Analysis as Technologically-Mediated Musical Experience

music analysis;musical form;Music and Dance;Arts;Music: Theory

Dinardo, JamesMengozzi, Stefano ;

University of Michigan

关键词: music analysis;    musical form;    Music and Dance;    Arts;    Music: Theory;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/140862/dinardo_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation takes as its starting point a heuristic orientation to analysis as a dynamic between three things: analyst, music, and the conceptual tools—what I call ;;technologies”—that one brings to the music. Its goal is to explore how the use of technologies affects or mediates one’s analytical experience—the actions, thoughts, decisions, and conclusions that obtain as one analyzes. The various ways in which our tools affect what we do, I argue, has not sufficiently been explored. Although scholars have begun to recognize the personal, non-objective nature of analysis, and have continued to interrogate the tools themselves, there have been no sustained attempts to consider the various effects of implementing these tools in analysis. How might adopting a particular technology encourage certain analytical actions over others, while altering the written product (the finished analysis) these actions leave behind? Although questions of this sort are often explored by examining written analyses, I intend to complement these approaches by personally doing and reflecting upon my own analytical activities.Following an introductory chapter, I undertake five case studies that attempt to foreground some effects of using the chosen technology. In each, I perform and reflect upon my own analyses of music by Haydn, Mozart, Brahms, Rachmaninov, and Bizet. Among the technologies implemented in this study are: paradigmatic analysis, Sonata Theory, form-functional theory, as well as approaches informed by the work of Leonard Ratner and Donald Tovey. Each chapter unfolds in three stages: 1. A preliminary analysis of the selected music that does not draw upon the particular technology but rests upon more traditional tactics, 2. Familiarization with the technology to be applied, 3. An analysis with and through the lens of thetechnology constructed in part two. Comparing the first and third stages reveals how the technology affords new insights that had initially gone unnoticed or unexplored. Furthermore, we get a sense of which aspects of any given technology have the greatest potential to alter analytical outcomes/experience, as well as those whose effects are less pronounced or superficial. The approach consciously draws on subjective experience, positing that experiments in musical analysis must utilize insights gained through practice.