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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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experience. Yet to engage in an analysis using the tools of music theory is to use the

score as a representation of the experience. Thus, the act of listening is confounded; it

becomes an affirmation or critique of analysis rather than a sublime, unburdened artistic

experience.

How, then, can a music analysis truly reflect the sublime, non-analytic, artistic

experience of listening? An ideal analysis of listening experience should seek to explain

what non-analyst listeners describe as affective. Therefore, after I crafted my analysis

through a combination of reflective listening and score reading, I sought a method to

focus the analysis back on the experience of non-analytic listening. I gathered qualitative

data by asking participants to listen deeply and report on their perceptions of the piece.

By analyzing the content of their phenomenological responses, I could both fortify and

critique my initial analysis.

Background

As a music analyst, with what tools can I dive into this piece in order to resurface

with a firm understanding of what gives it its emotional profundity? Music theory has

given analysts a garage-full of tools with which to examine and explain musical features.

The tool or tools of choice depend on the task that one hopes to accomplish. Some tools

facilitate inspection of the musical surface, some prune away surface materials to reveal a

more essential structure, some enable their users to plant new ideas into an existing piece.

My analysis requires tools that facilitate inspection and description of music as a listening

experience, and not as dots on a piece of paper. Although written scores provide an

invaluable entry into understanding the aural experience, they are themselves reductive.

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There is much that they don’t show: notes indicate fundamental pitches but not

harmonics, timbre is reduced to an instrument indication and some articulation markings

(which require a performer’s interpretation), and importantly, the score cannot convey the

feeling of hearing the music performed.

To focus music analysis on the listening experience is to place analysis

somewhere near the crossroads of music theory and music cognition. This, of course, is

not a new concept; many music analysts, especially within the past few decades, have

found themselves at that intersection. It is a bustling juncture with activity on every

corner that has produced intriguing theories and analytic approaches. To arrive there, one

must begin by asking oneself about the purpose of music analysis.

Analysis and Description

The truest answer to the query, “what is the purpose of music analysis?” is that it

depends entirely on whom one asks. With even minimal research into this question, it

becomes clear that, by and large, music scholars do not agree on an overarching purpose

or goal for analysis. What appears to be the most widely agreed upon (and perhaps the

vaguest) conception of analysis is that it somehow relates to musical structure:

“The study of musical structure applied to actual works or performances.”

“Analysis” (Harvard Dictionary of Music)

“An analysis is an investigation of the structure of a single piece.”

“The Question of Purpose in Music Theory” (Temperley 1999, 66)

“That part of the study of music that takes as its starting-point the music

itself, rather than external factors. More formally, analysis may be said to

include the interpretation of structures in music, together with their

resolution into relatively simpler constituent elements, and the

investigation of the relevant functions of those elements.”

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“Analysis” (Bent and Pople)

“Analysis is thus concerned with structure, with structural problems, and

finally, with structural listening. By structure I do not mean here the mere

grouping of musical parts according to traditional formal schemata,

however; I understand it rather as having to do with what is going on,

musically, underneath these formal schemata.”

“On the Problem of Musical Analysis” (Adorno 1982, 173)

The disagreements truly abound when one asks either, “where does the structure arise?”

or, “how should analysis address the structure?” The question of how analysis should

address structure appears overall to have been of more central concern to music theorists.

A common thread running through written investigations of the practice of

analysis is the relationship of description to analysis of structure. Michael Rogers, in a

book chapter about the pedagogy of analysis, writes, “the most basic problem in defining

analysis is to distinguish it from description,” where description is the “fact-gathering

enterprise that answers, ‘what happens [in a piece of music]?’ and ‘where does it

happen?’” His objection to description, or “fact-gathering,” as analysis mirrors Adorno’s

sentiment regarding the “mere grouping of musical parts.” The stance against description

as analysis is indeed a shared sentiment among many other music scholars. To them,

analysis is heralded as an achievement and held in much higher esteem than description

of music. Authors who hold this point of view sometimes ascribe analysis rather lofty

goals; for instance, Adorno writes, “works need analysis for their ‘truth content’

[Wahrheitsgehalt] to be revealed” (1982, 176). The more general – more grounded –

conception amongst those who oppose description as analysis is that “analysis tells you

more than you could find out by listening, description does not; and analysis tells you

why things happen, description does not” (Dubiel 2000).

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Joseph Dubiel laments this widespread opposition to description. In his 2000

exposition on the subject, “Analysis, Description, and What Really Happens,” he asks,

“what’s ‘mere,’ I’d like to know, about conveying the sense of what it’s like to listen to

some music?” The examples Dubiel cites in his ensuing defense of description make

clear that his idea of description differs from Rogers’s in a particularly telling way.

Where Rogers opposed the description of facts that can be gathered from looking at a

score, Dubiel defends, instead, the description of the experience of hearing a piece. Both

are descriptions of musical structure. They differ primarily in the conception of where

that structure arises: for Rogers, structure is primarily discoverable in the composer’s

notation; for Dubiel, structure exists in the listener’s brain.

