Musical Analysis - Analytical Situations

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:

(Nattiez 1990: 140)

Examples:

1. "...tackles only the immanent configuration of the work." Allen Forte's musical set theory
2. "...proceed from an analysis of the neutral level to drawing conclusions about the poietic." Reti's (1951: 194-206) analysis of Debussy's la Cathédrale 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)