An Applied Approach to the Descriptive Analysis of Music as Heard THESIS Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Alissandra Reed Graduate Program in Music The Ohio State University 2017 Master's Examination Committee: David Clampitt, Advisor David Huron Eugenia Costa-Giomi Copyrighted by Alissandra Elise Reed 2017 Abstract This document engages music analysis toward the aim of describing the experience of listening to a piece of music, specifically Franz Liszt’s “Il Penseroso.” In this analysis, music is considered strictly as an aural experience, an object that exists in its hearer’s brain. The document therefore takes a critical approach to descriptive analysis by combining Schenkerian reduction, tonal and neo-Riemannian harmonic analysis, phenomenology, and empirical participant-based musicology to describe the experience of listening to “Il Penseroso.” The term descriptive analysis, taken from David Temperley (1999), refers to the description of how a piece of music is experienced; Temperley opposes this to suggestive analysis, which instead provides a new way of hearing a piece. An analysis is thus given based on the analyst’s perceived experience of listening to “Il Penseroso,” with focus on the role that harmony and melody play in that experience. Next, a study is carried out to gather phenomenological accounts of “Il Penseroso” from expert listeners. Their verbal descriptions are categorized using qualitative content analysis and the occurrences of the resulting categories are compared to the initial, score-based analysis. Liszt’s emotionally complex “Il Penseroso” highlights inherent differences between listeners’ experience of affect. The results demonstrate that an analysis can be, and often is, both descriptive and suggestive, as it may accurately describe one listener’s experience while suggesting a new way of hearing the music to another listener. ii Acknowledgments For their invaluable discussion and guidance throughout this project, I thank my adviser David Clampitt and my dear colleague Lindsay Warrenburg. I thank my committee members, David Huron and Eugenia Costa-Giomi, for the compelling conversations that led me to this project and for their insightful feedback on it. Finally, I thank the Ohio State University Cognitive and Systematic Musicology Laboratory for their never-ending support and cheerful participation in my study. iii Vita June 2011 .......................................................Coral Glades High School May 2015 .......................................................B.M. Music Theory, Florida State University 2015 to present ..............................................Graduate Teaching Associate, School of Music, The Ohio State University Fields of Study Major Field: Music iv Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ iii Vita ..................................................................................................................................... iv List of Tables .................................................................................................................... vii List of Figures .................................................................................................................. viii Chapter 1: Foundations for Musical Description ............................................................... 1 Background ..................................................................................................................... 2 Analysis and Description ................................................................................................ 3 Music Psychology ........................................................................................................... 6 Phenomenology ............................................................................................................... 9 Description of “Il Penseroso” as Heard......................................................................... 12 Chapter 2: Listening-Based Analysis of Liszt’s “Il Penseroso” ....................................... 13 Melody and Harmony: Schenkerian Reduction ............................................................ 14 Narrative Interpretation ................................................................................................. 19 Harmony and the Penseroso Narrative ......................................................................... 20 v Chapter 3: Method for Participant-Based Phenomenological Analysis .......................... 27 Method for Collecting Participant Responses ............................................................... 27 Participants .................................................................................................................... 29 Stimuli ........................................................................................................................... 30 Procedure ....................................................................................................................... 34 Instructions .................................................................................................................... 34 Data Collection and Content Analysis .......................................................................... 35 Results ........................................................................................................................... 42 Limitations .................................................................................................................... 44 Chapter 4: Descriptive Strategies...................................................................................... 47 "Thinking" Descriptions ................................................................................................ 47 Expressive Categories ................................................................................................... 49 Negative Emotion: Fate/Hopelessness ...................................................................... 55 Moments of Highest Agreement................................................................................ 55 Overall Emotional Trajectory .................................................................................... 57 Conclusions ................................................................................................................... 59 References ......................................................................................................................... 62 Appendix A: Segmented Participant Responses ............................................................... 64 vi List of Tables Table 1. Segmented responses to Clip 1 ........................................................................... 36 Table 2. Researcher 2’s categorization process and category operationalizations ........... 38 Table 3. Experimenter’s categorization process and category operationalizations. ......... 39 Table 4. Correlation of two category lists and resultant new category list ....................... 41 Table 5. Operationalizations for the final category list ..................................................... 42 Table 6. Tallied number of participants who used each expressive category by stimulus 45 Table 7. Expressive categoric responses compared to intial analysis ............................... 50 vii List of Figures Figure 1. Schenkerian and Neo-Riemannian reduction of “Il Penseroso” ........................ 16 Figure 2. Chunking “Il Penseroso” ................................................................................... 32 Figure 3. Average affective trajectory of participant responses across 21 ordered clips. 58 viii Chapter 1: Foundations for Musical Description When I first heard Franz Liszt’s “Il Penseroso,” I was stricken. I had been passively listening to Alfred Brendel’s 1998 CD recordings of the entire Années de pèlerinage as background music, but when “Il Penseroso” came on, it demanded my attention. The music carried a certain emotional profundity that drove the analyst in me straight to the score. I wanted to analyze the notes so I could understand what it was about their combination that felt so deep, so emotionally compelling. My goal was to combine deep, reflective listening with the tools of harmonic and melodic analysis to construct an understanding of the profound affective nature of the piece. I sought to use the tools of music theory to analyze not the notes in the piece, but the experience of listening to it. It did not go unnoticed, however, that, through analysis and targeted listening, my experience of the piece changed. Indeed, that is what analysis is meant to do; to give its practitioner a deeper understanding of a piece of music. Perhaps I noticed things in the printed score that I didn’t notice through listening. Perhaps too, looking at the score inhibited my ability to hear beyond the written pitches. Perhaps acquiring a visual representation of the music changed my mental representation of the sound. That reading a score is usually a substantially less emotional experience than listening to a performance is indicates that analysis of a score is, indeed, not analysis of a musical 1 experience. Yet to engage in an analysis