (many times unconsciously) our perception of a musical work. Every analyst chooses the particular tone and character of his/her narrative, and the way of narrativity adopted obviously involves a high degree of personal involvement. By discussing separately the cases of different kinds of analytical narratives, Guck points out that ‘different preferences about verbs saturate the texts, thereby shaping not only the background story of engagement but the foreground structural characterization with every sentence. They are, after all, at the heart of the story’. A subsequent study by Scott Burnham links the issue of analytical language with this of the interpretation of musical meaning through analysis and points out that
there is a crucial difference that obtains between music an language. In verbal metalanguage, descriptive prose is distances from the thing described. In musical metalanguage, a prototype [..] is not only a descriptive model, it functions itself as an exemplification of the class. The thing doing the describing is also the thing described. As such, this ‘abstract’ prototype is at the same time palpable and concrete. Our recourse to such a palpable prototype facilitates the type of thinking that we have characterized the ‘music itself’. It encourages the notion that music is about itself. And later on Burham observes that ‘If we wish to grant music the power to speak of other things, we inherently need to understand music as music, as an autonomous voice: we couldn’t reasonably expect something without its own voice to comment on anything’. As far as it concerns this main issue of interpretation in music analysis there is a long and vivid debate between scholars during the last decades. Cook explored those approaches towards interpretation through music analysis in his article ‘Theorizing Musical Meaning’. He notes that ‘a variety of analytical tools might contribute to an understanding of how a particular interpretation emerges from the properties of the musical trace, but also moulds the manner in which they are experienced’. After a thorough, critical survey of the bibliography Cook comes up with some concluding thoughts on musical meaning by observing that’ meaning becomes [an] autonomous agent. It becomes an integral element of the music after all –but only because we have started of thinking about music differently. Perhaps then, we should not be theorizing musical meaning after all, but rather looking for ways of understanding music that are fully attuned to its emergent properties, of which meaning is just one’.
The issue of the interaction between the music, the analyst and the listener/reader, has concerned several scholars in multiple ways. Guck, in a critical response to Jonathan Bernard, opposes her approach to that of Jonathan Bernard, which she describes as more formalistic. Guck attempts to define the role of the analyst and points out that analysis is the means to change and refine hearings and therefore that, when analysts write analytical texts, we are offering readers the possibility of recreating a hearing that we have found worthwhile. Because a hearing is directly accessible only to the individual having it, the analyst can only intimate the experience. Given this view of the motivation for and difficulties of creating analytical texts, my analyses cannot have the identification of musical entities and relations as their goal, but must go on to weave what I identify into interpretations of the musical work. Bernard, I think, focuses on identification, leaving interpretation as much as possible to the reader. Mark DeBellis discusses the issue of how an analyst or a reader of an analysis knows that he/she hears the piece ‘in the way an analysis specifies’. He explores the factors that determine the instances which regulate a particular perception of a musical work in linkage to its analysis, from time to time and points out the need to define the relations between ‘nonconceptual content’ and ‘theoretical concepts’. The ‘paradox of musical analysis’ for DeBellis is orientated to the dilemma of what is a reader’s expectation from it; that is, an analysis is supposed to correspond to the listener’s experience or to be informative, in the sense that illustrates ‘hidden’ aspects of the piece, which were not perceived by the listener? The answer, for the author, is that an effective analysis is supposed to meet both of those aspects. In a subsequent study, Guck explores in more depth the importance of the listener’s interpretive participation to the analysis. She explores ‘how interaction with music is shaped by both the music and the concerns that the human agent brings to it’. In fact this is the first of the four ideas she distinguishes under the ‘umbrella of interpretation’. The other three approaches to the interpretation of a musical work through analytical processes concern the personal perception of the analyst, the reference to other experience on music and the conceptual or verbal inventions an analyst attempts to do in order to explicate certain features of the work, in order to ‘build’ an effective analysis. This ‘hearing based’ analytical approach was explored also from Joseph Dubiel, who is concerned with the listener’s responses to musical structure and how these responses associate or dissociate with a technical, strictly score-based analysis. He explores the concept of ‘structural listening’ by discussing how responses to music like uncertainty, disorientation and loss impact the listener’s perception of musical structure, while he proposes to consider more the way that music is perceived in order to analyse it. So, analysis enforces new ways of listening, or the listener’s perception is a new way of analysis (or may be both)?
New musicology adopts new approaches and interpretations to musical works. As Kofi Agawu points out that the attempt is ‘to problematize the gap between the musical and the extra-musical’. But how analysis serves as a tool in cultural criticism? The attachment of historical, social or cultural meaning to compositional processes, has turned analysis to a useful means of interpretation which extends to many fields of inquiry. Musicologists like Susan McClary, Philip Brett, Suzanne Cusick, Nadine Hubbs, Jann Pasler, Ellie Hishama, Joseph Strauss et al. have turned to a score-based cultural music analysis. That is, they explore issues like gender, sexuality and disability in relation to a close study of the score, by interpreting in certain ways the formal features of the work. For instance, McClary discusses issues of sexual politics in classical music based on a particular score-based analytical interpretation of Carmen and Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony. Another example is that of Philip Brett, who explores Britten’s homosexuality and analyses particular excerpts of his works. The author builds his arguments by taking as point of reference score-based analytical descriptions and extends his observations to the sexual identity of the composer and the social responses to it. Another field of inquiry is that of criticism towards the analytical approaches themselves, and the social, political, cultural and philosophical implications of their practices from time to time. Agawu criticizes the practices of analysis in new musicology by noting that ‘rather than develop new methods for analysis, methods that are free of conventional biases, new musicologists often fall back on conventional methods’. And continues by observing that ‘theory-based analysis, which prides itself on leading the analyst to the ‘truth content’ of a work as mediated by its ‘technical structure’, which allows the musical mind to engage directly with the compositional elements themselves- such analysis seems to be of limited utility in a project that interprets music as social discourse’. I will conclude this brief essay on the discourse on Theory and Analysis by posing a question in Agawu’s words, while the debates on the ideology, philosophy and practices of music analysis go on constantly, with new approaches and ideas; ‘Is there any way in which music theory can embrace the positive tenets of the new musicology and still give attention to what Adorno called ‘technical structure’ of musical works, not as an end but as a means to an end?’
Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Paddison. ‘On the Problem of Musical Analysis.’ Music Analysis 1, no. 1 (1982): 169-87.
Agawu, Kofi. ‘Analyzing Music Under the New Musicological Regime.’ The Journal of Musicology 15, no. 3 (1997): 297-307.
Bent, Ian and Anthony Pople. ‘Analysis.’ In Grove Music Online.
Brett, Philip. ‘Britten’s Dream.’ In Musicology and Difference, edited by Ruth A. Solie, 259-80. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Burnham, Scott. ‘The Criticism of Analysis and the Analysis of Criticism’, 19th-Century Music 16, no. 1 (1992–3): 70–6. Burnham, Scott. ‘Theorists and ‘The Music Itself’.’ The Journal of Musicology 15, no. 3 (1997): 316-29.
Cook, Nicholas. ‘Theorizing Musical Meaning.’ Music Theory Spectrum 23, no. 2 (2001): 170-95.
Cross, Ian. ‘Music Analysis and Music Perception.’ Music Analysis 17, no. 1 (1998): 3-20.
DeBellis, Mark. ‘The Paradox of Musical Analysis.’ Journal of Music Theory 43, no. 1 (1999): 83-99.
Dubiel, Joseph. ‘On Getting Deconstructed.’ The Journal of Musicology 15, no. 3 (1997): 308-15.
Dubiel, Joseph. ‘Uncertainty, Disorientation, and Loss as Responses to Musical Structure.’ In Beyond Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing, edited by Andrew Dell'Antonio, 173-200. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Guck, Marion A. ‘The Endless Round.’ Perspectives of New Music 31, no. 1 (1993): 306–14.
Guck, Marion A. ‘Analytical Fictions.’ Music Theory Spectrum 16, no. 2 (1994): 217–30.
Guck, Marion A. ‘Analysis as Interpretation.’ Music Theory spectrum 28, no. 2 (2006): 191-209.
Hisama, Ellie. ‘The Question of Climax in Ruth Crawford's String Quartet, Third Movement.’ In Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon, 12-34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Keller, Hans. ‘Epilogue/Prologue: Criticism and Analysis.’ Music Analysis 1, no. 1 (1982): 9-31.
Kerman, Joseph. ‘How We Got Into Analysis, and How to Get Out.’ Critical Inquiry 7, no. 2 (1980): 311-31.
Kerman, Joseph. Contemplating Music. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985.
McClary, Susan. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.
McCreless, Patrick. ‘Contemporary Music Theory and the New Musicology: An Introduction.’ The Journal of Musicology 15, no. 3 (1997): 291-6.
Morgan, Robert P. ‘The Concept of Unity and Musical Analysis.’ Music Analysis 22, no. 1-2 (2003): 7-50.
Scherzinger, Martin. ‘The Return of the Aesthetic: Musical Formalism and Its Place in Political Critique.’ In Beyond Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing, edited by Andrew Dell’Antonio, 252-77. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Solie, Ruth. ‘The Living Work: Organicism and Musical Analysis.’ 19th-Century Music 4, no. 2 (1980): 147-56.
Williams, Alastair. Constructing Musicology. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001.
Alastair Williams, Constructing Musicology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 21-33. Theodor Adorno, and Max Paddison., ‘On the Problem of Musical Analysis,’ Music Analysis 1, no. 1 (1982): 176. Ruth Solie, ‘The Living Work: Organicism and Musical Analysis,’ 19th-Century Music 4, no. 2 (1980): 147-56. Nicholas Cook, ‘Theorizing Musical Meaning,’ Music Theory Spectrum 23, no. 2 (2001): 170. Morgan, Robert P. ‘The Concept of Unity and Musical Analysis.’ Music Analysis 22, no. 1-2 (2003): 7-50. Marion A. Guck, ‘Analytical Fictions,’ Music Theory Spectrum 16, no. 2 (1994): 217–30. Mark DeBellis, ‘The Paradox of Musical Analysis,’ Journal of Music Theory 43, no. 1 (1999): 83-99. Marion A. Guck, ‘Analysis as Interpretation,’ Music Theory spectrum 28, no. 2 (2006): 191-209. Joseph Dubiel, ‘Uncertainty, Disorientation, and Loss as Responses to Musical Structure,’ in Beyond Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing, ed. Andrew Dell'Antonio, 173-200 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Kofi Agawu, ‘Analyzing Music Under the New Musicological Regime,’ The Journal of Musicology 15, no. 3 (1997): 299. Such a study is for instance that of Martin Scherzinger, ‘The Return of the Aesthetic: Musical Formalism and Its Place in Political Critique,’ in Beyond Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing, ed. Andrew Dell’Antonio, 252-77 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 