Dubiel’s idea of description is representative of a camp of theorists who view

music more as an aural or mental process than as a set of notated ideas. David Temperley,

both a music theorist and a cognitive scientist, is part of this camp. In his article “The

Question of Purpose in Music Theory”, Temperley responds to Bent’s statement that

analysis “is the means of answering directly the question ‘how does it work?’” (Bent and

Pople) by noting that to ask how something works might either be to ask, “what does it

do?” or to ask, “how does it do what I already know it does?” He elaborates this

dichotomy,

In the case of music, I could be saying, “This piece has certain effects on

me (an emotional effect, a sense of conflict and resolution, etc.). How is it

having these effects [e.g., how does it do what I already know it does]?”

Or I could be saying, “I don’t feel that I’m fully understanding this piece;

show me a better way of listening to it so that I can appreciate it more

[e.g., what does it do].” (1999, 67)

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The remainder of Temperley’s article paints the former statement as a starting point for

description or “descriptive analysis” and the latter as one for “prescriptive” or

“suggestive analysis.” His line is thus drawn between analysis that explores and describes

how a piece of music is heard and analysis that suggests particular ways of hearing a

piece of music. To accomplish descriptive analysis, then, one must have some basis for

understanding how a given piece music sounds to a population.

We return to the busy intersection of music theory and music cognition. Analysts

who come to this crossroads in search of musical description remember that “music

unfolds in time; we do not wait until the end of a piece to begin analyzing it, but rather,

we interpret it as we go along, sometimes revising our interpretation of one part in light

of what happens afterwards” (Temperley 2001, 2). Therefore, description of musical

experience requires knowledge of cognitive and perceptual experience.

Music Psychology

In seeking Temperley’s brand of descriptive analysis, it is crucial to note that the

same music sounds different to different listeners. A listener’s perception and experience

can depend on their previous musical experience, their knowledge of the musical idiom,

any external associations they might have with a sound stimulus, or their artistic

preferences (Stewart 2008). Even a single listener might experience the same stimulus in

different ways depending on the time of day, how much attention they give to the

stimulus, or their mood. Therefore, issues of affective perception across an entire piece

are essentially impossible to quantify or define when the piece is considered as

experienced sound.

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Nevertheless, some music theorists, Temperley included, have constructed

theories that generalize aspects of musical experience. Because of principles like

statistical learning, researchers can say with high degrees of certainty that listeners

experienced in an idiom will have similar expectations associated with different musical

sounds. Some models that have taken a scientific approach to generalizing musical

experience across a population include the Generalized Theory of Tonal Music (Lerdahl

and Jackendoff 1983), the implication-realization model (Narmour 1990), Temperley’s

“preference rules” in The Cognition of Basic Musical Structures (Temperley 2001), and

the ITPRA model of expectation (Huron 2006). These models enable theorists and

analysts to approach the analysis of a piece of music in terms of how a listener is likely to

interpret some of its sounds.

Some traditional models of music analysis have also been said to describe

psychological processes. For instance, in regard to Schenkerian analysis, Nicholas Cook

wrote,

Schenker’s approach to analysis was “psychological” in the sense that he

was interested in how musical sounds are experienced, rather than in the

sounds themselves; so that he interprets one C major chord one way and

another differently because the context is different and consequently the

chord is experienced in a different way. (1987, 67)

Although the consideration of context and experience was central to Schenker’s theories,

his reductive approach to analysis has been criticized for its questionable perceptual

salience. Schenker’s approach to melodic interpretation at the foreground level is, in fact,

quite similar to Lerdahl and Jackendoff’s “prolongational” analytic domain (Lerdahl &

Jackendoff 1983, Cross 1998, 7–8). However, Schenker had no empirical evidence for his

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model, and his was not supposed to be generalizable beyond the “genius” of German

instrumental music (Kerman 1980). Even Cook, quoted above, quickly backpedals to say

of Schenker, “this is to use the word ‘psychological’ in a rather loose manner.”

In response to music theories’ claims to represent psychological experience, Ian

Cross criticizes the music theory community’s utilization of unproven “folk

psychologies” as they oppose empirical cognitive psychology. In his 1998 paper “Music

Analysis and Music Perception,” Cross quotes Jerome Breuner, defining the term as “a

set of more-or-less normative descriptions of how human beings ‘tick’, what minds are

like, what one can expect situated action to be like, what are possible modes of life, how

one commits oneself to them” (Cross 1998, 5). These descriptions are used by laypeople

to describe perceived mental processes; they often do not accurately reflect the findings

of empirical psychology research. Cross insists that “the ‘analytical idea’ of perception

can be thought of as a partial ‘folk psychology’ of music analysis.” In other words, the

way that many analysts conceive of musical perception is not consistent with the findings

of cognitive science. Analysts often discuss perception as though it is subject to volitional

intervention, while the broader domain of cognitive psychology, he writes, understands

perception as “involving involuntary and non-conscious processes” (Cross 1998, 5).

Cross eventually concedes that it would not be reasonable to forgo “folk

psychology” in music analysis entirely, but calls on music analysts to make clear whether

their analysis makes use of an understanding of “folk” or empirical psychology. This may

not be a realistic request on all fronts, but I will concede that the current study chiefly

engages perception through “folk psychology.” By collecting and analyzing listener-

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based data, I take an empirical approach to understanding the experience of listening to

“Il Penseroso” among a population. Since cognitive science considers perception an

involuntary and non-conscious process, though, the act of reporting on one’s perception

is necessarily confounding.

