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Chapter 6 details a power-laden and affective symbol, metaphor, poetic and musical sign in Pamir culture that is central to concepts of health and healing. This is done through poetic and musical analysis that shows the pervasiveness and centrality of this local sign, which is manifest in local belief, the natural and built environment, and the musical and poetic structure of maddâh devotional music. A physiological experiment that was conducted in the context of maddâh ritual performance is presented and statistical data analyzed and interpreted showing a significant downward modulation of systolic blood pressure at p-value of .0003. Further, the culture-transcendent aspects are applied in another research project in the U.S. among a culturally diverse group of people (ages 18-85) where participants learn to create health, healing, or transformation through practices of music, sound, vocalization, and meditation. The GAP — Guided Attention Practice is presented as part of this latter research project.

This introductory chapter explores the historical and aesthetic context of Mozart's seminal contributions to the piano literature, with attention given to the evolution of keyboard instruments and relative assets of the fortepiano and modern piano, questions of stylistic influence, issues of aesthetic autonomy, and Mozart's own devotion to the cultivation of “taste and sensitivity” (“Geschmack und Empfindung”). The desirable balance in Mozart interpretation between freedom and determination, or subjective expression and objective structure, is probed. A goal is outlined whereby analytic description of the music can remain relevant to issues of practical performance.

This chapter presents a review of the essay “Schenker's Conception of Musical Structure,” written by Allen Forte. The essay comments on a graphic analysis presented by Heinrich Schenker and exemplifies his approach towards tonal music. The music theorist in Forte's essay is conspicuously a writer, who seeks to dispose the words of the essay in the allotted time or space, imagines a time outside the span of the essay and an encounter with a diverse world in which incomprehension is possible. Beyond making assertions about musical structure, the essay also mimics procedures of Schenkerian musical structure and musical theory. Forte's language in the essay also creates parallels between music and theoretical discourse apart from more general resemblance between the musical theorist and the composition in the essay. He also refers to the discipline of music theory and evokes a coherent, purposeful area of research at a time when the present institutional structures of music theory didn't exist.

The success of the expression “world music,” a commercial label coined during the 1980s to refer to certain types of music, provokes an inquiry into the conditions underlying its invention and success, and to question about how these types are brought together and how this music is made. An analysis of a limited corpus of pieces circulating under the genre “world music” leads to the building of a typology. This music does not correspond to any homogeneous form; it derives completely from a combination of pre-existing elements. This art of making combinations, whereby the imagination spreads its wings in the contemporary world, explores a changing world, arouses a feeling of exercising control over it and provides a means for escaping from it. “World music” thus turns out to be an instrument for construing a new, emergent world. Sociological and musicological approaches must be brought together to understand how this music operates and how imagining this new world works through music.

This chapter discusses an alternative to the structural listening proposed by Rose Subotnik is presented. This alternative approach rejects Subotnik's notion that one must choose between binary opposites. It considers structural elements as gestures, which do not represent meanings within abstracted two-dimensional spatial graphs, or communicate them through association or reasoning by analogy, but rather constitute part of the meaning of the original work as a performance event. The essay also critiques Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno and Richard Taruskin, who based on musical analysis, has provided ideological or philosophical critiques of Le Sacre. This chapter particularly questions the way these two authors defined human subjectivity based on immanent musical form, and how they use their conclusions to determine the humane value of Le Sacre. It also questions their structuralist analyses of Le Sacre by offering an alternative reading that recognizes the importance of bodily gesture in danced works of music.

This chapter presents musical transcriptions of the attempts of eight adult subjects to recall part of a folk melody that was repeatedly presented to them. It also discusses the results of some analyses of these transcripts, which seem to point particularly clearly to the involvement of structural knowledge in musical memory. A different reason for the paucity of empirical work on musical recall is the lack of agreed upon and well-motivated methods of describing and analysing the content of a performance in relationship to an original model. The chapter explores methods of musical analysis that provide information at an analogous level of abstraction. It is worth pointing out that most contemporary research on musical memory has used some form of recognition procedure and has used sequences containing much fewer than thirty notes.

This chapter discusses the main topic of this book, which is musical meaning. The question “Does music have meaning?” has been asked ever since music became a subject of discourse. While some think that musical meaning is intrinsic, extrinsic, autonomous, or permanent, the chapters in this book provide an exercise in musical analysis. Several terms that are used in the following chapters are mentioned and defined here, such as semiotic adventures, music as discourse, and discourse.

Some of the ways in which film music has more recently been treated are initially examined. Engagement with the Adorno/Eisler Composing for the Films concentrates on a curious gender implication in their modernist-oriented critique. This is extended into a broader account of hidden critical agendas within the academic practice of musical analysis, particularly with respect to late nineteenth-century music. Rachmaninov is chosen both as a key source of film music's style and as a key composer to suffer both modernist and musicological opprobrium. He is considered with reference to Adorno's essay “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening.” An exploration and problematization of the historical roots of that critical discussion leads to an analysis of Brief Encounter (1945) and the question of what it actually “affirms.”

