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Mark Hutchinson
For many musicians, the idea of ‘analysing contemporary music’ might seem rather like the worst of both worlds: the (un)perfect combination of one dry, arcane, and needlessly abstract art-form with another. Could it ever be possible that two such wrongs could make a right, some curious conceptual double-negative? Both certainly have some significant image problems to overcome within the wider musical community (and certainly within the public sphere): much contemporary music1 is often seen (by many outside its sphere of appreciation) as overtly intellectual at the expense of genuine expressive content, hopelessly elitist in the technical demands it places on performer and listener alike, and wholly divorced in its subject-matter from the realities of life. Analysis, for its part, has been accused of blithely disregarding the heard (and felt) experience of individual musical works in order to construct arduous (and irrelevant) pseudo-scientific schemes of overarching structural ‘unity’ within and across compositions, arrogantly claiming supremacy for its organicist approach over any attempts to offer wider cultural and artistic perspectives, and distorting (or dismissing) any compositions which do not easily reduce to its own prefabricated schemas.2 That is a lot of vitriol, far too much for a brief article such as this; so I will attempt only to discuss what happens when these two scapegoats are combined, and whether their intersection can offer anything fruitful.
Given such a litany of accusations, it is perhaps not surprising that some attempts to combine these two fields have done more harm than good. Two opposing dangers in particular seem well-nigh omnipresent within contemporary musical analysis. The first is the lure of system-building: faced by highly complex music, all too often analysts have retreated into equally obscure methods of classification and objectification – running the gamut from set-theory to semiotics – which only serve to render the actual sound-stuff more distant, by wrapping it within a layer of bewildering academic jargon. Worse, these intricate frameworks, unless very carefully handled, may prove almost irrelevant to a piece as it is really heard, particularly if they focus upon only one aspect of its existence (its score, for example) to the detriment of other more evanescent elements (its actual sound in performance, the trace it leaves in the listener’s memory, the vast cloud of influences surrounding its conception). The second danger, on the other hand, is that of redundancy: in attempting to discuss music which makes a feature of incoherence, discontinuity or extreme simplicity, it is only too easy to restrict oneself to simple description – ‘occasional annotations’, in Daniel Chua’s memorable phrase3 – of elements which are clearly audible anyway (and which sound much better than they read).
Both these extremes have the same outcome: they fail to offer the listener any deeper understanding of what is being heard – the first because its constructed accounts remain unenlightening to any but (at best) those trained in their own underlying language, the second because it can only repeat (in the ‘pidgin music’ of the written word) that which is already obvious to the listener. Neither is it necessarily helpful to concentrate solely on the psychological process underlying the perception and comprehension of music: work by Nicholas Cook suggests that even in styles (such as the functional tonality of Western ‘Classical’ music) with a fairly well-defined, hierarchical language, many of its clearest ‘analytical’ structures do not carry through in any clear way into the listener’s own perceptual processes.4 In any case, such a restrictive focus would close off the possibility of increasing a listener’s understanding of (and response) to the music under investigation, since it would be limited to description of perceptual processes already in evidence.
We should not forget, however, that written accounts of music can serve a purpose beyond simple description. Nicholas Cook, accepting the mismatch between psychological and analytical accounts, suggests that analysis could (and should) serve a far more active, interpretative role; in his view analysis, by giving listeners a particular account of the shape and progress of a musical work, allows them to alter their own way of listening, and thus encounter the music at a different (perhaps a deeper) level than they could have before.5 In the case of contemporary music, this kind of mediation could even lead to a real emotional response where previously there had been only bemused (or amused) detachment – surely a prime goal of anyone writing in this field.