Whatever its challenges, the music cognition field has set a precedent and

standard for the collection of participant-based data toward the goal of understanding

how listeners perceive musical sounds. It has introduced to music analysts a rigorous,

scientific, and empirical approach to describing music listening experiences. While most

of the generalized music cognition models discussed above will not be directly applied in

the forthcoming study, their philosophy of approach to uncovering satisfactory

descriptions of musical experience will.

Phenomenology

When one looks outside the bounds of cognitive science for a method for

reporting on one’s perceptual experience, one discovers the philosophic discipline of

phenomenology. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes phenomenology as

“the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of

view.” It elaborates:

We all experience various types of experience including perception,

imagination, thought, emotion, desire, volition, and action. Thus, the

domain of phenomenology is the range of experiences including these

types (among others). (Smith 2016)

Phenomenology therefore accounts for the volitional aspect of music listening that

cognitive science does not. Husserlian phenomenology, however, is not empirical. It

depends on its practitioners to report on their experience by introspecting.

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Phenomenology is wholly subjective and qualitative, but this does not mean its

application cannot be rigorous.

A seminal application of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology to the description of

music came in Thomas Clifton’s 1983 book Music as Heard: Studies in Applied

Phenomenology. As its title implies, Clifton’s book takes music as a listener-dependent

object. His philosophy mirrors music cognition’s as they both consider music an artifact

of the mind of the listener. In the following statement, Clifton makes an appeal to

musicians to consider phenomenology as a valid and useful mode of theory and analysis:

…there is ample room in music theory for phenomenological description.

There is no reason why music theory cannot feel free to deal with

meanings which are significant to one’s consciousness of music, to the

way one relates to, and in fact, recognizes music. Music theory need not

feel that it is being unscientific by returning the experiencing person to

center stage. The dichotomies have been dissolved, and we speak today

out of ignorance when we oppose descriptive and objective methods. For

this reason and others, it is possible to frame a phenomenological

definition of music theory in which a surprising number of theorists may

recognize their own efforts: let us say that music theory is not an inventory

of prescriptions or a corpus of systems, but rather, an act: the act of

questioning our assumptions about the nature of music and the nature of

man perceiving music. … to perceive any object as an individual standing

out from the background of the world is already to theorize about it.

Perception does not precede thought, but a reflective attitude is needed if

the thought in the perception is to emerge [italics mine]. (1983, 37)

The last statement confronts the conflict between cognitive science and “folk

psychology’s” views of perception as involuntary or volitional. In his book, Clifton uses

his carefully developed philosophy to discuss music that has challenged other theoretical

approaches, such as aleatoric music. Chance music challenges analysts who seek to

illuminate musical meaning in a work because there is no agent behind the notes.

Phenomenology, however, can account for the music purely in terms of how it is heard.

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Therefore, Clifton “finds no experiential basis for distinction between indeterminate

music and that which is highly specified” (Bowman 1989). Another insight arising from

his discussion of aleatoric music is “that repeatability is as impossible for highly

circumscribed compositions as for the aleatoric or improvisatory, since the listener's

experiential modes vary even given an otherwise identical performance” (Bowman

1989). In other words, the phenomenological approach recognizes that repeated music or

musical ideas will be experienced differently on each iteration. This is a concept that does

not appear to pervade much music analysis, as writers often highlight recurrent structures

each on the same level.

In David Lewin’s 1986 article “Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of

Perception,” he presents a decidedly formalized model for “a musical perception” based

on Husserlian phenomenology. Lewin’s formula accounts for five elements of perception

that occur at any moment in listening time: the sonic event, the musical context, a list of

pairs of perception and relation, and a list of statements in a stipulated language. In the

article, Lewin uses his five-element formula to write an analysis of a passage from

Schubert’s Morgengruss. He divides three measures into eleven “events” and defines the

five elements for each event in order to track the phenomenon of listening to these

measures. Lewin’s method employs phenomenology to make predictions about how an

enculturated listener would interpret a musical event in terms of its context. The

approach, like some empirical psychological approaches, produces a great amount of

information with respect to each musical event. This rigor yields stimulating results and

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discussion, to be sure, but perhaps it is not the most useful approach for a written

descriptive analysis of an entire piece.

Description of “Il Penseroso” as Heard

The current study will employ phenomenological thought, participant-based data,

and traditional music-theoretic concepts to construct a description of “Il Penseroso” as a

heard experience. The analysis presented in Chapter 2 employs theoretic tools such as

Schenkerian reduction and neo-Riemannian transformational analysis to investigate the

harmonic and melodic structures that underlie my experience of listening to the piece.

