A lot of composers, I suspect, just write intuitively with perhaps the development of "filters" to trim down the possibilities to ones that are most useful. Other composers follow worked-out systems of composition (the serialists). Others create systems and move on to new systems with each piece (Stockhausen). Others modify traditional styles by distorting or stripping them down to essentials (Prokofiev? Feldman? Stravinsky?). Others are what theorists like to call "refractory to analysis" meaning probably that they just have no idea what is going on.
Music theory and music analysis are somewhat different animals. Music theory is the search for general principles of music construction while analysis is more focused on the specifics of individual pieces. They overlap to a considerable extent, of course.
I have been reading this book, which though a bit dated (1987), is proving to be very informative. The author was a professor at Southhampton University in England.
His writing style is clear and informative and he gives a good overview of various different approaches. Analysts seem to prefer shorter pieces as the process of analysis can be very exhausting and time-consuming. The first prelude in Bk I of the Well-Tempered Clavier is a particular favorite:
It is amazing how much analysis you can do of a two minute piece. Another popular one is the brief (two and a half minutes) song from Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin, "Das Wandern."
On first listening, both these pieces might sound very simple, trite even, but one thing analysis can do is refresh your listening so you are hearing with new ears.
In our everyday lives we are constantly hearing music in public spaces that is run-of-the-mill, routine music, music that sounds a lot like a lot of other music. This dulls our aesthetic sense so we become less capable of hearing into a piece, hearing past the surface.
So now that we are all locked down for a while, we can sit down and do some serious listening!
Right?
15 comments:
The Kindle edition's not as cheap as it was when I got it but Nicholas Cook wrote an interesting long book published by OUP on Schenker called
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001CPR488/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i1
It was cheaper when I got it but 26 USD beats 100+ for the hardcover.
Cook's thesis was that Anglo-American but especially American musicologists have not accounted for the importance of Schenker being an assimilated Jew who mastered the German musical legacy and, in Cook's long-form argument, developed his ideal of German music as a way to establish a German music canon that cnosisted of pre-Wagnerian music. The tragicomic end of Schenker's analytical and cultural project was that in attempting to salvage the best of the German musical cultural heritage he saw Schenker tried to battle one form of anti-semitic German cultural chauvinism but ended up replacing it with another of his own making. American interpretations of Schenkerian analysis have either reified his approach to a fault or castigated him as functionally representing the kind of post-Wagnerian anti-semitic German supremacism that Schenker, during his life, was paradoxically trying to combat. It's a dense book but worth picking up if you would rather read more ABOUT Schenker than read Schenker's work. I've honestly never had the slightest use for Schenkerian analysis myself but I do think that in the US the "cancel the 19th century " sentiments seem to take Schenker as "the" villain" in musical analysis too easily.
We're in full lockdown mode here in Washington state so ... there's gonna be time to read stuff. I've read all of the above mentioned Cook book and have thought of blogging about it but haven't felt I had time to write about it with other things going on irl.
"analysis is paralysis" doesn't really resonate with me.
I find that analysis and composition are synergistically beneficial ways of thinking.
If we're locked down as we are I could probably get down to work on my Ragtime and Sonata forms project, I suppose. And read that biography of George Rochberg and Rochberg late writings on the evolution of Western music from music based on assymetric scales in the common practice era through to the emergence of music based on symmetrical scales in the era of Stravinsky.
since I'm on this topic as it is, analysis benefits a lot from listening widely and having familiarity with as wide a range of scores as possible. Had I know steeped myself in so much Haydn before studying Matiegka's guitar sonatas I couldn't have spotted how liberally Matiegka appropriated themes from works by Haydn in his Grand Sonata II.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/12/wenzel-matiegkas-grand-sonata-ii.html
Haydn's trio was written around 1788-1789 while Matiegka's Grand Sonata II was published in 1808, plenty of time for the guitarist to have picked up Haydn's scores and made use of the themes. Since the finale to Grand Sonata II is a bravura set of variations on a Haydn lieder that's cited by name it's not a big shock to find Matiegka's opening sonata form is ostentatiously indebted to a theme from Haydn's pianos, not just in the second theme but in the ways in which even theme 1 can be shown to be spun out from that Haydn theme, too.
Wow, fascinating references in each of the three parts of your comment! I got the paperback edition of Cook as I don't like Kindle for books with illustrations and musical examples. I never had a Schenkerian for music theory so haven't been too exposed so I was glad to read Cook's chapter on him.
Yes, the "analysis is paralysis" sentiment fell apart for me as soon as I thought about it. I have had the same observation about the evolution, or transition at least, from assymetrical scale structures to symmetrical ones.
Thanks for the information about Matiegka's debt to Haydn.
Cook's The Schenker Project doesn't have any musical examples at all, it's more exploring German philosophical movements across the 19th century.
I'm not in the ideal position to be getting books or scores for a while and sometimes the Kindle is easier to deal with on limited storage space. Taruskin's forthcoming book is cheaper to get Kindle than physical. Alex Ross' long-incubating book on Wagnerism in September 2020 looks interesting. Though he's got a few hobby horses I really don't relate to I kind of expect that of writers who are regularly published at The New Yorker, Seattleite that I am.
Oh yes, I love the convenience of the Kindle. Just pre-ordered the new book of Taruskin essays. Thanks for the tip.
This is another fascinating topic so kudos to our blogmaster.
