Musical analysis
One of the best known and most influential was Heinrich Schenker, who developed Schenkerian analysis, a method that seeks to describe all tonal classical works as elaborations ("prolongations") of a simple contrapuntal sequence.
Rudolph Réti is notable for tracing the development of small melodic motifs through a work,[citation needed] while Nicolas Ruwet's analysis amounts to a kind of musical semiology.
Fred Lerdahl[10] argues that discretization is necessary even for perception by learned listeners, thus making it a basis of his analyses, and finds pieces such as Artikulation by György Ligeti inaccessible,[11][verification needed] while Rainer Wehinger[12] created a "Hörpartitur" or "score for listening" for the piece, representing different sonorous effects with specific graphic symbols much like a transcription.
The greatest analysts are those with the keenest ears; their insights reveal how a piece of music should be heard, which in turn implies how it should be played.
An analysis is a direction for performance,"[5] and Thomson: "It seems only reasonable to believe that a healthy analytical point of view is that which is so nearly isomorphic with the perceptual act.
[25] Jean Molino[26][incomplete short citation] shows that musical analysis shifted from an emphasis upon the poietic vantage point to an esthesic one at the beginning of the eighteenth century.
Impressionistic analyses are in "a more or less high-literary style, proceeding from an initial selection of elements deemed characteristic," such as the following description of the opening of Claude Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun: "The alternation of binary and ternary divisions of the eighth notes, the sly feints made by the three pauses, soften the phrase so much, render it so fluid, that it escapes all arithmetical rigors.
It floats between heaven and earth like a Gregorian chant; it glides over signposts marking traditional divisions; it slips so furtively between various keys that it frees itself effortlessly from their grasp, and one must await the first appearance of a harmonic underpinning before the melody takes graceful leave of this causal atonality".
[28][incomplete short citation] Paraphrases are a "respeaking" in plain words of the events of the text with little interpretation or addition, such as the following description of the "Bourée" of Bach's Third Suite: "An anacrusis, an initial phrase in D major.
"[29][incomplete short citation] "Hermeneutic reading of a musical text is based on a description, a 'naming' of the melody's elements, but adds to it a hermeneutic and phenomenological depth that, in the hands of a talented writer, can result in genuine interpretive masterworks.... All the illustrations in Abraham's and Dahlhaus's Melodielehre (1972) are historical in character; Rosen's essays in The Classical Style (1971)[30] seek to grasp the essence of an epoch's style; Meyer's analysis of Beethoven's Farewell Sonata[31][incomplete short citation] penetrates melody from the vantage point of perceived structures."
He gives as a last example the following description of Franz Schubert's Unfinished Symphony: "The transition from first to second subject is always a difficult piece of musical draughtsmanship; and in the rare cases where Schubert accomplishes it with smoothness, the effort otherwise exhausts him to the verge of dullness (as in the slow movement of the otherwise great A minor Quartet).
Linear models ... describe a corpus by means of a system of rules encompassing not only the hierarchical organization of the melody, but also the distribution, environment, and context of events, examples including the explanation of 'succession of pitches in New Guinean chants in terms of distributional constraints governing each melodic interval' by Chenoweth[33] the transformational analysis by Herndon,[34] and the 'grammar for the soprano part in Bach's chorales [which,] when tested by computer ... allows us to generate melodies in Bach's style' by Baroni and Jacoboni.
[35][This quote needs a citation] Global models are further distinguished as analysis by traits, which "identify the presence or absence of a particular variable, and makes a collective image of the song, genre, or style being considered by means of a table, or classificatory analysis, which sorts phenomena into classes," one example being "trait listing" by Helen Roberts,[36] and classificatory analysis, which "sorts phenomena into classes," examples being the universal system for classifying melodic contours by Kolinski.
These include Schenker, Meyer (classification of melodic structure),[39][incomplete short citation] Narmour, and Lerdahl-Jackendoff's "use of graphics without appealing to a system of formalized rules," complementing and not replacing the verbal analyses.
For instance, the first two bars of the prelude to Claude Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande: are analyzed differently by Leibowitz[43] Laloy,[44] van Appledorn,[45] and Christ.
Blacking gives as example: "everyone disagrees hotly and stakes his [or her] academic reputation on what Mozart really meant in this or that bar of his symphonies, concertos, or quartets.
As Jean-Claude Gardin so rightly remarks, 'no physicist, no biologist is surprised when asked to indicate, in the context of a new theory, the physical data and the mental operations that led to its formulation'.