These tools are employed not for the purpose of understanding the composition, but for

the purpose of understanding the listening experience. Since they necessarily do both, and

since they were used for analysis prior to a thorough phenomenological approach, the act

of analysis changes my listening experience in unknown ways. I then gather

phenomenological data, or in other words, descriptions of the experience of listening to

“Il Penseroso” that are unconfounded by score-reading, in a participant-based study

whose methods are detailed in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 presents an analysis of the

phenomenological data, a comparison to my original listening-based analysis, and a

concluding discussion on the goals, methods, and viability of descriptive analysis.

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Chapter 2: Listening-Based Analysis of Liszt’s “Il Penseroso”

Franz Liszt composed “Il Penseroso” in the 1840’s as the second piece in his suite

Deuxième année: Italie (Second year: Italy) from his set of three suites entitled Années de

pèlerinage (Years of Pilgrimage). The piece’s title, translating roughly to “the thinker,”

“the serious man,” or “the man deep in thought,” has a clear programmatic implication.

Because I read the title when I first heard the piece, I can’t remember a time when I

didn’t associate the music with a man’s thought process. As I listen to the short piece, an

affect of solemn, dark, negative contemplation overwhelms my experience. There seems

to be a strong sense of introspective searching, perhaps as an internal quest for meaning

or to reconcile difficult thoughts. Moments of sequence or process-based harmony

particularly intensify the feeling of endless pursuit. Even moments of tonal, functional

progression tend to feel noticeably less sure than usual. Harmonic and melodic analysis

of the piece from both tonal Schenkerian and neo-Riemannian perspectives appears to

reveal some of Liszt’s most affective compositional strategies. Solemnity and melancholy

seem to manifest in slow – almost static – and descending melodic lines. Contemplation

and mental process seem to be represented in occasional absences of functional harmony

through harmonies related by neo-Riemannian transformations. Internal conflict is made

evident by dissonant inflections on functional dominants. The sadness and yearning

associated with lowered sixth scale degrees weighs heavily on the listening experience.

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As I approached the construction of my analysis, my main goal was to explain

how the piece achieved its strong affect. In effect, I attempted to answer Temperley’s

question “how does it do what I already know it does?” In pursuing an answer, however,

I discovered new and clearer conceptions of “what I know it does” – evidence that the

analytic process changed my perceptions and that therefore I could not truly use analysis

to describe my initial, non-analytic listening experience. Nevertheless, I consistently used

listening as my guide to interpret the notes on the page. As I got to know the piece more

deeply, a narrative emerged. It is told through melody, harmony, texture, dynamics,

range, and motivic development.

Melody and Harmony: Schenkerian Reduction

The original graph in Figure 1 provides a useful way to visualize both

transformational and Schenkerian reductive information about the melodic and harmonic

foreground. The graph’s two upper staves display a Schenkerian interpretation of

relationships and hierarchies in the outer voices1. The graph therefore displays

phenomenological information. The melody and bass notes with stems are experienced as

structurally important; they are marked2 as moments of sectional beginning or ending, or

as arrivals. Other notes are heard as relating to the stemmed notes. Flagged notes are

heard as upper neighbors to their succeeding structural stemmed notes, always implying

the expectation (and eventual satisfaction) of semitonal descent. The graph makes clear

that the first half of the piece is characterized by two minor third ascents in both melody

1 Written bass notes do not always reflect their true composed octaves. 2 Markedness is here used as it is defined in Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and

Interpretation (Hatten 2004).

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and bass and a long descent to the first structural dominant at m. 21. This interrupting

dominant results in a restart of directed harmonic motion in the second half, beginning

with the recovery of the structural melodic scale degree 3. This time, the minor third

ascents are forgone in favor of a melodic climax in m. 30 on 6 as the upper neighbor to 5.

This climax is followed by a descent to structural harmonic closure which is first

attempted in m. 35 and finally achieved in m. 39. The final eight measures act as a coda

to the closure, primarily reinforcing the tonic but including too a recall of the climactic 6

– 5 motion.

While all Schenkerian analyses aim to reduce a melody to a handful of notes at

the background, applying the process to this piece hardly feels like reduction. One of the

most noticeable experiences I have while listening to this piece is the stasis of the

melodic line; for long stretches of time, the melody feels as if it has nowhere to go. The

interrupted 3-line structure and the background pattern of descent seem to truly permeate

the phenomena of the piece. That there are two moments of ascent in the first half is

tempered by the fact that the melody never rises above 3 in the concurrent key; even the

climax on 6 in the second half is heard as 3 in the concurrently tonicized key.

16

Continued

Figure 1. Schenkerian and Neo-Riemannian reduction of “Il Penseroso.”

17

Figure 1 continued

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The lower part of each system on the graph shows a different kind of

phenomenological reduction. Below each system are written roman numerals and figures

to describe every discrete harmony in relationship to its local tonic. The lowest staff

illuminates voice leading relationships in harmonies that do not satisfy the expectations

of tonal function. To emphasize the neo-Riemannian transformations between them, the

staff depicts harmonies without respect to inversion (i.e., without respect to bass note,

which is shown on the staff above). These voice-leading transformations are illustrated

with blue slurs indicating common-tones and purple dotted lines indicating half-step

motions; in moments of non-tonal function in this piece, common tones and half steps are

the only types of voice-leading motion to exist.

