On page124: “Two thousand years ago, the idea of analysis could have been considered something akin to ‘logic’, derived from the so-called theoretical sciences (such a physics and mathematics). This reflection may produce nostalgia and forbidden desires in some moder neo-Aristotelian, but the fact is that today most musical analysts seem to need all the adjectives they can find—maybe too many. Thys we have formal analysis, semiological analysis, structural analysis, new-positivist analysis, phenomenological analysis, qualitative and quantitative analysis, statistical analysis, melodic and stylistic analysis...you name it! Of, on the other hand, the analysis is a composer, there will be no need to choose and specify the categories and criteria he or she intends to adopt because, whatever the circunstancies, the analysis will always be self-analysis: composers will not be able to help projecting themselves, their own poetics, into the analysis of the work. The composer revelas himself on the couch of someone else’s work. Even in cases of the greatest generosity and aloofness (Schumann’s analysis, for instance, of Berlioz’s Symphonic Fantastique) or of extreme far-sightedness and objectivity (Pierre Boulez’s analyses of Wagner, Debussy, and Berg) the chief analytical instrument at the composers’s disposal will always and in any case be his own poetics. Indeed, it is fortunate fore us that this should be so (enemies that we are of the hypothetical—and soporific—notion of musical objectivity), and fortunate too for anyone who believes as I do—I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again—that, when everything is said and done, the most meaningful analysis of a symphony is an other symphony.”
On page 126: “There are works characterised by extreme concentration and at the same time by extreme diversification. This is the case with Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring or Jeux by Debussy; they are works where a tendency toward autonomy of character and structural relations, on the one hand, coexist with independent, deductive, and generative processes, on the other. Harmonic, timbira, metric, and rhythmic matrices, on the one hand, coexist with evolving thematic cells, on the other; complex and discontinuous articulation coexist with repetitive and immobile events.”
On page 135 - 138: “I don’t see how musical experiecene can be contained, today; within this kind of tripartite vision. Given the rather diversified, heterogeneous, and glossolalic world in which we operate, whe should try to provide, with out own work—that is, with our heuristic instruments—the possibility of analysing and assimilating diversities. Otherwise we might just as well return, indeed, to Boethius and take refuge in the sumptuously ascetic Greco-medieval theory of music which confirms the idea, to quote Umberto Eco, that ‘the more the system explains experience, the more it precincts it.
It was Saint Augustine who said that in order to find truth, man must not only look
inside of himself but he must go beyond himfself. And it was, again, Severinus Boethius who, with his idea of musical knowledge, gave his seal of approval to the accessory character of sensible perception with respect to truth.
A number of composers, in a more secular intellectual context, of course, have been known to declare that they have no interest whatsoever in the technical problems of the performance of their music, and that they are not even interested in knowing what it sounds like. What interests them is how it should be written. Professionally and socially speaking, this is certainly a daring position. It is above all a new one, since at least fourteen centureis have hone by since the theory and practice of music became technically, anthropological, and psychologically inseparable. It may also be an interesting position, since this distance between thought and matter presupposes an idea of music as a instrument of knowledge instead of an instrument of pleasure. Knowledge of what? What kind of pleasure? The colours of Matisse, Pollock, and Rothko can be analysed with a light-frequency meter, and the perfume worn by an attractiver woman is subject to chemical analysis. In good weather and bad, the moon and the stars are variously observed by poets, farmers, businessmen on holiday, and astrophysicists. Perceptual space can be analysed on the basis of concrete acoustical and musical experience, or with the instruments of neurophysiology.
Once again, we are faced with an empty space. We could attempt to cross it and to fill it with meaning, if it were not bounded by an algorithm on the one hand and in performance clouds of sounds on the other, by algebraic speculations on one side and tautological tintinnabulations on the other.
Does this represent a flight from colours and perfumes, the moon and the stars? And from musical reality—granted that we can define it without having recourse to rhetorical figures? Of course it does. Not even the para scientific languages of so-called musical conceptualisation can give that empty space a meaning, because, however minimally, it has itself had a hand in creating it—with its stubborn insistence on considering sound processes independently of the way they are perceived, or on separating, in a formalistic way, the so-called ‘parameters’ of music (pith, dynamics, timbre, and time, that is, the morphology of sound), things that our perceptive abilities are not capable of separating. If it is impossible to make a phenomenological distinction between sound and noise, how can we ever hope to separate, for instance, pitch from timbre or timbre from dynamics? Neo-positivistas analyses make frequent appeals to science, but it is significant that they seem to dismiss the science of acoustics (I am not talking about Helmholtz’s acoustics, which explored musical sound as a stationary and periodical—and therefore as an abstract—phenomenon, however correct it may be mathematically, but about the recent research conducted at the Bell Laboratorires, at Standford Unversity, or at IRCAM on the diffuse instability and the developmental nature of every aspect of every significant sound phenomenon).
Analysis is not just a form of speculative pleasure or a theoretical instruments for the conceptualisation of music; when it contributes to a topology of the coming into being and the transformations of sound forms (and not only be means of the new digital technologies), it can make a profound and concrete contribution to the creative process.”