Music analysis is more difficult because it has combinatorial growth at the note level. When we analyze literature we are either looking at sentence/paragraph structure or usually deep structure concepts. No one analyzes literature word by word or letter by letter.
With music we are often at the note level of why did that note follow the previous one or why does this vertical set of notes occur here? Schenkerian analysis was really designed to try and simplify analysis so it suffers from the same issues as any inductive generalization.
Having read many analyses of specific works I feel that while interesting they miss a crucial point. Whatever passages they call attention to in a selected work (generally a masterwork) can be found in mediocre works of the same period. So it is circular to say that this or that attribute is the reason it is a masterwork since we have no deductive framework to analyze that way.
To try to state succinctly what my current position is: a masterwork can be organized any which way as long as it is organized. The way it uses its organizational plan though is unique to that work and won't explain another masterwork. Music masterworks do generally tend to balance expectations and surprises so that the mind has a way of seeing how the surprises may still follow from the known context and to what degree they are surprising. It is a bit like poetry. But the composer can use various stock elements or new elements to achieve that result. The one fly in the milk is the assessment and analysis of melody which is still rudimentary.
So I think music theory needs to move to an engineering type approach. The civil engineering text doesn't tell you the blueprint for a bridge over the Mississippi, it discusses the various factors and info one needs to build that specific bridge. So music theory should get away from analyzing specific works at least until we know more. Instead try to build up the collection of organizational strategies and elements that composers use from voice to voice or chord to chord structure to the higher sequence of discriminable episodes in the work. We don't know enough yet to analyze a single work in a non circular way.
I recommend another Nicholas Cook book Music Imagination and Culture.
Maury, you have obviously thought a great deal about music analysis at the professional level. I always enjoyed analyzing compositions, but I am in the process of taking it to a higher level. As part of that process I am going to analyze a recent composition that I think I wrote long enough ago that I can approach it from the outside.
Very sagacious comments! Especially about melody. I was astonished to discover that, despite the salience of melody, theorists hardly have a word to say about it.
the way Leonard B Meyer put it is musical analysis has been stuck at the level of attempting to reverse-engineer the rules of a football or baseball game without having any reference to the rulebook. In many cases we have treatises that describe the practical outworkings of specific styles but what those practical guidelines won't tell us is WHY those theories are applied in practice. He likened most theory and analysis books to radio repair manuals that don't spend any time telling you about the principles of electricity and electromagnetic energies that make radios possible.
Bob Snyder's Music and Memory gets a little bit into how short and long-term memory and cognition let our brains group sounds into smaller and larger units of memory but he seems to stick more to that bare level of cognition and musical organization without getting into melody. That said, Meyer and Snyder and others who float the idea that to understand melody we may need to know more about brain functionality seems like it at least is a field of study that has room to grow.
The engineering everything from the applied theory side of things in musical practice doesn't seem to have produced much that sticks with a lot of people.
Yes melody was rationalized as the florid voice in the tonal harmonic structure. Analysts now use motives instead of course which has a certain logic as often particular short motives are used in various forms and concatenations in writing a melody. However that is not really analyzing the total form of every melody as the motives are by definition something common to almost all composers. It is precise;y the concatenation and elaboration that are specific.
If it were me I would analyze melody according to its memorability and perceived emotional affect but that is leaving the musical domain of analysis for psychology and cultural norms. However that seems to be the purpose composers employ melody for most of the time.
I had a theory professor that proposed that theory and analysis was "composition in retrograde." But it really isn't. For one thing, composition is most certainly not "analysis in retrograde." The analogy is to something like technological products which someone steals and then "reverse engineers." That doesn't seem to work for music. Not good music, anyway.
Analysis would only seem to be composition in retrograde for people who don't write music. I find analysis and composition are intertwined threads of thought. I was revisiting a book by Elaine R Sisman called Haydn and Classical Variation where she described how there was a shift from 17th through 19th century composition manuals that evolved broadly from points of style to theories of gestural embellishment through to phrase-level and theme-level theories up to macrostructural formulas and plans in the 19th century. As more and more aspects of style tended to be taken as given there was more of a focus on getting the "picture" as big as possible. In the 18th century, Sisman wrote, there was less of a tendency to view a minuet, a variation movement and a sonata form as divided by some chasm predicated on form and that Riepel and Koch in particular argued that you basically have to start at the minuet, get through mastering variations and then get to the symphonic big movements but that all the things you need to know about craft and design you learn in the smaller and more "trivial" forms.
This sounds rather like the basic approach of my last theory teacher, Bill Caplin, who does a lot with theme types and formal function.
I loved William Caplin's Classical Forms, which I learned about through Kyle Gann's blog. Caplin's work has been pretty influential in the last ten years. I've been making reference to a number of his concepts incubating my project on ragtime and sonata forms. Caplin's great for the structural building blocks stuff and Hepokoski & Darcy's Elements of Sonata Form is good at laying out the diversity of syntactic scripts available in 18th century music, even if they skew more Mozart and Beethoven at the expense of Haydn or even Clementi and Hummel than I would personally prefer.
I did a graduate seminar with Bill Caplin titled "Non-classical theme types" in which, after reviewing the theory as it applied to classical themes, we saw how it might apply to non-classical ones. My role was to examine various pieces by Bach from this perspective, another student took on Liszt. Interesting class.
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