SOUNDING HISTORY

Traditional modes of analysis implicitly attribute privileged meanings to formal, harmonic and motivic relationships. The underlying assumption seems to be that structural functions of this kind make up the content or substance of the work. Content or substance, in other words, equate roughly with a particular kind of (top-down) structural configuration, a relatively modern equation which paradoxically strengthens both a sense of the work's originality and uniqueness, and a sense of its communion with other music; semper idem sed non eodem modo [always the same, but not always in the same way] was Schenker's formulation. Indeed it is precisely through this paradox that the work might be viewed as a form of knowledge, the particular tracing of a universal form, as well as an object of beauty. When analysis was instituted as a discipline in the late nineteenth century, it formalised a growing tendency for the profiles of individual works to emerge sharply from music as a whole, and specifically from larger generic groupings. One might argue about the details of the history here. But at the very least there was a shift of emphasis through the nineteenth century from a position where genres were exemplified by works to one in which works made their own statement. The work, clearly defined against a generic background, would be legitimised by its structure, and that in turn might be revealed by analysis.