This view of the purpose of analysis – as interpretation and mediation rather than scientific ‘explanation’ or mere description – has a number of significant consequences. The first is an acceptance of the very act of analysis as an interpretation, just as provisional and just as individual as a performance; indeed, it might be viewed as a ‘written performance’ designed to offer a new (and, hopefully, enriching) perspective on the composition itself. It is misleading and dangerous for any analytical methodology to claim a ‘definitive’ hold on what is contained within a musical work; and the highly reductive, formulaic approach which so often goes hand-in-hand with this pseudo-scientific ideology has done the whole discipline a great deal of damage. Rather, the final judgement is left to the listener: ‘[a]n analysis is verified not when it accounts for a certain percentage of the notes in the score, but when its reader chooses to accept it as a satisfying interpretation of the composition in question’.6
A second, closely related consequence is the determined intention to keep the theoretical apparatus associated with analysis as minimal as possible, and to be especially wary of those techniques which unhelpfully focus attention on one single element of a piece (pitch, rhythm, texture), or indeed on any single representation of it (whether score, recording or the firing of neurones within the listener’s brain), in order to ‘uncover’ unities which may not be present at all. A corollary of this is the need to place the focus of attention primarily upon the individual work; the more general analytical statements become, the greater the danger of destructive oversimplifications. In order to avoid simple description it is, of course, necessary to use various methods of classification and generalisation; but they must be used critically, and always with an ear to how they connect with the experienced reality. Amid the complexity (or seemingly-irreducible simplicity) of contemporary music we may often find the techniques we use ‘pushed to extremes and forced out of shape’7 by the intractability of the material; in such situations it is crucial to ensure that it is the methods, not the music, which buckle under the strain. By no means does this render the act of analysis futile: ‘[a] work of modern art can be intelligible, can be coherent, without necessarily being organically integrated’;8 indeed, within recent music even total incoherence, music which seems wholly unintelligible, can have an expressive impact which deserves recognition and scrutiny.
A third consequence of this changed attitude is an increased breadth and inclusiveness of approach; there is no need for analytical writing to stick to just one methodology – or even to restrict itself to purely ‘intrinsic’ musical observations – for it to offer a helpful interpretation of a work. Indeed, given the tendency for ‘difficult’ music to stretch and damage the very methods used to discuss it, this eclecticism is crucial; what is needed is a whole constellation of partial perspectives, ‘a collection of conflicting theories which gather about the object’,9 and which taken together can give greater insight than any of them could provide alone – a ‘holistic’ approach which could perhaps undo some of the harm which has been caused in the past by overactive ‘reductionism’. This should not turn the analytical project into an uncritical free-for-all; writing which treats music as merely a hook on which to hang various tangentially-related ideas is just as unhelpful as repressively systematic dogmatism. Yet the discipline of music is far wider than notes on a page; it has retained its impact and cultural centrality over generations precisely because it communicates on so many levels, from high-flown intellectualism to gut-punching emotional impact. Deepening our awareness of this wealth of associations and connotations can only enrich our experience of contemporary music – indeed, of all music. This, surely, is what analysis was made for.
End Notes
1. In the absence of any less ambiguous alternative, ‘contemporary music’ here refers to recent music in the Western ‘art’ tradition of large-scale, principally notated works for predominantly acoustic instruments.
2. The most (in)famous polemic of analysis from this standpoint is Joseph Kerman’s 1980 article ‘How We Got into Analysis, and How to Get Out’; the debate has eaten up countless pages (from both sides) since then, however.
3. Chua, Galitzin Quartets, 5; Chua is writing about Beethoven’s late style – these issues are clearly not restricted to contemporary music.
4. see Cook, ‘The Perception of Large-Scale Tonal Closure’, for example.
5. Cook, ‘Musical Form and the Listener’, 6.
6. Ibid.
7. Chua, Galitzin Quartets, 9.
8. Cross, ‘Music theory’, 187.
9. Chua, Galitzin Quartets, 10.
Resource List
Chua, Daniel. The Galitzin Quartets of Beethoven. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Cook, Nicholas. ‘Musical Form and the Listener’ (1987), in Music, Performance, Meaning: Selected Essays. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. 1-7.
Cook, Nicholas. ‘The Perception of Large-Scale Tonal Closure’ (1987), in Music, Performance, Meaning: Selected Essays. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. 9-17.
Cross, Jonathan. ‘Music theory and the challenge of modern music’, in Theory, analysis and meaning in music, ed. Anthony Pople. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 184-194.
Kerman, Joseph. ‘How We Got into Analysis, and How to Get Out’. Critical Inquiry, 7/2 (1980), 311-331.