Bachian invention and its mechanisms
Laurence Kaplan Dreyfus · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 1997
Since the nineteenth century, the analysis of music has undertaken to provide accounts of musical structure by explaining musical events and patterns that lend coherence to an individual work as well as contributing to its beauty and meaning. Drawing on a variety of musical building blocks – whether harmonic, contrapuntal, melodic, rhythmic or sectional – analysts of various theoretical persuasions have asked their readers to set aside their first impressions in order to pay attention to the way a piece of music works by examining the details of its ‘facture’. The ‘truth-value’ of such interpretations can of course never be divorced from the ideas an analyst holds about musical structure, since these notions or ‘theories’ largely determine which musical parameters count as structurally significant. Nonetheless within the realm of musical analysis – far different from, say, mathematics or physics – it has rarely been the elegance or grandiosity of a structural theory that has attracted adherents. Instead, successful analyses have always appealed to an inherently musical plausibility, fuzzy though such a concept must ultimately remain. For this reason, the seeming circularity of interpretation endemic to musical analysis will appear less troubling, especially when one realises that analysts – if they are to succeed – need to persuade a community of musicians that it is possible to hear a piece as proceeding ‘so and not otherwise’, to borrow a phrase of Theodor W. Adorno. And contrary to some popular perceptions, musicians are a famously hard-nosed lot when it comes to being told how to hear a piece with which they are intimate.