Musical Analysis

Feldman wrote:

So what does musical analysis give us? The study of sketches has allowed us to understand that while Haydn started from the theme and then developed it, Beethoven organized the form and structure of the piece simultaneously with the theme, planned the development, and based on certain choices made modifications to the theme and adapted it to the logic of his piece.... therefore analysis allows us to understand the HOW, not just the WHY of a certain strategic choice.

Does analyzing not mean understanding what the relationships are between the different elements of a large-scale composition and nothing more?7

I believe there is a substantial difference between pure description and analysis.

Studying sketches and performing musical analysis on the finished piece are different things. Today, many aim to integrate them, even though "methodologically" they also make sense as pure disciplines. I might be very interested in knowing how Beethoven constructed his compositions, but musical analysis of the finished composition explains to me how those compositions worked yesterday and today, how they are perceived, and for what reason Beethoven wanted to arrive at that finished product. The sketches unravel the path of the method he used to get there. But while musical analysis, being a synchronic discipline, finds "always valid" data and arguments (a statement to be taken with a grain of salt), the study of sketches, being a diachronic discipline—or rather, a historical one—is always subject to changing its course (due to the discovery of new sketches, the falsification of the authorship of existing ones, or other obscure philological mechanisms).

This is also to clarify that musical analysis and the study of sketches are different things, not interchangeable, with different methodologies and purposes. Schenker did not want to understand the creative process; rather, he wanted to demonstrate a formal, syntactic, "musical" theory, in a broad sense, according to which there are universal structures underlying most compositions in the tonal system. Awareness of these structures helps to understand the form of finished compositions and directs the listening and enjoyment of these compositions. Schenkerian reductions do not presume to speak of the creative and compositional process; they are, quite simply, analyses of the finished work.

Thallo, I struggle a bit with your sharp terminology and rich methodology of exposition.

Just to understand a little more, the lesson on Beethoven proposed two posts ago by Feldman, in which of the 2 cases of your discourse does it fit?

Replying to Thallo:

Your point of view is that of a musicologist, and I have the utmost respect for your thinking and for your aims in carrying out a specific analysis.

The problem is that I do not want to analyze to generate musicological reflections on the History of musical evolution through the centuries, but simply to understand how the logic of pieces composed by composers of the past works so that I can use such knowledge in the present, when I write my own music.

So if I perform an analysis, I do it for the sake of writing, exactly as a writer forms their grammatical, syntactic, and logical vocabulary by reading many books of many genres and authors (a literary scholar would do so for different purposes, and therefore with certainly different methodologies, at least regarding some aspects related to the goal of the work).

The fact is that if I take any piece and do not have the sketches available, I can still empathize with the person who wrote it by starting from the beginning and understanding what relationships exist. If these relationships are used multiple times throughout the piece through processes of evolution and contextualized in every formal event, all I have to do is understand the how and why of such logical links. In this way, I can reconstruct the compositional process. It is true that if Beethoven, to generate a theme, started from one version and made many to arrive at the final one (I think this happened with the first theme of the Eroica, correct me if I am wrong), I need notes that prove it.

But what I want to say, and I reiterate, is that I can understand the how and why of certain compositional choices and relationships which, when placed in a chronological context from the beginning to the end of the piece, allow me to have a clear idea of the procedures. I don't know if you have heard Ligeti's words.... if we can assert that in Beethoven there is a rigid logical structure made of strategic choices, does it mean that it is possible to reconstruct a path, or not?

It would be interesting to dust off Franco Donatoni's thought in this regard

Frank wrote:

It would be interesting to dust off Franco Donatoni's thought on this matter

Donatoni was famous for his analytical acumen and for the way he taught it to his students. He, exactly like other teachers who studied in his class (I am thinking, for example, of Solbiati), based analysis on identification to understand the how and the why (thus understanding relationships by making them derive from previous ones, etc.), how to contextualize choices within a precise rule with its amendments, and above all, the practical phase of stylistic imitation in order to be able to apply what has been assimilated through analysis.

I should nonetheless dust off the initial interview of DONATONI edited by Restagno (EDT ed.) where he speaks about Beethoven's sketches and the great work that lies behind a simple theme...

I understand your point of view too, especially now that you have stated it completely. I limited myself to making very broad disciplinary distinctions, because both analysis and the study of sketches can be used for different purposes.

