Assignment on Tristan und Isolde - Prelude

Submitted by Zhuqing Hu on Saturday, 5/5/2012, at 12:12 AM

Assignment for Wagner's Tristan und Isolde Prelude

Listen to the Prelude. The sound fild combines the Prelude with the finale, Isolde's Liebestod. You can stop at around 9:52. The orchestral score is here: http://conquest.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/f/f8/IMSLP20351-PMLP03546-Wagner_Tristan_und_Isolde_Vorspiel_fs.pdf

Listen also to Isolde's Liebestod (a vocal version as a separate sound file). The socre: http://erato.uvt.nl/files/imglnks/usimg/e/ee/IMSLP20353-PMLP03546-Wagner_Tristan_und_Isolde_Liebestod_fs.pdf

Read the opera's synopsis http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/O905152 . I will not be summarizing the opera's story during my presentation.

Watch the final parts of Scene V, Act I: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4skF3PAhM (consult the synopsis if you are not sure what is going on here).

Answer the following questions, after listening to the Prelude, the Liebestod, and consulting the scores.

(1) What key is the Prelude in? What supports your reading?

(2) What are the major cadences in this Prelude?

(3) What are the major motivic units? How are they related to each other?

(4) What is the connection between the Prelude and the Liebestod? Why are they often performed "back-to-back?"

(5) What is the connection between the Prelude and Scene V, Act I? What does this connection tell us?

Post your answers (short, 1-2 sentences teach) to the course blog no latter than 10:00 P.M. on Sunday, May 6th. (See I am pretty lenient).

Revised (and shortened) definition of analysis

Submitted by Joseph John Taff on Tuesday, 4/17/2012, at 11:00 AM

The term “analysis” refers to any attempt to characterize the thoughts, feelings, and moods evoked by a piece of music, and to explain them in terms of specific techniques used in the composition and the performance of the piece.  This process also involves examining compositional and performance techniques in light of their historical context, and often ventures into descriptions of how a given piece shows the evolution of such techniques over time.  Frequently, analyses also include discussions of what claims we can legitimately make about the expressive content of the piece, that is, about how (if at all) we can bridge the gap between descriptions of musical characteristics and descriptions of emotional or affective characteristics.  That is to say, analysis feels obligated, it its more philosophical branches, to justify the very asking of its central question: how to form a bridge between gut reaction and musical device in a way that explains emotional reaction in terms of musical device without destroying its emotional significance in the process.

Analysis (revised)

Submitted by Ryland L. Richards on Monday, 4/16/2012, at 5:53 PM

(I still would like to separate "analysis" and "interpretation" into two distinct categories, but as no one else follows this rule and my definition is supposed to be widely applicable, I will forgo my own inclinations.)

Music analysis is 1) the practice of parsing music, which is by nature ambiguous, into explicit terms that describe its structure; 2) designating the expressive functions of specific musical facts within a piece; and 3) figuring out how the piece works as a whole. To accomplish these aims, a music analyst may draw on relationships inside a piece or on the way the piece it fits (or does not fit) into patterns set by other music. Indeed, he or she must often draw on both to produce a useful and comprehensive analysis.

Analytical approaches differ most frequently in their pursuit of the third aim enumerated above. Organicism, for example, portrays pieces of music as growing from simple building blocks into a much more complex entity whose features, while they can be picked out and isolated for the purposes of recognizing them, depend on their interactions with each other; each feature must be taken in context with the entire piece. Narrativity strives to relate the progression of a piece to the telling of a story, although the location of narrator, characters, events, and setting in music is a prickly and nebulous question.

The second aim is perhaps not as disputed, but it gives rise to much discussion all the same. What does music express, at any given point or as a whole song? How do we know, or how do we construct our best guess? What, exactly, in the music has the ability to express?

In the 19th century specifically, many composers were beginning to break from traditional tonality and form, as one can see from the harmonic or structural analyses of 19th-century music. Thus, these novel motions become the foci of interpretation. An analyst must attempt to figure out what the new gestures mean, considering they often do not have precedents, and how their foreignness affects the impression that the piece leaves on the listener.