The types of triadic transformations are also labeled in brackets below or at the

roman numeral level. Each of these refers to semitonal voice-leading motion from one

harmony to the next. [P] refers to the parallel transformation – under [P] the third of a

major triad moves down or the third of a minor triad moves up. [L] refers to the

leittonwechsel transformation – under [L], either the fifth of a minor triad moves up or

the root of a major triad moves down. Combinations of these should be read with right

orthography (i.e., [LP] means first apply [L], then apply [P] to the result of [L]). [SL]

refers to the slide transformation – under [SL] the root and fifth of a major triad move up

or the root and fifth of a minor triad move down. Each of these discrete transformations

results in a triad whose quality (major or minor) is opposite that of its originator.

Neo-Riemannian and Schenkerian approaches to analysis have sometimes been

painted as opposing viewpoints. An understanding of the harmonic forces at work in this

composition, however, unquestionably requires an integration of the insights from both

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approaches. Both give phenomenological information about how harmonies relate to each

other. The Schenkerian and roman numeral approach describe how harmonies relate to

the local tonic. The neo-Riemannian approach describes how harmonies relate to their

immediately surrounding harmonies. Listeners experience music in both ways, hearing

both long-term, directional relationships and immediate ones. When a harmony does not

fit within the key, it is useful to investigate where it does fit. Therefore, in a piece that

stretches the bounds of tonality, a combined approach such as mine lends the most useful

information for describing how harmony and melody are experienced.

Narrative Interpretation

In addition to the initial harmonic incompletion and the parallelism between the

beginnings of each half, the piece is sectionalized by its texture. The first half is relatively

sparse; with separated melodic and harmonic attacks, and harmonies realized as blocked

or rolled chords with a single attack, the music feels like it is wandering (or, perhaps,

wondering). There is a palpable uncertainty, a sense of being lost. The second half

introduces moving eighth notes in the bass voice, usually moving in oscillating half-steps.

To me, this textural device invokes images of gears turning, or perhaps thoughts

processing. The music sounds more connected, coherent, and goal-directed. The coda,

beginning at m. 40, recalls the opening texture, but sounds more sure. The melody

becomes registrally buried under the harmonies that now occur on strong beats and

persist without rests. Through listening and analysis, the piece has led me to the

following narrative interpretation: in the first half, a subject, il penseroso, contemplates

new, negative, and confusing thoughts; at the start of the second half, he begins to be able

to process those thoughts, arriving for a moment at a staggering realization (m. 30), and

20

by the end he fully accepts the subject of his contemplation, having gained the ability to

integrate it into his prior understanding of the world.

Harmony and the Penseroso Narrative

A primary harmonic element of this interpretation is the use of harmonies without

diatonic function throughout the piece. The first half particularly uses non-diatonic or

non-functional harmonies within its keys to communicate confusion and negative

emotional states. In fact, only about half of the twenty-nine discrete harmonic moments

in the first half have clear, directed harmonic function, and even those are divided among

four successive tonal areas.

The opening two measures use non-diatonic harmony to communicate an

immediate affect of solemnity and confusion. David Huron noted, in his book Sweet

Anticipation, that even the initial tonic chord is likely to sound unexpected on first

hearing.

On the basis of past statistical exposure, listeners are apt to assume that the

initial octave E’s represent either the tonic or dominant pitches. At least

initially, the most probable inferred key is either E or A major or minor.

Listeners will tend to hear the first (C# minor) chord as a mediant chord

evoking both surprise and seriousness. Repeating the pattern into the

second measure, the ensuing (A minor) chord holds a chromatic mediant

relation to the first chord and so will reinforce the qualia of surprise and

seriousness. (Huron 2006, 274)

Roman numerals might be stretched to call this A-minor chromatic mediant “bvib,” but it

is more usefully described by its neo-Riemannian, voice-leading relationship to the

preceding tonic. Through the [LP] transformation, only one note is held in common

between the two triads – the E of the static melody. On its initial hearing, the A-minor

harmony makes little sense amid a phrase that is otherwise an entirely functional C#-

21

minor progression, despite being related by close voice-leading to both its functional

neighboring chords. It is as if the melodic E is searching for options – both C#-minor and

A-minor are valid harmonizations (although, as minor triads, both are negatively

valanced), but C# wins out as the stronger option immediately with its cadence. When I

hear these opening measures, even though I now fully expect it, the A-minor chord still

invokes a strong sense of emotional pain3. The second time the C#-minor – A-minor

progression is heard, in m. 6, the ear is somewhat more prepared to understand it; its

purpose becomes retrospectively clearer when it is reconciled as a functional

predominant leading to the E-minor cadence in m. 8.

Parallel to the opening harmonies of the first and second four-measure phrases are

the augmented triads in the following two phrases that tonicize E-minor and G-minor

respectively. Both of these phrases open with augmented triads built on ↑7, 3, and 5, once

again using semitonal and common-tone voice-leading to move between the non-

functional chord and the local tonic. The augmented triad, which is equal parts dominant

(↑7 and 5) and tonic (3 and 5), and whose notes are equidistant from each other (each a

major third or diminished fourth apart), invokes to me a feeling of emptiness, a needing

to be filled in. They are strong purveyors of the sense of searching and confusion that

permeates the opening half of the piece.

