Interactive strategies for analysing musical structure

Background in music analysis. Music analysts traditionally take the score as their subject matter but have more recently begun studying music ‘as performance’, as outlined in Nicholas Cook’s 2001 article, ‘Between Process and Product: Music and/as Performance’. This development poses new challenges for analysts exploring alternative texts to the notated score. An ethnographic approach exemplifies and develops Cook’s recommendation to bring more voices into play than has been the case for traditional music-analytical approaches (E. Clarke et al. 2005: 46-47). Involving the composer and performer in analysis brings fresh insight into Ian Bent’s observation that the ‘analyst’s ultimate concern is with the place of a musical structure within the totality of musical structures’ (Bent, 1987: 2). Background in music technology. Music Technologists work with software to manipulate sound. Increasingly, with the growing interest in multi-media work, visual elements are also transformed using such software. Programming languages such as Cycling 74’s Max/MSP (developed from a programme designed at IRCAM by Miller Puckette) provide a versatile and powerful means of constructing software that can present and manipulate sound recordings, video, text and still images in a structured environment. Not only can such software be constructed for creative performance situations but also to create interactive multimedia pedagogical software. One of the authors (Clarke) has also used such techniques to develop an ‘interactive aural’ approach to the analysis of electroacoustic music (where a sound recording rather than a score is often the only or main trace left by the composer). Aims. Composer-performer interactions that took place during the rehearsal of Michael Finnissy’s Second String Quartet (written especially for the Kreutzer Quartet in 2007), help to establish a network of relationships between different layers of the musical structure. By adapting the techniques and methodologies that Clarke has developed for analyzing electroacoustic music the aim is to provide an informative, educational tool for navigating through the different musical parameters of the piece. Main contribution The fact that Finnissy has only provided individual parts for his Second Quartet, and not a full score, invites the structure of the piece to be considered from a new perspective. From a variety of primary source material documenting the creative and interpretative processes, this paper explores the interface between performative, analytical and aural approaches to musical structure. The software that Clarke has developed for electroacoustic music enables the ‘reader’ to interact with the work as sound. This ‘interactive aural’ approach will be expanded for Finnissy’s piece to accommodate the variety of written, aural and visual media that the piece has generated. The approach applied to these materials will enable the reader to engage with them in an integrated and creative manner in exploring the structure of this music. Implications for musical practice. The available technology has not yet fulfilled its potential for supplementing more traditional methodologies. The software developed for this project will help to promote multimedia techniques for music analysis more broadly and will enable the work of other composers and performers to be disseminated in ways that will further enhance our understanding of creative processes by actively involving the reader in the analytical process. Implications for musicological interdisciplinarity. In recent years music analysis has broadened to take into account music as it sounds, as it is performed. By bringing together expertise developed in the areas of musicology and music technology techniques and approaches can be developed to enable the aural aspect of analysis to be brought into the analysis and presentation of music.