On the Musicological Necessity of Musical Analysis

Abstract

Assessing musical analysis’s prospects in 2004, Kofi Agawu struck a tone of cautious optimism.1 Noting that the new musicology’s critical “bid for power” had subsided into an uneasy truce, Agawu diagnosed “a sharply delineated pluralism,” in which the increasingly aged new musicology coexisted with a theoretical renaissance he called the “New American Music Theory,” a diverse movement encompassing neo-Riemannian theory, the new Formenlehre, a rejuvenated Schenkerian theory, novel approaches to the history of theory, growing interest in cognition and perception, fresh attitudes to the theory of rhythm, and a distinctive embrace of World music and non-canonical repertoire.2 Speculating about the future, Agawu observed that “these and other formalist ventures are alive and very well, and have as good a chance of survival as any other musicological practices.”3 The fifteen subsequent years have, in one sense, validated Agawu’s prognosis: the fields under the new theory’s banner have flourished and acquired siblings in diverse areas, including the analysis of pop music, music and emotion, Romantic form, topic theory, and musical narrativity.4 The question of how the new theory interacts with the now-old new musicology, however, remains underinvestigated. Although Agawu noted a grudging musicological acceptance of the pluralist settlement,5 the periodic commentary that musicologists have offered since the turn of the millennium suggests that the cessation of hostilities results more from a belief in total victory than an acknowledgment of the pluralist world order. The idea that analysis now exists as little more than a defunct ideology’s lingering shadow continues to be an enabling musicological thesis, notwithstanding analysis’s manifest vitality.

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