This chapter examines the relationship between rhetoric and music, with an emphasis on the role of rhetoric in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century culture and how it was absorbed into the musical theory and practice of the day. It then considers the relevance of rhetoric to musical analysis by offering a rhetorical critique on a short section of vocal music from this period: Jan Dismas Zelenka's ‘Crucifixus’ from Missa Paschalis ZWV 7. Aristotle's The Art of Rhetoric, regarded as one of the foundation stones of rhetoric as a discipline, identifies three distinct areas of persuasion: ethos, pathos and logical proof. Another major influence on the thought process of musical theorists of the time was the work of the French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650).

Analytic statements about music inevitably have a hermetic quality. If we want to make understanding music a critical, hermeneutic activity, an understanding of music in its worldly bearings, we need to confront the question of how analytic description can be reconciled or integrated with worldly knowledge. How can the hermetic become the hermeneutic? The impetus for the development of critical musicology came from the rise of critical theory in literary and cultural studies, and more broadly from the development of a postmodernist attitude toward knowledge. A problem arises from the priority of musical analysis over hermeneutics: that is, the standing assumption that any interpretive statements about music must be grounded in technical descriptions of musical style and structure which are, in themselves, independent of “extramusical” interpretation. The self-division of Ludwig van Beethoven's Largo (from Trio in D Major, op. 70, no. 1, the “Ghost” Trio) raises issues that also confront the “enlightened” subject described in Immanuel Kant's famous essay of 1784, “What Is Enlightenment?”

This chapter examines the contribution that traditional music theory and analysis can make to empirical psychological studies of multimedia. Two pieces are examined in detail: Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, which appears numerous times throughout Oliver Stone’s film Platoon, and the Allegretto from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, which accompanies the climactic scene of Tom Hooper’s film The King’s Speech. The dramatic role played by each of these pieces is highly complex, this chapter argues, and thus not entirely captured by the sorts of descriptors commonly employed in empirical studies, such as ‘sadness’ and ‘positive mood.’ Fully understanding a musical excerpt’s dramatic role in a multimedia context—including interactions with spoken text and camerawork—in many cases requires detailed analysis of musical structure. This chapter aims to inform readers of the value of musical analysis for the study of multimedia and to illustrate instances in which musico-structural analysis clearly contributes to dramatic interpretation.

This chapter proposes two linked ideas about classical music theater. First, it suggests that each analytical observation about the music-cum-text intends (inter alia) a point of dramatic direction. Second, and conversely, it argues that each intuition we have about the behavior of characters on stage naturally seeks its validation (inter alia) through musical-textual analysis. To oversimplify the matter in a brief maxim: no analysis without direction; no directing without analysis. To demonstrate the relation between musical analysis and stage direction, the chapter examines a short passage from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro. The passage, comprising a solo by Count Almaviva, and a subsequent solo by Basilio, opens the first act trio “Cosa sento!” Most people will observe that the Count has trouble making a firm cadence on the tonic, that the cadence on “sento” is somehow unconvincing, and that the Count must work hard—too hard—to achieve the eventual cadence at the end of his solo.

In this chapter, the book moves from discussing the concept of ‘making music’ to ‘using music’ and the intentions or purposes of the receiver of the music for using or consuming it. The previous chapters have established the idea that music creates both an aural domain which imposes seclusion and an instrument which creates social bond and cooperation. This chapter defines and explores the common approaches to listening to music and discusses how music can be used for ‘structural listening’ and for ‘art for art's sake’. Sociological and psychological perspectives on listening to music suggest that music performs a range of psychological and sociological functions for those who consume it. Far from being autonomous or functionless, the chapter argues that studies have shown clear-cut pieces of evidence showing that music affords important uses to individual and groups of listeners.

This chapter addresses the temporal processing of complex sounds relevant to musical analysis. Functional imaging studies, using positron emission tomography (PET), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and magnetoencephalography (MEG), and the psychophysical assessment of patients with lesions allow two different approaches to this. Functional imaging allows the determination of structures normally involved in temporal analysis, while patient studies allow inference about the necessary structures for temporal analysis. Both approaches suggest a hierarchal organization in the brain corresponding to the processing of music. The features of individual notes are analyzed in the pathway up to and including the auditory cortices, while higher-order patterns formed by those features are investigated by distributed networks in the temporal lobe and frontal lobes distinct from the auditory cortices. Both studies of humans with brain lesions and functional imaging provide convergent evidence for the existence of a neural substrate for the processing of sound sequences that is hierarchal in organization.

This chapter examines the collective aspects of improvisation, proposing an analytical framework for the examination of widely divergent forms of collectively improvised music. It assesses collectivity from two broad vantage points, musical and interactional, exploring each from a variety of theoretical perspectives. The concept of the “model” for improvisation, introduced in Chapter 1, is nuanced through discussions of model specificity and flexibility, the varying degrees to which models are consciously known, and the musical make-up of the model itself: whether it contains one or multiple strands of music and which musical textures are idiomatic to its realizations. Discussion of these factors for musical analysis is enhanced by consideration of cognitive processes and concepts of group flow, shared histories, and dynamic, shared knowledge bases. Interactional factors of collective improvisation are then considered through an examination of communication codes and modes of interaction as well as diverse interactional roles. The concepts of collaborative emergence and intersubjectivity, central to many discussions of group creativity, are tempered here by considering the varying degrees of influence and interaction at play in different moments of a collective improvisation. The end result is a comprehensive analytical model for examining the multifaceted aspects of collective improvisation across cultures.