Concise

Submitted by Henrik O. Onarheim on Monday, 4/16/2012, at 5:00 PM

Music Analysis (19th century) – the act of ‘explaining’ a composition.  Theories, methods, and devices vary widely amongst musicologists on how best to manage this ‘explanation’.  A more formal analysis of chords and tonal functionality is often the starting point before for an attempt to locate interconnectivity in music or elements of narrativity.  The project of music analysis arises from the acknowledged expressiveness of music.  While nearly everyone – uneducated listener, music theory professor – agrees that music has expressive potential, the music analyst must determine what is expressed, who does the expressing, and how the expressing is done.  Even these most fundamental questions cause heated debate and involve often contentious assumptions.  This is no doubt why the field generates such interest despite seemingly low stakes – after all, music can leave indelible effects on listeners, and accounting for these effects add as much to our knowledge of humanity as of music.

 

 

A Far Cry from a Grove Entry

Submitted by Jenna Iden on Monday, 4/16/2012, at 4:16 PM

[In this re-write, I stood by many elements of my original post’s overview, though I now have far more specifics to support it.]

To analyze a written excerpt in an English class, you break down rhetoric to particular arrangements of words, sounds, and grammatical decisions in an attempt to understand and recreate their original impact. The emotional value of language can be sewn back together, metaphor reattached to meter and rhyme, in an attempt to understand its initial power. Music analysis makes this attempt with even less tangible elements. Chords and rhythms are called upon to explain a guttural response to a particular musical moment. Key areas can be settings, character development. Successful music analysis discerns what makes a piece live and breathe without simply butchering the work, clinically removing the expressive content. Analysis begins with the big picture, focuses in on the mechanical details, then labors to attach those smaller details to their larger impact. 

In 19th century analysis, the crafting of a musical story heavily influences analysis. Schubert’s and Schumann’s sets of Lieder rely heavily on their texts, allowing their music to embody the story professed in words. Careful attention to key relationships, interaction of instruments, and melodic and rhythmic content can support analysis, wedding formal musical elements to more easily understood text. The flat VI and Neapolitan chords especially play a role in the music of the time; the flat VI (the dominant of the Neapolitan) seems impossibly foreign, a dramatic change that reappears again and again in 19th century works. The late 1980s yielded a narrative approach based on the formalist and structuralist thought of the time.  This creation of narratives transfers the analysis of character and text from the Lieder to purely instrumental work. As with any approach, wholehearted religious adherence is undesirable. Narrative is an entryway to talking about the horizontal arc of a work in particularly emotional terms. A combination of all approaches should present a nuanced view of analyzed music, an attention to detail and the entire work at once. 

So what is it that we've been trying to do all semester?

Submitted by Beccie M. Magnus on Monday, 4/16/2012, at 4:12 PM

Music analysis is the process by which people attempt to explore and express why music works the way it does and why it affects the listener in a particular way. This process may include an examination of the form, harmony, themes and thematic relations, and many other technical aspects of a piece, seeking to create an account of how these elements interact to inspire some kind of emotional reaction. These methods of technical analysis may expand to include investigation of the development of certain themes or gestures over the course of the piece, interrelations and transitions between different sections of a piece, etc., and may ultimately lead into more abstract characterizations of the piece in an attempt to articulate the effect that a piece has.

People may choose to interpret their reaction in terms of its narrative or emotional content, but in order to move beyond an individual and private relation with a given piece to come up with a more general account of the way(s) a piece works, there must be some consensus about what in fact the effects are. If this consensus is not reached, then it will be naturally impossible to agree on how any effects are produced. This means that in the public sphere, successful analysis relies heavily on successful articulation of things that are inherently musical—rather than linguistic—in origin. As such, certain methods of analysis may be more useful on a personal basis, in order to augment an individual understanding, but others may be more conducive to establishing this linguistic common ground that is necessary to be able to share communication about—and therefore appreciation of—music.

Analysis

Submitted by Robert M. Suits on Monday, 4/16/2012, at 1:22 PM

Musical analysis is the study of how music works, and the attempt to put those ideas into writing.