The final augmented triad prompts the “filling in” that I desired on hearing it, but

perhaps in the least satisfying way. The major thirds (between ↑7 and 5 in the bass and 3

and ↑7 in the melody) are “filled in” with chromatic steps in mm. 17–19. This chromatic

3 This emotional response may also be caused particularly by Brendel’s performance. In the second

measure, he strikes the low A1 a moment before rolling the rest of the chord. The resulting expectation of

A-major makes the realized A-minor chord all the more painful.

22

descent is achieved through a chain of neo-Riemannian triadic transformations through

which the triads alternate preservation of the root and fifth and preservation of the third.

Born out of an augmented triad and with no sense of tonic, the sequence sounds as if it

might be an endless search. Every melodic or inner voice note within the sequence

moving in descent creates a sort of sinking feeling and at this point, il penseroso’s search

for understanding sounds fruitless and hopeless.

By contrast, the second half of the piece is more substantially made up of directed

harmonic function. It begins with the same [LP] motion in the same harmonic phrase as

the opening, though it should be noted that by this third hearing, the A-minor triad feels

unquestionably less foreign. The fourth time the C#-minor to A-minor motion is heard,

instead of modulation to E-minor, another voice-leading transformation occurs, [L], so

that A-minor moves to F-major – the hexatonic pole of the global tonic (mm. 27–29). F-

major is tonicized for three measures, marking the only non-tonic key area in the second

half. The arrival on F-major sounds triumphant. It marks the first and only major key area

in the piece, the first moment of melodic ascent in the second half, and its second

measure, marked rinforzando, results from the first melodic ascent larger than a minor

third in the whole piece. It is as if this triad, with only one semitone of difference from

the recurrent A-minor, realizes the goal that that “bvib” had been striving to achieve the

entire time. It sounds to me like an apex of realization for il penseroso, an exciting idea,

perhaps a possible solution to dealing with the difficult ideas on which he was thus far

focused. The achievement of this positively-valanced major triadic moment is satisfying,

a triumph after 29 long measures of struggle. That sweet feeling of triumphant idealism,

however, is abruptly swept away by the chromatic bass descent back to the tonic in m. 32

23

– il penseroso’s remembrance of a grave reality, perhaps. The triadic [LPL]

transformation here moves every chord tone by half-step, creating that unique,

disorienting feeling that tends to accompany any immediate transformation from a triad

to its hexatonic pole. The other occurrence of the C#-minor – A-minor – F-major

progression falls after the final achievement of tonic in a coda section, mm. 43–44. This

time, instead of the abrupt move from F-major back to C#-minor, a common tone C/B# is

held through a move to the functional dominant, effectively integrating the non-diatonic

F-major triad into the larger tonal C#-minor framework of the piece. Although C#-minor

has been established as the inescapable tonic of reality, perhaps the F-major possibility

need not be so distant as felt necessary after its initial presentation. Thus, without losing

all hope, Il penseroso has become able to reconcile the short-lived triumphant discovery

with his more somber, realistic view of the world.

Setting aside the implications of non-tonal harmonies, the narrative interpretation

is also supported by an examination of functional dominants. The inclusion of a minor

ninth above the root of a dominant chord can be understood as reflecting not only

harmonic, but cognitive dissonance; thus, use of V7b9s versus V7s follows the same

overall pattern of confusion, realization, and integration. No dominant in any key area in

the first half is heard without its minor ninth. In fact, the extended dominant at the point

of interruption (mm. 21–22) prominently features this ninth in its left-hand arpeggiation.

The global use of V7b9s does not let up until after the triumphant F-major moment.

Immediately after its [LPL] transformation back to tonic (m. 32) begins a chain of

applied dominants leading to 2. For the first time here, the listener hears regular,

uninflected V7s in between V7b9s. This reflects the moment of realization associated with

24

the F-major section, the consonance acting as an afterglow of the seeming clarity

achieved in that moment. Unexpectedly, when this sequence is immediately repeated as a

small-scale interruption of the structural cadence (expected on m. 36), each dominant

includes a minor ninth. This, in conjunction with the prior denial of cadence, reflects a

lingering uncertainty and need for further mental processing. The structural authentic

cadence is finally realized in mm. 38–39, brought about by a plain V7, devoid of ninth

inflection. This dominant’s relative consonance coincides with the moments of large-

scale melodic and harmonic closure, and together these elements all point to il

penseroso’s reconciliation and acceptance of his dissonant thoughts.

Not only did the V7b9s create dissonance, but they represented part of a thematic

instantiation of tension-to-resolution that prevails throughout the piece. While I cannot

say for sure whether all of the following was noticeable to me by ear, I notice a theme of

↓6 – 5 resolutions across the piece. At a deep background level, this is reflected by ↓6 as

the ninth in the first structural dominant (m. 21) “resolving” to 5 in the last structural

dominant (m. 38). At a more immediate level, both of these dominants are approached by

iv6 so that there is ↓6 – 5 motion in the bass. However, this motion is not fully satisfied

by the first dominant, since ↓6 persists through it; therefore, the ↓6 – 5 resolution is

stronger at the final dominant. This and other moments of ↓6 – 5 outer-voice motion are

denoted on the upper two staves of Figure 1 with flagged ↓6s. The melodic climax itself

(m. 30) is part of one of the most important ↓6 – 5 resolutions. Overall, it should be

observed that ↓6s occur more frequently in the second half, and each of them resolves

directly to 5. This once again points to the ability that il penseroso gains in the second

25

half to better process his thoughts and to move toward the acceptance and reconciliation

of dissonance.

