Beyond the Purely Musical

The tension between formalist and representationalist views on music’s meaning has been a persistent one in the West, culminating in the second half of the twentieth century in an institutionalized distance between formalism as practiced in academic and classical music circles, and pop and film music practices based on the idea of representation.
Music theory and analysis have generally been understood to deal primarily with matters of internal musical signification, and not so much with “extroversive,” representational meanings. As such a predominantly formalist discipline, music analysis came under attack from the so-called New Musicology in the final two decades of the twentieth century. Analysis was accused of producing texts that failed to consider both music’s emotional content and the wider cultural context in which music is always inserted. Partly in response to such criticisms, some analysts sought to develop strategies that effectively bridged the gap between formalism and representationalism, including various analytical approaches to musical topics, narrative, temporality, and emotion. These approaches, however, have not yet properly reached teaching, where analysis continues to be addressed in an almost entirely “introversive” (and typically formalist and technical) way.
In this article, I aim to propose a set of methodologies that productively combine formalism and representationalism in teaching music analysis, by drawing from theories of topics, narrative, emotion, and temporality, so as to address excerpts by Debussy, Schubert, Schoenberg, Webern, and Bernard Herrmann.

Keywords

music analysis teaching, musical meaning, musical topic, emotion, temporality