Among the most important directions of inquiry in the first field are why and how the music itself has the power to express emotion of some kind, and how music can impart a story to the listener. To this end, analysts use individual works by acclaimed composers and examine them on a technical level -- how the melody, harmony, timbre, rhythm, form, and other aspects interact to express or narrate. Such examination can take place on a number of levels: a very localized treatment of how a single musical aspect develops through a piece or the effect of a few measures on the larger whole of a piece, or a larger-scale attempt to understand the piece as a unified whole.

The second aspect -- that of communication -- is perhaps the more difficult of the two. Music is traditionally one of the most difficult media to translate into other media, for it affects a non-visual sense in an abstract but extremely specific way, imparting emotion and images directly into the mind of a listener, but ultimately with very different effects depending on the performance, setting, and audience. Analysis typically uses an imperfect mixture of technical description and metaphor to attempt to communicate the one analyst's reading and interpretation of a work to their readership.

In the end, the stated goal of such study is to better understand the musical artform and to formulate potential interpretations of historical or modern works.

Analysis (edited)

Submitted by Julian Cullen Budwey on Monday, 4/16/2012, at 1:20 PM

Since I still stand by a good portion of my original definition of analysis, I decided to edit my old version, adding some new thoughts and getting rid of things that I no longer agree with. Here's the edited version:

The word “analysis” comes from the ancient Greek word lyein, meaning, “to unfasten”. In a very literal sense, an analysis of something is a taking-apart of that thing. In analyzing something, one breaks a complex thing into its simpler parts. Analysis is an integral part of many different disciplines (e.g. philosophy, mathematics, literature, music, etc.), and bears a slightly different shade of meaning in each discipline. However, in all cases, analysis involves breaking down a complex subject to better understand it.

Analysis of music involves taking apart a musical work and examining it. Very often, this process begins with a question about why a piece evokes a certain reaction from the listener. The analysis frequently involves examining the harmonic structure of the work. Other sorts of structures and details can be worked out of the piece and similarly examined. This step involves the discovery of objective structural facts.

But while we may note these objective details, simply stating that a certain piece moves to the Neapolitan, however, in a certain measure is relatively meaningless to the listener. Noting that the move to the Neapolitan causes a feeling of disorientation is very meaningful. Thus, we move back to the original question, finding the connection between the objective musical facts and the subjective response of the listener.

There is no official method of analysis. Different methods have their benefits and some work better than others for different types of music. Certain types of analysis focus on the internal logic of a piece, while others look at the work as it stands in relation to others of its genre. Some methods of analysis include: organicism, narratology, and Shenkarian analysis.

Analysis 2

Submitted by Robert T. Flynn on Monday, 4/16/2012, at 12:06 PM

Analysis is, most broadly, uncovering what a musical work has to offer. It is often the process of relating the parts of a work to the whole, as is important in recognizing form and understanding organicist or narrative pieces. Composers often emphasize particular kernels of musical interest, intentionally or otherwise, that may be discovered through analysis. Finding such musical intricacies unique to any work offers the listener a means of engaging with it, a process by which he will find meaning and depth.

Analysis seeks to understand what a piece can do and how it does it, often dividing into several unique paths of interpretation. There is rarely a unianmous understanding of how a piece works, as where one listener may appreciate a piece's narrative capacity another may prefer its organicist composition. Analysis is then a process that varies between individuals, though it invariably achieves a sort of bond between the work and the individual. Written analysis can be understood as the account of such a bond's creation, or an explanation of what aspects of a piece cause a listener to assign it meaning.

Such ambiguity as to what constitutes "analysis" suggests that there can be no absolute analytic method, and that analytic practices will vary between pieces and even between listeners. Since the intricate meaning of a piece may be communicated through a whole number of musical devices, it is the job of several unique methods to surely discover meaning.

