This morning I woke early and, having no particular pressing need to get out and about, enjoyed a bit of wool-gathering and dream-waking. For whatever reason I started presenting an analysis of a Mozart piano sonata to a room filled with my colleagues. I finished my analysis (in dreamtime almost immediately after beginning it) and then one of the studio teachers asked me: “So what use would all that be to one of my students practicing this piece for a recital?”
I hear that sort of thing a lot: what use is analysis. Will it help me play a piece better? If not, why bother? This being my dreamtime, my answers went by unchallenged as I made my points, one after another, unpestered by back-talk, furrowed brows, or withering dismissals. It’s so easy to win arguments in dreamtime.
Worrying about whether analysis improves one’s instrumental performance is tantamount to worrying whether it improves one’s tennis game. Analysis is cheapened and demeaned by casting it in the role of handmaiden to performance. It can act in such a capacity, but that’s not a particularly compelling reason for analysis. Actually, all analysis is performance of a sort, in that it is making music. Too many performers conceive of music-making as music-playing, very much to their own detriment. One can make music in all manner of ways, one of which is making sound with an instrument or the voice.
To make music is to communicate music, not necessarily to others although that’s usually the case. One can do that verbally, taking a historical or performance-practice approach, or via philosophical inquiry, or via formal analysis, or via structural (Schenkerian) methodologies, or using the tools of modern analysis in all their (sometimes confusing) glory. Sitting quietly with a score, hearing it mentally and making the connections that can follow when the rigidly linear time flow is abolished, is also a form of making music. I would also categorize the recording of music as making music—recording engineers can be quite a passionate lot about what they do, and they’re just as much musicians as anybody else.
While the varieties of music-making can inform each other, there is no requirement that they do so, nor is any gradation of worth implied in whatever sharing might occur. In other words, just because a pianist might analyze a late Beethoven sonata prior to performing that sonata, it doesn’t follow that the pianist’s analysis was worthier than another musician’s work that was not part of a concert preparation. Sometimes performing musicians gaze askance at musicological types who hang out in universities and spend their days reading and writing instead of practicing and playing. Misconceptions abound on both sides: the performers view the musicologists as stuffed shirts, while the musicologists think of the performers as nincompoops. The dispute reminds me a bit of the battle lines in hospitals between Internists and Surgeons—the pill-pushers vs. the plumbers. Both are valuable, both are needed, and both are doctors.
Most musicians tend to stay on one side of the divide or another. I’m an oddball in that I straddle the two, although these days I’m increasingly inclined towards the musicological-theoretical side of things. But I have a pianist’s mind, whither I may wander; I bring a blue-collar mentality to everything I do in music, whether lecturing to a SF Symphony audience or writing a program note or teaching harmony or analyzing Mozart. I recoil a bit from the more arcane stretches of musical analysis, for no good reason. Well, maybe I’m worried that I wouldn’t be able to understand it. There might also be a disconnect between my instinctive reaction and my understanding: I know that even the most intensely academic analysis is music-making, but my subconscious won’t accept it as such. But that’s my problem, and does not point to shortcomings in the techniques themselves or their practitioners. An analytic technique isn’t of less value just because I neither use nor teach it.
I wonder how often we’re engaged in music-making without identifying it as such. Is listening intently to a recording performance an act of music-making? What about talking about music, informally or not? Walking down the street humming a tune? I would suggest that they’re all aspects of making music. It’s a big world out there, bursting with music in all shapes, sizes, and degrees of scrutability. So we might as well roll up our sleeves and dig in, in whatever manner seems best at the moment.