A traditionally interesting question that music analysis has to deal with is to what extent analysis accounts for what is actually heard in music. A way to deal with this question is to take a phenomenological approach to music analysis, which means to study consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view when it comes to the musical experience.Thomas Clifton’s Music as Heard (1983) is probably the best known study that exemplifies this approach to music analysis.
There are many events happening simultaneously in all music. The question of which of these events (are intended) to draw our attention the most is a question of musical foreground and background. The mechanisms that affects what in music is perceived to be in the foreground vs. background is complex and relates both to musical structure, musical cognition, and more importantly how these two meet.
The challenges to music analysis are amplified when it comes to works of phonography, which are dominated by musical properties that fall outside of the score, where music analysis traditionally operates. My PhD work-in-progress studies salience in works of phonography to discuss which musical properties or events are the most functional, or account for the coherence, in these works. Studying salience in these works is put forward as a possible method to tackle the aforementioned problem.
As a part my study on salience in works of phonography, I conducted a number of analyses by applying methods from Clifton’s phenomenological approach to music analyses. In this conference, I will present a number of these analyses selected from different genres of music to demonstrate how a phenomenological approach can help the music analyst tackle the challenges mentioned above.
Referenser
Clifton, Thomas. (1983). Music as Heard: A Study in Applied Phenomenology. Yale University Press
2022.
Musikforskning idag. 13–15 juni 2022. Avdelningen för medier, ljud och musikproduktion, DAVA (Dalarnas audiovisuella akademi), Högskolan Dalarna, Falun