Definition of Analysis, take two

Submitted by Shenglan Qiao on Monday, 4/16/2012, at 10:59 AM

The analysis of a musical work involves reading and listening to it in great detail. The end product of such an exercise can be a more structured understanding of the expressions of music and how it achieves them. Because such understanding can be entirely subjective, the role of methods in the analysis of music is then to provide novel approaches to engage with music so that we can make previously undiscovered connections. Historically, the analysis of 19th-centhury music has been through many paradigmatic shifts. Many methods have been developed to guide musicologists’ understanding of the mechanics and hermeneutics of 19th-century music. Amongst them, the Schenkerian method focuses on the unique view that works that is tonal and exhibit mastery are projections in time of a single element: the tonic triad. Other methods focus on the expressive potential of music and its interpretation. For instance, the organic approach looks at a piece as an organic whole that grows out of a musical seed, an element that is the kernel of other thematic materials in the piece. Another perspective identifies thematic materials and the unique ways in which these materials are modified, disguised and developed. Finally, we can also take the narrative approach by comparing the structure and content of a work to those of a literal narrative. In short, the point of employing different methods to musical analysis is to reveal the richness and ambiguity of musical expressions.

Analysis

Submitted by Luca Antonucci on Monday, 4/16/2012, at 8:46 AM

In looking over what I wrote at the beginning of the semester, I find I still like it, and would like to let it stand as my dictionary entry. However, such an entry might have sub-articles, and this might be the one about nineteenth-century analysis:

1. The term “analysis,” with reference nineteenth-century Western Classical music, refers generally to the academic study of individual works of music. As opposed to “musicology,” or “music history,” “analysis” occupies itself with the technical aspects of the music itself, rather than the historical or cultural context, although these aspects of a piece’s nature do sometimes play a role. “Analysis” in a post-Schenkerian world has no agreed-upon methodology, although it is generally conceded that the examination and classification of harmonic, motivic, and structural-formal components of a work form the basis from which serious study begins. From this point, approaches vary, mostly featuring the creation of metaphors with which to describe a piece of music’s emotional and expressive content. Such metaphors include the concept of music as “narrative” or as other types of literary expression, which allow for “hermeneutical” interpretation, exploration of the subjective experience of listener or performer, or comparison with cultural influences on the composer. Analytical approaches often include examination of the work within the context of the time period or, more specifically, of the composer’s output, in which certain patterns or techniques can be detected (for instance, “developing variation” in Brahms or “topics” in the works of certain time periods). Thus “analysis” today actually comprises a mixture of theory (the technical aspects of a work), criticism (evaluation of the aesthetic or expressive content of a work), historiography, philosophy, and often even semantics. 

Lolz analysis

Submitted by Zhuqing Hu on Monday, 4/16/2012, at 12:21 AM

The analysis of a musical work starts with a question after listening to the work. Such a question ultimately addresses the piece itself instead of its background or context. It may pertain, however, to various different aspects of the piece. First, it can investigate how the piece stands on its own with its internal logic and structure. Tonal harmonies (especially, in the case of nineteenth-century, resistance of tonal clarity) and organicsm are helpful directions with this respect. Second, it can explore the various ways one can hear the piece unfolding in time with the aid of formal analyses. Third, it can look into how a piece of music can be heard, whether as a drama or a narrative, with theories of narratology and musical agencies.

The significant of musical analysis lies in its legitimating the abstract music as a valid piece of evidence relevant to other disciplines such as cultural history. Analytical familiarity with the piece opens up other possibilities of studying it. One can focus on its expressive potentials, its relation to the composer’s biography, the historical process of its creation, the history of its reception etc.

All musical analyses, however, are open-end engagements with the music that change each time one approaches the music. Thus, one should resist the temptation of constructing an all-applicable “method,” but should instead develop a unique approach out of the particular characters of each piece. Since an approach to a piece begins with listening, it can also end with another listening of the piece now more informed by the analysis.

Analysis

Submitted by (inactive) on Sunday, 4/15/2012, at 11:00 PM

I have included my rewritten definition and my initial definition of analysis in the entry below.  I am more comfortable with a shorter entry for the recent definition as I do not think it possible to have too precise of description of the analytical process so as to not limit the methods that may be utilized in analysis.

                                                Definition of Analysis 17 April 2012

     Musical analysis is an inspection and interpretation of a composition that seeks to better the understanding of the piece.  Analysis is difficult to complete in an objective sense and may instead be realized through any method that facilitates understanding of the observer.  Through such close examination one may speculate about the relationships within and without the piece, its presence within various contexts, and its characteristics as evident through different systems of analysis whether they are methodical or instinctual. 

