Listening beyond the Score: Integrated Music Analysis

This project seeks to integrate two musical analytical approaches that are often considered separate: theoretical-analytical enquiries into written music (scores) and aural analytical enquiries into the resulting sound reality (music as heard). Existing research on contemporary music usually focuses on analyses of scores. However, score-based analysis often fails to capture important acoustic results, especially in works in which oversaturated sound entities form a high degree of textural complexity. In these situations one can no longer hear individual pitch relations or rhythms but rather focus on the overall textures, sound density, registral distribution or timbral transformations. Despite the fact that we cannot exactly experience music as notated, listening has been seriously neglected in the field of contemporary art music analysis. In order to reveal musical meaning created by multiple aspects of a compositione.g. its internal structures, aesthetic concepts and the acoustic result of the final composition, insights into the notated information must be contextualised in relation to the way in which the performed music is perceived. This project addresses important yet unanswered questions about the relationship between the (production-centred) poietic and (reception-centred) aesthetic of new music: to what extent and how are musical networks created by the composer perceived by the listener, and how can the dialogue between these two points of musical communication lead to fruitful results in music analysis and criticism? I will develop an analytical method based on close listening, which itself will be combined with traditional score- and sketch-based analysis, simultaneously exploring the utility of recently developed digital sound analysis tools. I will develop this integrated model by conducting case study analyses of six composers works, which represent different prototypes of spatiotemporal complexity in music after 1945: Pierre Boulez, Kaija Saariaho, Brian Ferneyhough, Franck Bedrossian, Olga Neuwirth and Maki ishii. Based on the analytical practice of these case studies, I will identify the role of listening in relation to score-based/sketch-based and computer-aided analysis, creating in turn an integrated methodological model for examining aural-textual resources. The outcome of this project will provide 1. a methodological breakthrough for analysing spatiotemporal complexities in contemporary music and 2. a theoretical model of the interactivity between aural-textural resources, listening and technology. This model will define the complementary roles of multiple approaches in musical investigation and interpretation, the combination of which will advance the understanding of music after 1945.