Analyzing Music under the New Musicological Regime

Abstract

Analysis has always played a role in musicology. The analytical process, writes Arnold Whittall, and echoing a generation of structuralists, two-fold: to identify various materials of a composition, and to define ways in which they function.' Thus defined, analysis is indispensable to a discipline that takes 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 experience of music. Attending to archive (not canon) of musical works is, however, impossible without analytical mediation, itself propped up by an explicit or-more likely-implicit theory. Analysis plays an even more central role in 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,

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