Analyzing Music
Music on one of the most powerful of the arts partly because sounds – more than any other sensory stimulus – create in us involuntary reactions, pleasant or unpleasant. It may be difficult to connect analysis with the experience of listening to music, but everyone’s listening, including performer’s, benefits through understanding of some of the fundamentals of music.
Music can be experienced in two basic ways: hearing and listening. Hearers do not attempt to perceive accurately either the structure or the details of the music. They hear a familiar melody, which may trigger associations with the composer, time era, or places dedicated to the song. Aside from melody, little else, such as details or chord progression, is heard.
The listeners, however, concentrate their attention upon the many elements of the music. They observe the form, details, and structure of the music, focusing upon the form that created the content. They listen for something – the content. Even the most avid listeners will be hearers under certain circumstances. No one is always up for concentrated attention.
In order to continue, some important terms and concepts must be introduced to arrive to a clear discussion of music. Some of the basic musical terms include tone, consonance, dissonance, rhythm, tempo, melody, counterpoint, harmony, dynamics, and contrast. Each one is essential to the analysis of music. Most music contains at least one, if not all, of these variations within a piece of music. That is primarily what creates a pleasant or unpleasant experience.
If music is like the other arts, it has a content that is achieved by the form’s transformation of subject matter. However, some critics have denied that music has a subject matter, while others suggest so many different possibilities can create utter confusion. Two theories that Humanities Through the Arts identifies are “two basic kinds of subject matter:...
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