The idea that ↓6 – 5 motion represents an important aspect of resolution here is

especially supported by the final melodic motion in the coda, after the structural

achievement of tonic. Measures 44–46 elaborate ↓6 – 5 motion over the harmonic

progression of F-major – V – I that I have said represents il penseroso’s integration and

acceptance of his dissonant thoughts. It is unusual for a melody in a 19th-century concert

piece to end off tonic; usually the tonic pitch is an indication of finality. Liszt emphasizes

the decision to end the melody on 5 by preparing the listener to expect 1 by using a

melodic 3 – 2. The expectation that the melody will end with 3 – 2 – 1 is created both

through experience listening to European art music of a similar tradition and through the

already-heard structural cadence in mm. 38-39. Thus, despite that the ↓6 – 5 motion

usually represents resolution or closure in this piece, the melodic conclusion on 5

simultaneously represents a lack of closure. It draws attention to the importance of that

↓6 and F-major moment. The C#-minor that “won” in the first cadence is slightly

thwarted in this final cadence by the denial of 1. To me, this indicates that il penseroso’s

triumphant, climactic idea, represented by F-major and the ↓6 – 5 motion, has not only

integrated into, but has changed his lasting view of the world. This small ray of positivity

at the end of his thought process is still assertively grounded in the negatively-valanced

C#-minor, however, by means of the low C# octaves that end the piece.

Although the analysis presented in this chapter sought to explain my experience

of listening to “Il Penseroso,” many of its details would not have come to light without

26

the analysis of the written score. As a music theorist who has spent years thinking about

meaning in composed music, I am aware of a personal tendency to ascribe meaning to

interesting harmonic and melodic relationships. At the time of writing, however, I do

truly hear the narrative presented in this chapter when I listen to the piece. I hope that the

tonal relationships and the narrative structure I have described here are not far removed

from an experience that other expert listeners might have as they listen to the piece. In an

effort to discover what type of experience my descriptive analysis truly describes, the

following chapters present the methods and results of a study on the reported aural

experiences of expert listeners hearing “Il Penseroso” with fresh ears.

27

Chapter 3: Method for Participant-Based Phenomenological Analysis

This chapter describes the methods used in the participant-based portion of the

descriptive analysis of “Il Penseroso.” The goal of the study described herein is to collect

data on trained musicians’ descriptions of the experience of listening to this piece without

having seen the score. The data will be compared to the findings of my score- and

listening-based analysis presented in Chapter 2.

Method for Collecting Participant Responses

Musicologists and theorists have developed different methods for probing what

people experience when they listen to music. Joshua Albrecht has reviewed some of these

methods in his 2012 dissertation that methodically chronicled affects in Beethoven’s

Pathétique sonata. The most common and simplest method to collect data on listener

experiences is to have listeners self-report. Self-reported data contrast in two important

ways with other experiential data, such as metabolic changes, that might be collected by

taking measurements. First, self-reported data give researchers access to a listener’s

feelings, which are subjective and cannot be measured. This fact points to the second

contrast, that self-reported data are somewhat unreliable. For instance, some research has

shown that listeners are relatively unreliable when rating their felt emotions (Albrecht

2012, 6–7).

28

There are two common approaches to collecting self-reported data from

listeners. Albrecht notes that the most common is a “retroactive response paradigm” in

which participants listen to a piece or passage and subsequently report their responses.

Reports in this paradigm might take many forms. Methods employed have included free

response, choosing adjectives from a checklist, and rating affects on Likert scales. A

benefit is that retroactive response data are relatively easy to read and analyze, even when

they are quite detailed. Furthermore, participants are given time to think about their

responses. A drawback is that a listener responding to a passage after it ends diminishes

the researcher’s ability to track changes in listener perception over the time of the

passage.

A second approach to self-reported data enables real-time responses to track

changes in affect over time. In this “continuous response paradigm,” participants

manipulate a scale or dial while they listen to the piece or passage to indicate their

perception of how given variables change over time. Although real-time response is

valuable, this method comes with its own drawbacks. First, the manipulation of a single

slider or two sliders yields rather crude information about the complex experience of

listening. Second, research has shown that listeners require different amounts of time to

process different musical features. This discrepancy makes it difficult to attribute

participant responses to specific musical features. Finally, tests using the continuous

response paradigm have shown low reliability both between and within listeners.

Albrecht suggests that the continuous response task might be too difficult, placing an

undue cognitive load on its participants.

29

As a sort of compromise between these two paradigms, Albrecht developed the

“progressive exposure method” (PEM). This method divides a work or passage into

small, discrete chunks. Then, retroactive responses are collected for each chunk. The

result combines the benefits of retroactive response with the benefit of tracking changes

over time that had previously only been available through continuous response. PEM

yields rich data at small time intervals.

