An Applied Approach to the Descriptive Analysis of Music as Heard
Alissandra Reed · OhioLink ETD Center (Ohio Library and Information Network) · 2017
This document engages music analysis toward the aim of describing the experience of listening to a piece of music, specifically Franz Liszt's "Il Penseroso."In this analysis, music is considered strictly as an aural experience, an object that exists in its hearer's brain.The document therefore takes a critical approach to descriptive analysis by combining Schenkerian reduction, tonal and neo-Riemannian harmonic analysis, phenomenology, and empirical participant-based musicology to describe the experience of listening to "Il Penseroso."The term descriptive analysis, taken from David Temperley (1999), refers to the description of how a piece of music is experienced; Temperley opposes this to suggestive analysis, which instead provides a new way of hearing a piece.An analysis is thus given based on the analyst's perceived experience of listening to "Il Penseroso," with focus on the role that harmony and melody play in that experience.Next, a study is carried out to gather phenomenological accounts of "Il Penseroso" from expert listeners.Their verbal descriptions are categorized using qualitative content analysis and the occurrences of the resulting categories are compared to the initial, score-based analysis.Liszt's emotionally complex "Il Penseroso" highlights inherent differences between listeners' experience of affect.The results demonstrate that an analysis can be, and often is, both descriptive and suggestive, as it may accurately describe one listener's experience while suggesting a new way of hearing the music to another listener.