Twenty years of Music Analysis: a retrospective

In 2002, the journal Music Analysis marked two decades since its first appearance. For those who were closely involved in its creation — the committed analytical evangelists working mainly in and around the University of London during the late 1970s — the years since Volume 1, Number 1 feel as if they have flown by. For those slightly too young to have been part of those early volumes, the early 1980s resemble a golden era, a time when the burgeoning British analytical community seemed united by certainty and common purpose. Several landmark events provided the backdrop against which Music Analysis quickly established itself: the publication of the English translation of Schenker's Der freie Satz (1979); the arrival of The New Grove (1980), a monumental musicological achievement that included Ian Bent's discipline-defining entry on "Analysis"; and Arnold Whittall's appointment to the first UK Chair in Music Theory and Analysis at King's College (1982).

The journal gave focus to the rapid professionalisation of the discipline within British universities and music colleges. Its model came from established Departments of Music Theory and Composition in the USA—such as those at Forte's Yale, Babbitt's Princeton, or Schoenberg's Southern California and Los Angeles—but with a distinct British character. At the first UK Music Analysis Conference in 1984, Robert Pascall voiced the transformative shift underway when he suggested that studying harmony and counterpoint (taught in British universities for at least six hundred years) provided "a more impoverished way of finding insights into the masterpieces than analysis." The old methods were not abolished entirely, but "analysis" became the catchword, finding its way into the curricula of most self-respecting music departments, for better or worse. Introduced rapidly to students were Schenker, Schoenbergian motivic theory, set theory, semiotics, and other systematic methodologies, sweeping aside the dilettantism that had previously dominated much higher education in Britain. A palpable sense of excitement accompanied a new generation of students—the author included—who discovered Nattiez, Adorno, Forte, and Schenker thanks to those early journal issues. Much catching up was needed.

For today's students, this must seem strange, since Schenker, Forte, and their peers are permanent fixtures of the landscape—at least in the UK and USA. Yet readers should not assume that what appears in Music Analysis fully represents global practice.

Schenker is known only in isolated pockets elsewhere in Europe; Forte is hardly known at all. Meanwhile, the Riemann-derived work that dominates teaching and research in German-speaking Europe (discussed by Christian Martin Schmidt below) is virtually absent from the journal's pages. The certainty and unanimity of purpose mentioned earlier—if it ever truly existed—has now mostly vanished. The typical British music student, raised in a postmodern climate, is eager to scrutinise the ideological framework of everything encountered and to challenge Old Father Formalism wherever he appears. Curiously, in the German Hochschulen, because analysis exists only as a by-product of a broader practical training in music theory, there persists a stronger faith in the unique value of score-centred musical inquiry—though how much longer this will remain is debatable.

Over the past two decades, Music Analysis has both charted and influenced the discipline's changing shape. It was international from the outset, helping bring Nattiez's work to a wider Anglophone audience. It was also consistently interdisciplinary, whether through Arnold Whittall's proposal of music analysis as a Foucauldian human science (Volume 1, Issue 1), Theodor Adorno's sociologically situated examination of musical material (Volume 1, Issue 2), or Christopher Wintle's early conjunction of analysis and performance (Volume 1, Issue 1).

At such a milestone, singling out individual achievements may seem invidious, but there are two specific articles worth highlighting. Both exemplify the distinctive contribution Music Analysis has made, and both were produced by brilliant scholars whose tragically shortened lives nonetheless left a quantity and quality of work that overshadows most colleagues. Both were first-class analysts acutely aware of the critical contexts in which they operated. The first is Derrick Puffett's analysis of the fugue from Tippett's Second String Quartet, published in 1986. This article remains a model of its kind—elegant, rigorous, critical, and provocative. For the author, it represents "British analysis" at its finest: a work that undertakes a fascinating critique of methodological orthodoxies while, like all the best analysis, provoking new and fresh ways of hearing the music. The second article is Naomi Cummings's discussion of "Erbarme Dich" from Bach's St. Matthew Passion, published in 1997. It stands as "critical musicology" at its very peak, engaging with ideas of subjectivity, contingency, and performativity, while offering first-rate score-based analysis that links pitch and rhythmic structure to the performer's gestures, the text's content, and the listener's responses.

As Music Analysis looks toward the future, it will continue to publish the best work in the discipline, whatever form it takes. For Dunsby, Puffett, and Pople, quality was the primary criterion, and that standard remains. Interdisciplinarity was present from the journal's beginning. As musicology grows more aware of its wider contexts, the journal's articles will intersect with the most current ideas in critical theory, cultural studies, aesthetics, sociology, psychology, and performance studies. Analysis cannot exist in isolation; meaningful life under such a condition is impossible. Yet analysis will not be overwhelmed by these connections either. The type of structural activity that Bent's New Grove entry defined as "that part of the study of music which takes as its starting-point the music itself" has come under serious attack for allegedly ignoring broader social and cultural conditions and matters of reception. But Anthony Pople clarifies below that this was not Bent's meaning. Jim Samson, in a key recent chapter seeking to contextualise analysis for the new millennium, speaks of a "failure of the structuralist programme." Among possible paths beyond structuralism, Samson raises the idea that analysis might lose its identity as a separate discipline altogether—an outcome arguably visible in the work of several "new musicologists" (though he does discuss two less extreme possibilities). But this amounts to throwing away the baby with the bathwater. When Derrick Puffett, in his famous defence of formalism, wrote that analysis "needs to maintain its own internal logic, its aims and its sense of purpose—which may be described as formalist aims and purposes, in the best sense of the word," but "does not mean that analysis can afford to ignore everything else that is going on in the world," he was writing a manifesto for Music Analysis that subsequent editors have found impossible to disregard. The journal will continue to feature cutting-edge work-centred and theory-based research within appropriately critical contexts, serving its existing community while also enlarging and developing that community.

To acknowledge this twenty-year landmark, five essays were commissioned from scholars who have been closely associated with Music Analysis and who have helped shape it significantly over the past two decades. Two of the authors served as its Editor (Jonathan Dunsby and Anthony Pople); one was the first Chair of its Editorial Board (Arnold Whittall); two have been Advisory Board members since the journal began (Allen Forte and Christian Martin Schmidt). Each author was given complete freedom to write whatever they wished, with minimal editorial intervention. Personal reflections, anecdotal touches, and profound observations were desired.

The contributors were invited to consider the discipline's condition then and now, and to explore the ever-changing role of Music Analysis in, as Allen Forte discusses, reflecting and (re)forming developments. The results aim not only to provide the first informal history of the journal but also to clarify where readers stand today. For students who continue to ask, as they still do in 2002, "What is analysis?", these essays may help formulate tentative answers to that difficult question.