Approaching the Analysis of Post-1945 Music: Pedagogical Considerations

Abstract

In this article I propose a conceptual and pedagogical framework to organize a course or a fragment of a course on the analysis of post-1945 post-tonal music, in a way that brings together the phenomenological understanding of music as an objective entity on the one hand, and the historical and social contexts needed to provide the necessary perspective to our conceptual understanding of a musical work on the other.

The discussion focuses on seven general issues that I recommend addressing as part of this organizational framework:(1) the value of understanding the music through analysis; (2) the value of understanding, in particular, the historical and social contexts of artistic movements and styles; (3) preference for a roughly chronological organization; (4) the multiplicity of styles in the second half of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century; (5) the lack of a unified methodology; (6) the need to rely on existing theoretical and analytical scholarship; and (7) the need to be aware of the generative and interpretive approaches to analysis. The article closes with two analyses of pieces by Augusta Read Thomas and Krzysztof Penderecki, which illustrate contrasting approaches to the study of motivic and spatial music, respectively.