Analysis of Music

[Kage]

I was doing some reading on various subjects, and I happened to stumble upon this article:

http://www.andrewkeeling.ukf.net/Keeling-TheConstruKctionOfLight.html

Now, I read the whole thing, and for the most part I was fairly lost. I could understand what he was saying, but overall it just went over my head with all the talk of octatonic scales and things of this nature. I found it fascinating, and I'm sure his analysis is valid and correct for the most part, but it is quite over-the-top and I'm still skeptical as to just how deep we should look into the objective qualities of a piece of work.

To me, I think the music as expression should just speak for itself. Analysis only brings understanding to something for which, to me, understanding dumbs down the effect.

And the musicians in King Crimson are brilliant visionaries, but since a lot of the material was based on improvisation and what have you, I'm fairly certain that not much of this actually went into the writing process.

Anyway, what are your thoughts on musical analysis--how far can we go into understanding the phenomena of music? Should music really be a language that can be defined by the greatly limited English language?

[Permanent Solution]

I feel all art is overanalyzed.

I've always wanted to have an English class analyze one of my poems just to see what BS a teacher pulls out of it.

[Kage]

I agree. I think especially writing is overanalyzed. I see these "intellectuals" analyzing something to a degree that almost makes me sick, and I just think, if you need to analyze something to pull out these deep, sophisticated meanings behind it just to justify it to yourself, what does that say about you?

[Cocaine]

It comes to a point where you can find anything you want in any piece of art. You can take a book, read it, find out the author is of a religious background. Re-reading it with that in mind, you'll instantly look for things that may not be there. Personally, I agree that you can look too far into things, but that's half the fun sometimes.

[Shadius]

I think that talking about art and offering opinions can be a great thing. Art should come from a personal place, and it's up to people to interpret it, this is important, but people need to realise that art in general is very subjective and opinions are just those.

Overanalysing musical theory, if that's what you're talking about... well, yes, I agree. There's no magical formula that explains why I enjoy the music I do. You can explain why certain parts of music have their certain sounds or effects with music theory.

An example of something I was playing today;

Oh, that colour note in the chorus of Radiohead's high and dry (a G#) isn't even in the chord (basically an F#m)! How very unique and clever!

This dosn't explain why I like the song, it's just a piece of musical knowledge and explains why a certain thing may sound like it does. It adds tension which is released when it goes into the E chord, or whatever, okay, fine, when they wrote the song I doubt they were thinking these things, they just wrote a melody and had these chords, and this was the effect.

Music is expression, and emotion, and music theory dosn't explain everything about why people like music.

And, a lot of time, people start making opinions about things which they have no evidence about, and start overstepping their boundaries about what the musicians where trying to do.

I hate it when people say things like "I think the artist was trying to say..."

Who cares what the ARTIST was trying to say? He created the ART, and you make up YOUR mind about it. You'll never know what the artist was doing until you ask him/her.

[Freezing Moon]

Oh good, I can hardly wait for a bunch of pseudo-intellectuals to start telling me my music sucks because it doesn't match up to some sort of mathematical formula or something.

[AA-12]

^Yep

[Moon Flavor]

Eh, knowledge helps to write, but it shouldn't really need to be overused to decipher something with possibly no meanign behind it. Reminds me of a couple years ago in English class...
Teacher: So the color red in The Scarlet Letter obviously symbolizes sin while the color green symbolizes innocence...

Me: No, shut up. You already fed us some crap about some random-*** green light being "the american dream" in the Great Gatsby, stop pulling crap out of thin air for the sake of making this class seem worthwhile.


...she hated me the rest of the year

[Nepenthe]

Yeah, I remember that light in Great Gatsby, haha.

[Kage]

The green light is a nice symbol for overanalysis.

I think Shadius sums it up pretty well, though.

In terms of analysis, I think it should be a personal perception, a feeling you derive from it. Not analyzing the artist's techniques towards getting to that feeling.

[Shadius]

Exactly Kage.

That said, as a music student, or analyst, knowing what theory has gone into pieces of music is their job, and some musicans would use these skills to write good music, and others just like analysing music... for the sake of it. Which is sort of silly unless you're trying to learn something with a real use or lesson.

I think it just so happens that the type of music I listen to, while the musicians generally have a level of theory knowledge, they mostly just experiment with feeling and what they write may sound good but probably not be analysed to any huge degree especially if, for example, they're not even sure what complex chords they're even putting into the music, or why this chromatic section sounds cool even if it's out of key, etc.

[Kage]

Exactly Kage.

That said, as a music student, or analyst, knowing what theory has gone into pieces of music is their job, and some musicans would use these skills to write good music, and others just like analysing music... for the sake of it. Which is sort of silly unless you're trying to learn something with a real use or lesson.

I think it just so happens that the type of music I listen to, while the musicians generally have a level of theory knowledge, they mostly just experiment with feeling and what they write may sound good but probably not be analysed to any huge degree especially if, for example, they're not even sure what complex chords they're even putting into the music, or why this chromatic section sounds cool even if it's out of key, etc.
Yeah. Specifically regarding the example I gave at the first post, I know that Fripp and Co. are all extremely knowledgeable in music theory, but they use that as a springboard and break all the rules they can by just playing in their unique styles. I couldn't tell you if it's a concious thing or not.