Year: 1996
Type: article
Abstract: Analysis has always played a role in musicology."The analytical process," writes Arnold Whittall, and echoing a generation of structuralists, "is two-fold: to identify the various materials of a composition, and to define the ways in which they function."(1) Thus defined, analysis is indispensable to a discipline that takes the musical object as its point of departure.Not all branches of musicology demand a vigorous deployment of analytical techniques.And this is in part because not all branches of musicology are directly concerned with the experience of music.Attending to the archive (not canon) of musical works is, however, impossible without analytical mediation, itself propped up by an explicit or-more likely-implicit theory.[2] Analysis plays an even more central role in the discipline of Music Theory.Traditionally defined, theory undertakes to codify "the various materials of a composition" and to exemplify their functioning in a range of works; it insists that its methods meet explicitly stated criteria of coherence; and it often proclaims aesthetic preferences, though not always directly.In a little-known essay published posthumously, Adorno reflects upon the potential of music analysis.Reading notation, for example, requires "an analytical act"; analysis is "the prerequisite for an adequate performance", and aesthetic theories on music are "inconceivable without analysis."Perhaps most important of all, analysis "has to do with the surplus [das Mehr] in art," this surplus being the "truth content" of a work in so far as it goes beyond the mere facts."No analysis," Adorno writes, "is of any value if it does not terminate in the truth content of the work, and this, for its part, is mediated through the work's technical structure".(2) [3] Not all areas of theory need analysis, but by and large the majority of scholars who regard themselves as 'theorists' or 'analysts' or 'practicing analysts' are often engaged in a more or less systematic inquiry into the structure of 'the music itself.'Analysis allows practitioners to come to grips with "the detail of a musical whole."(3) Its rewards, like those of musical performance, stem from a hands-on experience.Although it makes claims about knowledge (here the differences between analysis and theory are noteworthy), an analysis does not merely produce a detached set of results available in verbal form.This is neither to mystify the analytical process nor to claim for it transcendent status; it is rather to remind us of the easily forgotten fact that there are different kinds of musical knowledge, and that these are constituted in a complex variety of ways.[4] Analysis, finally, is a relatively young discipline.According to Ian Bent, analysis "as a pursuit in its own right, came to be established only in the late 19th century."(4) Although codified analytical methods date back at least to the eighteenth
Source: Music Theory Online
DOI: 10.30535/mto.2.4.1
Author: Kofi Agawu
Institution: Yale University
Language: English
Subfield: Music
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4391830216