Nicolas Ruwet (31 December 1932 – 15 November 2001) was a Belgian linguist, literary critic and musical analyst.
Later he studied with Claude Lévi-Strauss and later still with Noam Chomsky and Roman Jakobson, both influences,[1] at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Ruwet is best known for his work as a linguist and critic, but he was also a significant figure in musical analysis.
He attempted to make his analyses completely objective by not making any a priori assumptions about how the music worked, instead breaking the piece down into small parts and seeing how those parts related to each other, thus discovering the syntax of the piece without reference to any external sources or norms.
His work in this field constitutes a kind of musical semiology and his analytical methods were later named paradigmatic analysis.