I haven't had the chance to see the video yet, I'm sorry, but the point you mentioned—the idea that through analysis you formalize the piece, even empathizing with the composer, and from those formalizations you draw inspiration for your compositional path—in a disciplinary sense has less to do with analysis and more with your compositional method. With due differences, it is similar to the compositional process of many spectralist compositions: one takes the spectrogram of an instrument and derives useful elements for a new composition. To a spectralist composer this seems obvious, but in reality, the spectrogram of a trumpet note does not originate as a compositional "starting point." In the same way that the analysis of a Beethoven composition is not done to obtain compositional ideas (or is not done "only" for that). You have the sacrosanct right to look at sketches and compositions and to use this kind of Stanislavski method of composition, but it is likely that, in this way, you will prefer some analytical methods over others, giving weight to certain data while ignoring others, because if you give a PURPOSE to analysis, its neutral description is lost! If you, due to your aesthetic choices, are someone very tied to the techniques of thematic development (just another example), then I would probably consider formal analyses secondary. Those "insiders" easily recognize analyses made by composers versus analyses made by musicologists. There are excellent and terrible examples of analyses made by anyone, but generally, composers question the technical-musical mechanism (harmonic successions, formal originality, etc.), while generally, musicologists strive to create historical systems (this was something everyone did and is typical of that period). Contemporary music, moreover, has truly changed everything... and even ancient music!

Your comment is fantastic, thank you for the reply.

Yes, I understand better now what you meant in your previous posts, but I still think that a predilection for thematic development (always as an example) would never lead me to overlook, ignore, or otherwise consider formal analysis secondary, because the composer's point of view is one of relationship, not description... so I would consider form related to harmony, and harmony related to thematicism. In this way, every aspect of the composition is equally important.

I don't know which Analysis methodologies you are referring to; for now, the one I know is: describing what I see to understand its characteristics, then assigning a function to each element (on every scale) and moving on to the "how," that is, tracing back to the previous relationship that necessitates the presence of that element instead of another. In the Viennese sonata style, for example, if I identify a generating motive with well-connoted features inscribed within it (intervallic ratios, rhythmic ones, etc.), then I have nothing left to do but move forward and understand if those ratios are still used and where they are used.... in this way I realize that composer "x" did this, that, and that, and above all, I wonder why they did it and under what conditions.

In this way I can understand their journey, certainly not 100% real (I would have to take a time machine and spy on them through the window while they compose)

but certainly correct, corresponding to the reality of the facts.

As far as contemporary music is concerned, I don't know who you are referring to. If you are talking about the avant-garde, then the discussion changes quite a bit, but if we are talking about the 70s/80s period, then it changes very little!

I wrote my graduation thesis on 1960s minimalist music, the kind that many consider extremely easy and almost unanalyzable (because it yields banal results). To make something out of nothing, I was "forced" to change analysis methods, ignoring harmony and melody, for example, and trying to link musical data to significant consequences in another way... Analyzing Philip Glass's "Music in Fifths," a composition made of two parallel lines at the distance of a fifth that go up and down by stepwise motion on five notes (do re mi fa sol fa mi re do, basically), I fragmented the composition into modules, reduced it as if each module could be expressed with an algebraic monomial, reconstructed a formal structure according to simple criteria of addition, subtraction, and hybridization, and from this reduction, I derived temporal implications: a complex discourse on temporal vectors, on the "direction" of musical time, on perceived teleology, and on how rhythmic and melodic repetitions have different but complementary functions. Everything I derived is unorthodox; it was the fruit of creativity.

Here and elsewhere, we have already discussed strange types of musical analysis, applied especially to avant-garde repertoire. Set theory is a non-immediate way of accounting for "objective data," but if set theory has often been used in the same way you say you use classical musical analysis (that is, as a model to later recreate original compositions, see Milton Babbitt), there are analytical methods that are virtually inapplicable to composition. Statistical analysis, for example. It is used mainly in early music, for cantus planus repertoires, where we have so few clues that knowing "how many times" a note is used in sequence with another, or an interval in sequence with another, is already a great deal. Statistical analysis is a simple and "anti-musical" way of deriving data; a composer would probably never think to "count" the incidence of a chord within a composer's corpus, but for someone who wants to understand, I don't know, how much the ninth was actually present in a certain polyphonic corpus, developing statistical patterns is the best way.

thallo wrote:

Statistical analysis is a simple and "anti-musical" way to derive data; a composer would probably never think of "counting" the incidence of a chord in a composer's corpus, but for someone who wants to understand, I don't know, how much the ninth was actually present in a certain polyphonic corpus, developing statistical patterns is the best way.

Does it hit the weighted scale? Right?

http://www.pianoconcerto.it/forum/index.php?/topic/615-la-scala-ponderata/

Thallo what do you mean by set theory? How does it work?

Feldman wrote:

Thallo what do you mean by set theory? How does it work?

Practical example...

http://www.pianoconcerto.it/forum/index.php?/topic/698-analisi-lied-di-luciano-berio/

Feldman wrote:

Thallo what do you mean by set theory? How does it work?

I created this topic

http://www.pianoconcerto.it/forum/index.php?/topic/1595-pitch-class-set-theory/