Review of Dora Hanninen,A Theory of Music Analysis: On Segmentation and Associative Organization(University of Rochester Press, 2012)
Zachary Bernstein · Music Theory Online · 2013
The innovative perspective set forth in Dora Hanninen's A Theory of Music Analysis: On Segmentation and Associative Organization can be glimpsed in its very title.The title proper states the scope of the project at hand: this theory is not a theory of any particular technique, composer, or body of music, but of the practice of analysis-which here seems to encompass any committed, particularized thinking about any piece of music-construed broadly.This immediately evokes one of the most conspicuous of the book's virtues: in order to accommodate the theory's generality, the specific analytical tools proposed are almost infinitely flexible.The subtitle, "On Segmentation and Associative Organization," states implicitly what the book will soon make explicit in great detail, that the act of forming and relating segments is basic to analysis in this most general sense, independent of any particular repertoire, analytical technique, or governing theory.The title further suggests a motivation for the book: the process of forming and relating segments, despite the fact that it is basic to music analysis, is complex, and worth addressing directly.The result is a challenging but rewarding reimagination of analytical practice with insights and implications for almost every music analyst.A brief analytical demonstration will present some of the issues involved.[2] Example 1 presents 24 notes.It also presents the opening of a piece of music called Composition for Four Instruments, by Milton Babbitt.(1) Surely, an understanding of those 24 notes as part of the larger whole is dependent, at the very least, on understanding them as more than just 24 isolated events, but as members of various groups that relate to each other in various ways and that themselves, eventually, compound into even larger groups.But an attempt at isolating the segments in this passage leads to numerous, conflicting possibilities for how this process might unfold.Example 2 presents the passage's trichordal array.This perspective highlights registrally distinct (014) trichords, their combination into hexachords, and the division of the whole passage into two aggregates.However, if we instead proceed from the presumption that silences define Volume 19, Number 4, December 2013