Musical Analysis - Analyses

Analyses

Some analysts, such as Donald Francis Tovey (whose Essays in Musical Analysis are among the most accessible musical analyses) have presented their analyses in prose. Others, such as Hans Keller (who devised a technique he called Functional Analysis) used no prose commentary at all in some of their work.

There have been many notable analysts other than Tovey and Keller. One of the best known and most influential was Heinrich Schenker, who developed Schenkerian analysis, a method which seeks to reduce all tonal classical works to a simple contrapuntal sequence. Ernst Kurth coined the term of 'developmental motif'. Rudolph Réti is notable for tracing the development of small melodic motifs through a work, while Nicolas Ruwet's analysis amounts to a kind of musical semiology.

Musicologists associated with the new musicology often use musical analysis (traditional or not) along with or to support their examinations of the performance practice and social situations in which music is produced and which produce music, and vice versus. The insights gained from the social considerations may then yield insight into the methods of analysis, and vice versa.

Edward Cone ("Analysis Today") argues that musical analysis lies in between description and prescription. Description consists of simple non-analytical activities such as labeling chords with Roman numerals or tone-rows with integers or row-form, while the other extreme, prescription, consists of "the insistence upon the validity of relationships not supported by the text." Analysis must, rather, provide insight into listening without forcing a description of a piece that cannot be heard.