Why Analyse?

From TheStudentWiki

Thoughts on Analysis?

The academic study of music was established in the mid nineteenth century not many years before the development of sound recording technology. The introduction of talking (and singing) pictures in the late 1920s, radio in the 1930s, TV in the 1950s, home taping in the 1960s, video recording in the 1970s and the proliferation of all things digital since the 1980s has completely transformed the way we receive and produce music. Musical media makes a significant contribution to our daily lives yet, surprisingly perhaps, scholarly writing on music in the mass media has only begun to emerge in relatively recent times. Musicology, it would seem, effectively ignored music in the mass media and if you examine some scholarly journals today, you will find that the situation has not changed significantly.

Outside of academia, there is a proliferation of writing about music in newspapers, magazines, fanzines and on the many pages devoted to music on the internet. The main focus for much of this discussion is on the cultural, social or economic aspects of the music. A significant body of writing explores the celebrity and more recently, there has been an increasing body of work dealing with technological hardware. Little has been written on the sounds of the music.

One possible reason for the reluctance to write about the sounds of music is the transitory nature of music. Traditional musicology could, at least, rely on the score as an anchor for their music analysis. The difficulty here was that this type of approach foregrounds harmony, melody, rhythm and structure. More recently, there has been a move to investigate the performative aspects of music in the work of Jonathan Rink (2002) and others. For those of us interested in the sounds (as opposed to the personality or socio-cultural aspects of the music) there has been little to stimulate.

New journals such as the Art of Record Production[1] have provided an insight into the world of production but often this centres on personality and techniques. This is all good and well, but how many hours do people interested in producing music spend creating the right sounds? Most of this talk is of a general nature and we are, to a large extent, happy with our intuitive approach to production analysis. But what happens when things go wrong? How do you break through the confusion and discover the underlying cause of the problem if you can't analyse it? For those aspiring music producers what do you listen for and what actually makes a good production? To these and many more questions, analysis will not provide the answer but at least it stimulates the debate. Analysis can be a way of finding out, of discovery, and of developing a skill and ability which will provide the user with a set of tools that will help us understand. Where analysis does not provide the answers, it will at least point to some questions that others might answer.

Philip Tagg (2003: 77) raises the point that there are those who claim that the true experiences of music defy analysis. His suggestion is that while there are those who would wish to leave musical experience in the domain of the subconscious or express it as some kind of transcendental corporeal experience misses the point the musicians have understood for years. Musicians who have tried to create music "in the style of" have had to engage in an analytical process. "Deconstructing to construct anew is an essential part of the musician's job" (Tagg, 2003:78).

There is no one way to analyse music and in suggesting a theme of 'methods of analysis' those of us who are concerned about the world of music production have to be careful not to create an inflexible or unrealistic methodological approach. A methodology should help unlock ideas in the music and provide a way into the music. At the same time, any methodology is only a part of the whole and we have to recognise the breadth of the musical experience. Failing to do this we may take the approach of musicology and exclude more than we include. In the end, the choice of analytical method is a personal one. Hopefully, what develops on these pages will provide a template for investigating those things that are important to the musical experience. In that way, analysis can be understood as relevant. We should, therefore, be on our guard when we begin to analyse those things we cannot experience in the music.

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