Musical Analysis - Divergent Analyses

Divergent Analyses

Typically a given work is analyzed by more than one person and different or divergent analyses are created. For instance, the first two bars of the prelude to Claude Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande:

are analyzed differently by Leibowitz, Laloy, van Appledorn, and Christ. Leibowitz analyses this succession harmonically as D minor:I-VII-V, ignoring melodic motion, Laloy analyses the succession as D:I-V, seeing the G in the second measure as an ornament, and both van Appledorn and Christ analyses the succession as D:I-VII.

Nattiez (173) argues that this divergence is due to the analysts' respective analytic situations, and to what he calls transcendent principles (1997b: 853, what George Holton might call "themata"), the "philosophical project", "underlying principles", or a prioris of analyses, one example being Nattiez's use of the tripartitional definition of sign, and what, after epistemological historian Paul Veyne, he calls plots.

Van Appledorn sees the succession as D:I-VII so as to allow the interpretation of the first chord in measure five, which Laloy sees as a dominant seventh on D (V/IV) with a diminished fifth (despite that the IV doesn't arrive till measure twelve), while van Appledorn sees it as a French sixth on D, D-F#-Ab- in the usual second inversion. This means that D is the second degree and the required reference to the first degree, C, being established by the D:VII or C major chord. "The need to explain the chord in measure five establishes that C-E-G is 'equally important' as the D-(F)-A of measure one." Leibowitz gives only the bass for chord, E indicating the progression I-II an "unreal" progression in keeping with his "dialectic between the real and the unreal" used in the analysis, while Christ explains the chord as an augmented eleventh with a bass of Bb, interpreting it as a traditional tertian extended chord.

Not only does an analyst select particular traits, they arrange them according to a plot .... Our sense of the component parts of a musical work, like our sense of historical 'facts,' is mediated by lived experience." (176)

While John Blacking (1973: 17-18), among others, holds that "there is ultimately only one explanation and ... this could be discovered by a context-sensitive analysis of the music in culture," according to Nattiez (1990: 168) and others, "there is never only one valid musical analysis for any given work." Blacking gives as example: "everyone disagrees hotly and stakes his academic reputation on what Mozart really meant in this or that bar of his symphonies, concertos, or quartets. If we knew exactly what went on inside Mozart's mind when he wrote them, there could be only one explanation". (93) However, Nattiez points out that even if we could determine "what Mozart was thinking" we would still be lacking an analysis of the neutral and esthesic levels.

Roger Scruton (1978: 175-76), in a review of Nattiez's Fondements, says one may, "describe it as you like so long as you hear it correctly ... certain descriptions suggest wrong ways of hearing it ... what is obvious to hear is the contrast in mood and atmosphere between the 'modal' passage and the bars which follow it." Nattiez counters that if compositional intent were identical to perception, "historians of musical language could take a permanent nap.... Scruton sets himself up as a universal, absolute conscience for the 'right' perception of the Pélleas et Mélisande. But hearing is an active symbolic process (which must be explained): nothing in perception is self-evident."

Thus Nattiez suggests that analyses, especially those intending "a semiological orientation, should ... at least include a comparative critique of already-written analyses, when they exist, so as to explain why the work has taken on this or that image constructed by this or that writer: all analysis is a representation; an explanation of the analytical criteria used in the new analysis, so that any critique of this new analysis could be situated in relation to that analysis's own objectives and methods. 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' (1974: 69). Making one's procedures explicit would help to create a cumulative progress in knowledge." (177)