To its devotees, music is the most fascinating and purposeful activity known to man. Many people are quite content to listen "innocently" without bothering to think of the historical importance of a work, its structure orits instrumentation. Indeed, a great deal of pleasure is to be gained in this way, and people must be free to listen to music in any way they wish. But there are several different responses when listening to music - physical, emotional, imaginative, intellectual; of these, the intellectual response is the most sophisticated, and occurs when music is enjoyed and appreciated for its sheer beauty and the way ithe composer has manipulated musical form. Therefore the greater the knowledge of the way the music is constructed, the greater the response intellectually.
Music analysis can take many forms. There is the basic analysis of what we hear, what are the instruments, does the music repeat, and so on. It is this basic analysis which is described in this lecture. However, there are other forms of music analysis. A particularly well-known analysis technique is that of Schenkarian. This involves producing a graphical analysis of a piece of music in order to try to reveal more about the music. Such analysis is beyond the scope of this lecture, but is looked at in more detail in Lecture 4 of Psychology and Music.
We appreciate and understand music mainly through listening. Certainly in a concert it is mainly our ears which tells us what the music is and how it is made up. We also bring to each piece of music any background we have. This may be simply reading the concert notes, or may be that we have heard this piece before and know already what to expect. So what are the various elements of music? The following pages take you through each element which can be used to analyse music in a simple way.