Society for Music Analysis - An Introduction to Music Studies

Society for Music Analysis - An Introduction to Music Studies

Wednesday 30 November 2022

The aim of the day was to give students an insight into what studying music at tertiary level can involve, combining practical music-making skills, harmony and counterpoint, composition, analysis, interpretation and critical theory. The day focused on three sessions:

1. Introduction to musical summaries and reduction theory.
2. Schumann’s Dichterliebe, reduction, analysis and interpretation, with a particular focus on Schenkerian analysis.
3. Art Tatum’s ‘Time for Tea’, interpretation and critical theory.

All students worked to an exceptionally high level with many of the analytical topics being of an undergraduate level. The students worked individually and collaboratively and demonstrated a deep interest in reduction theory.

A superb day, with an emphasis on academic stretch and challenge.

The day was led by Dr James Olsen, University of Cambridge and Dr Esther Cavett, University of Oxford.

What Is Music Analysis?

‘Theory and analysis are in one sense reciprocals: if analysis opens up a musical structure or style to inspection, inventorying its components, identifying its connective forces, providing a description adequate to some live experience, then theory generalizes from such data, predicting what the analyst will find in other cases within a given structural or stylistic orbit, devising systems by which other works – as yet unwritten – might be generated. Conversely, if theory intuits how musical systems operate, then analysis furnishes feedback to such imaginative intuitions. Rendering them more insightful. In this sense they are like two hemispheres that fit together to form a globe, functioning deductively as investigation and abstraction, inductively as hypothesis and verification and in practice forming a chain of alternating activities’.

 Ian Bent – Emeritus Professor of Music, Columbia University.

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‘Never confuse analysis with mere description!’, Hans Keller used waggishly to say, chastising unfortunate speakers at conferences. To Keller, most so-called ‘criticism’ and ‘analysis’ was an amalgam of the descriptive and the metaphorical: ‘The descriptive is senseless, the metaphorical usually nonsense’. Most analytical writing boiled to ‘mere tautological descriptions’. Not even Tovey was beyond reproach: ‘his ‘’analyses’’ are misnomers’, Keller remarked; they were in his view ‘faultless descriptions’ with ‘occasional flashes of profound analytical insight’; otherwise they contained ‘much eminently professional tautology’.

(Quoted from Hans Keller, ‘K.503: The Unity of Contrasting Themes and Movements – I, Music Review,  17 (1956), 48-9).  

More recently, V. Kofi Agawu has taken one analyst to task for failing to observe ‘the distinction between description and analysis, between a critical, necessarily impressionistic commentary and a rigorous interpretative exercise…’

(Music Analysis, 7 (1988), 99: review of W. Frisch, Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

Dr James Olsen

Dr James Olsen is College Teaching Associate in music at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. His research interests include the theory and analysis of music from the eighteenth century to the present, hermeneutics, critical theory, and music education.

He is also a composer, and his works have been performed by, amongst others, the London Symphony Orchestra, the London Sinfonietta, the Philharmonia Orchestra and Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. Three commercial recordings of his music have been released.

At Cambridge, Dr Olsen supervises music undergraduates for courses on the analysis and history of music, as well as composition, and he lectures for the second-year analysis course.

Dr Olsen has a strong interest in music education. He is the Widening Participation and Outreach Officer at the Society for Music Analysis, and the founder of Olsen Verlag, a social enterprise whose purpose is to bring Western art music to wider audiences.

 Dr Esther Cavett

Alongside her work at Somerville, she is Tutor in Music at Jesus and Lincoln Colleges, and Oxford Music Faculty Chair. She is also Senior Research Fellow in the music department at King’s College, London, where she co-ordinates the King’s St George’s Academy, which runs small group, after school music teaching for children living in Southwark, involving King’s College, London students as teaching assistants. She set up and now assists in the running of Water City Music, a charity providing access to performance opportunities for musicians of all skills levels, working collaboratively, and she is trustee of The Society of Music Theory (SMA), where she was sponsor the SMA Music Literacy research programme and for the SMA’s widening participation offering generally.

Her recent research has focussed on music and mentoring, the autoethnography of writing academically about music, and the perception of repetition in the music of English contemporary composer Howard Skempton.