                                               Definition of Analysis 31 January 2012

     Musical analysis is a close examination of the details of a composition that can incorporate structure, tonality, rhythm, etc.  More importantly, analysis seeks to uncover meaning in the musical choices made by the composer.  The most important part of analysis is not the individual definition of details, but the examination of their relationship to one another and to the composition as a whole. 

     Music is separated from ordinary sound through intention whether it is from the composer or the listener.  It is this intention that is subject to analysis and interpretation.  Like many abstract ideas, a sole model for analysis is not the best way of understanding a composition.  Many different models are possible and it may be that the best method is to view the composition from several of these models the same way that viewing a piece of art from various vantage points can reveal new expressions of the work.  From these various models, or “view”, it is possible to discover the intentions of the composer, or perhaps more importantly, the intention of the composition as a listener.  Multi-modal analysis also helps to prevent the illusion that one has reached a full understanding of the composition; as such an understanding is never possible-particularly with consideration to the intention of the listener.

Liszt and Narrativity

Submitted by Michael T. O'Connor on Thursday, 4/12/2012, at 2:00 PM

The sheer virtuosity of Liszt’s B minor sonata makes it difficult to read as a narrative work because there is just so much going on.  It seems that within these 760 measures Liszt is trying to tell hundreds of stories, so it is easy to lose track of the narrative.  This is quite unlike the experience one has when listening to The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a work inspired by a symphonic poem and with a much clearer narrative voice (although that could be a perception partially enhanced from Walt Disney’s animation).  Because of its highly sporadic nature, one might think it would be foolish to analyze Liszt’s sonata through a narrative lens.  After all, narratively as defined either Newcomb or Nattiez involves coherent relationships between different sections of music within the work.  As pretty as lightning-fast scalar glissandos are, they are hardly relatable to anything other than other lightning-fast glissandos.  Thus, we must look deeper into the piece to find the story that it’s telling.

The story is told in this song in between, above, and below the moments of virtuosic craziness.  Liszt mainly uses two mechanisms to create narrativity: expressive tempo markings and call-and-response between voices.  Liszt employs a host of tempo markings to create metric contrast throughout the work.  Some are traditional (“Grandioso”, m. 105), but others are more unique (“Recitativo” (a term usually reserved for opera), m. 301) and, in some places, quite beautiful (“dolcissimo con intimo sentimento” (sweet with deep feeling), m. 349).  These markings, in a sense, provide the work with some (very limited) ‘text’ off of which we can analyze.  Their specificity and descriptiveness add to the analysis, as often it is hard to discern a mood so specific merely from listening.  We feel the narrative speeding up or slowing down based on the player’s interpretation of it, but we don’t feel “cantando espressivo senza slentare” (m. 616) without Liszt’s writing. 

These mood changes are critical to the depiction of the narrative.  The transition to “Grandioso” at m. 105 is one example of Liszt’s forwarding of the narrative based on tempo and expression changes.  Coming from a wildly turbulent section (“sempre staccato ed energico assai”) in which the voices are bouncing around the keyboard like a wild rabbits, the shift to a stately, more simplistic section where chords back up a prominent and simplified melody is indicative of an intimate moment.  That moment grows, then shrinks into m. 120, where we reach the height of intimacy—the first truly recognizable theme (and to our surprise, it occurs as a simple, solo voice!)  This section then stresses Liszt’s second mechanism of narrativity, call-and-response.

Liszt creates and augments ‘conversations’ in his piece through this mechanism, and there is no better example of it in the sonata than in the section starting at m. 120.  This is an intriguing section because it begins as the most basic writing in the piece (reminiscent of the beginning of the work), but through exchange with the two hands, the section grows again into Liszt-sanity by m. 191 (“agitado”).  The conversation is highlighted by moments such as m. 141-3, where the soft staccato 8th notes call for the answer of a middle-register right-hand chord.  One can imagine this conversation extending to an argument as the music gradually picks up into frenzy. 

This is a monstrous piece in all aspects.  Analyzing it is not unlike trying to analyze each individual raindrop in a hurricane.  However, recognizing basic Lisztian patterns used in the work, it is possible to derive a story from the chaos that Liszt creates.