Keynote 3. Music writing and analysis
Music analysis usually starts with writing, namely a visual representation (transcription, notation, rewriting, ciphering, schema, graph, etc.) that transforms the auditory perception into a reading. Writing objectifies the music and forces to break from its representation as an activity, to become aware of music as a reality distinct from the usage one makes of it (Benveniste 2012/2019, 93). Furt...her, writing has the power to “structure” the music, “to displace, assemble, combine, [and] fit together” its elements (Barthes 1970/1977, 153).
The term “writing” (as opposed to “notation”), inspired by the title of Charles Seeger’s well-known article “Prescriptive and Descriptive Music-Writing” (1958), emphasizes the fact that visual representations may take different forms. Bruno Nettl (2005, 78) suggests that “The distinction between prescriptive and descriptive notation was Seeger’s terminology for music for performance versus analysis.” But this confuses analysis with a mere description. Seeger’s prescriptive writing is more analytic than his descriptive one. Analysis reveals aspects of the music inaudible at first hearing and, thus, inaccessible by description, whereas analytic representation, not aiming at a complete description, only concerns certain aspects that Leonard Meyer (1998) describes as “syntactic parameters.”
Analysis based on visual representation is primarily associated with written Western music. However, several other presentations at EMA-2023 and its satellite events testify to the importance of transcriptions in the analysis of oral musical traditions. Two points must be stressed. First, it would seem that written music is in greater need of analysis than non-written music due to its two phases (composition and performance) that oblige the composer to replace expressive elements with formal ones. Second, should analysis entail the description of expressive elements, notably in the case of non-written music, then it will likely need to embrace a more descriptive kind of writing, closer to an acoustic description, in order to account for details regarding intonation, non-proportional rhythms, timbre, etc. This shift could change the very definition of music analysis.