An Observation About Analysis
When you study music for a long time, you analyze music almost without thinking. You tear things apart and generate formal, melodic, and harmonic maps of pieces almost without thinking. I was teaching a webcam lesson earlier this week on the Merlin Suite Del Recuerdo, and without thinking about it I had analyzed the melody and form.
This is a good thing in the sense that it makes it very easy for me to have something to say about a piece when teaching, even if I’ve never played it before (as was the case with the Merlin: I’d never looked at the sheet music before). On the other hand, this makes it very hard to listen to music while doing anything else. I can’t listen to music when I read; I can’t listen to music when I write blog posts or papers. About the only time I can listen is when I set aside time specifically for that or late at night.
It’s kind of a cool development, like the last six years of music training* has finally started to catch up with me. I can’t even imagine what goes through veteran musicians’ heads when they hear a piece of play through it for the first time. I have to think that the level of analysis that takes places unconsciously is amazing.
*That’s a long time–25% of my life so far has been spent in college/grad school.
Interesting post. Re analysing without thinking. I think people new to playing, without thinking about it, often think of music as blobs on the page that have to be made into sounds. Of course, music is sounds first and foremost and the notation is merely a shorthand convenience (not even that, often, for a jazz musician). If you know a piece well then you leave the notation behind, even if you keep it there as a crutch!
I was watching a video of Mitsuko Uchida talking about playing the Schoenberg Piano Concerto the other day. Your post immediately reminded me of this. She was asked how she managed to memorise it. She replied to the effect that she didn’t “memorise” it, she just got to know it and, well, once she knew it she didn’t need the music. And analysing it in the video comes second nature to her, in the way you describe.
What I’m getting round to, I think, is that once you know a piece then you know its shape and can probably describe that shape (OK, so lots of prior musical training comes into play here) – and that is analysis.
The Uchida link is
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmWRttCo7lo&feature=related