I. General 2. The nature of musical analysis

2. The nature of musical analysis.
The primary impulse of analysis is an empirical one: to get to grips with something on its own terms rather than in terms of other things. Its starting-point is a phenomenon itself rather than external factors (such as biographical facts, political events, social conditions, educational methods and all the other factors that make up the environment of that phenomenon). But like all artistic media, music presents a problem, inherent in the nature of its material. Music is not tangible and measurable as is a liquid or a solid for chemical analysis. The subject of a musical analysis has to be determined; whether it is the score itself, or at least the sound-image that the score projects; or the sound-image in the composer’s mind at the moment of composition; or an interpretative performance; or the listener’s temporal experience of a performance. All these categories are possible subjects for analysis. There is no agreement among analysts that one is more ‘correct’ than others, only that the score (when available) provides a reference point from which the analyst reaches out towards one sound-image or another.

Analysis is the means of answering directly the question ‘How does it work?’. Its central activity is comparison. By comparison it determines the structural elements and discovers the functions of those elements. Comparison is common to all kinds of musical analysis – feature analysis, formal analysis, functional analysis, Schenkerian analysis, pitch-class set analysis, style analysis and so on: comparison of unit with unit, whether within a single work, or between two works, or between the work and an abstract ‘model’ such as sonata form or arch form. The central analytical act is thus the test for identity. And out of this arises the measurement of amount of difference, or degree of similarity. These two operations serve together to illuminate the three fundamental form-building processes: recurrence, contrast and variation.

This is a highly ‘purified’ portrayal of analysis, impartial, objective, yielding the answer ‘It works this way …’ rather than ‘It works well’ or ‘It works badly’. In reality the analyst works with the preconceptions of his culture, age and personality. Thus the preoccupation which the 19th century had with the nature of ‘genius’ led to the phrasing of the initial question not as ‘How does it work?’ but as ‘What makes this great?’, and this remained the initial question for some analytical traditions in the 20th century. Since the ‘scientific’, comparative method was predominant over evaluation in such traditions, and since only works of genius possessed the quality of structural coherence, it followed that comparison of a work with an idealized model of structure or process produced a measure of its greatness.

This is only one example of many. The history of musical analysis in §II below inevitably recounts the application of intellectual outlooks from successive ages to musical material: the principles of rhetoric, the concepts of organism and evolution, the subconscious mind, monism, probability theory, structuralism, post-structuralism and so forth. Ultimately, the very existence of an observer – the analyst – pre-empts the possibility of total objectivity. No single method or approach reveals the truth about music above all others.