Models of Music Analysis Form
Scott Burnham · 2017
This chapter traces some of the major strands of a tradition of musical thought that reaches from the late eighteenth century: the analysis of large-scale tonal form. Of interest for the history of music analysis is the way Heinrich Christoph Koch chooses to focus on the level of the phrase and the influential analytical terminology he developed to describe the melodic content and harmonic closure of phrases. In the still strong wake of a long tradition of rhetorical approaches to music, Koch worked hard to demonstrate that musical phrases were analogous to grammatically sound sentences. Anton Reicha posits a model of musical form that bears some relation to the unfolding and completion of an extended spoken and/or written utterance, such as an oration. Adolph Bernhard Marx&s;s synchronically conceived derivation of musical forms – probably the most fully developed and influential Formenlehre of the nineteenth century – was to a considerable degree motivated by the needs of his pedagogical system.