One virtue that PEM lacks, and that continuous response has, is accounting for

musical context and experience as it unfolds over the course of a piece. Participants in

Albrecht’s 2012 experiment listened to fifteen out of 56 five-second chunks from a

recording of Beethoven’s Pathétique sonata, movement two. Albrecht chose to present

the chunks to participants in a random order as an effort to minimize any effects of time

over the course of participant responses. He calls this random ordering a mosaic

presentation of the stimuli, but explains that for other experiments, a diachronic

presentation – where stimuli are presented in the composed order – might be preferable.

Albrecht’s study and the use of his PEM served as the methodological backdrop for the

participant-based portion of my analysis, detailed forthwith.

Participants

Because the initial analysis was based on my listening experiences, I sought a

population of participants that could be reasonably expected to experience music in a

similar way to me. Research has shown that musicians’ brains process music differently

than do nonmusicians’, and furthermore that the type of musical experience a person has

affects their mental processing (Stewart 2008). Therefore, I limited my sample to

musicians with or near the achievement of at least one advanced degree in music. Five

30

members of the Ohio State University Cognitive and Systematic Musicology Laboratory

were recruited to participate.

Stimuli

It is important to note that a composer’s music cannot be heard without also

hearing the decisions of its performer. As this is the case, the influence that a performer

has on a listening experience is essentially inescapable; therefore, any analysis informed

by listening is in some part an analysis of a performance rather than just a written piece in

abstract. In my theoretical analysis, the notes written on the score were created by Liszt,

but my listening experience was created by Alfred Brendel’s 1998 recording on a Philips

Classics CD set of all three books of Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage. It was that recording

that inspired the analysis in the first place. While I listened to a handful of other

performances during my exploration of the piece, I kept coming back to Brendel’s. Since

my analysis is therefore influenced most heavily by Brendel’s recording, my participants

listened to the same recording to maximize the opportunity for consistency between my

analysis and their responses.

The process of “chunking” the recording presented some problems. Albrecht’s

experiment used five-second chunks whose start and end points were purely a mechanical

decision. Removing the influence of the experimenter in such a way is valuable in

eliciting unbiased responses; it does not impose a way of hearing the music on the

participants. For the slow-moving “Il Penseroso,” however, mechanically chunking didn’t

seem to work as well. Musical ideas (usually about two measures) tend to last around ten

seconds and to start or end a chunk in the middle of an idea felt jarring and

unrepresentative of the typical listening experience. Additionally, the participants in this

31

study are highly trained in music; it is reasonable to assume that they themselves would

divide the music according to beginnings and endings rather than time. Therefore, unlike

Albrecht, I manually divided the 47-measure piece into 21 discrete chunks. Most of the

chunks are shorter than a phrase but might be described as subphrases. The paradigm for

choosing start- and endpoints was that a chunk must either begin at the beginning or end

at the end of a musical unit (both conditions were satisfied whenever possible), while

aiming for units of approximately two measures. Phrase elisions, changing hypermeter,

and long sequences made these goals challenging. The resulting chunks are illustrated in

Figure 2, although other solutions would certainly have been possible. I segmented

Brendel’s recording into 21 clips, cut at these points; to eliminate abrupt endings, the last

attacked note or chord of each clip was elongated by 25% or less and faded out.

Although the PEM is the optimal method for obtaining rich data throughout the

listening experience, it comes with the disadvantage of periodically stopping the music.

To maximize similarities between the progressive exposure experience and a typical

listening experience, participants first listened to the entire 4’10” piece and gave a

retroactive response. After this experience of the piece as a connected whole, participants

were exposed to the 21 clips diachronically. While speaking in between each clip lessens

the transfer of context from one clip to the next, the initial hearing of the whole piece

followed by the diachronic presentation of clips enables more maintenance of context in

the mind of each participant than would a mosaic presentation of the clips alone.

32

Continued

Figure 2. Chunking “Il Penseroso,” page 1.

33

Figure 2 continued

34

Evidence for this appeared as participant responses made references to prior clips with

relative frequency.

Procedure

Each participant was interviewed individually in a sound booth in the Cognitive

and Systematic Musicology Laboratory. Participants listened first to the whole piece, and

next to its twenty-one diachronic clips through headphones. After each hearing, they were

asked to describe the music, what they thought it conveyed or expressed, and any

emotional responses they experienced while listening. With the exception of the initial

presentation of the whole piece, they were free to listen to each clip as many times as

desired before responding. Because verbal responses were expected to elicit longer and

more detailed descriptions than typed or written responses, participants were prompted to

describe their perceptions aloud. The experimenter transcribed their remarks in real-time

on a laptop and could ask for clarification or elaboration when necessary.

Instructions

The participants received the following instructions, both in writing and read

aloud by the experimenter. The printed instructions were in participants’ view at all times

during participation.

“The purpose of this research is to learn about experienced listeners’ perceptions

and descriptions of a piece of music. You will be asked to listen through

headphones to a recording of Franz Liszt’s “Il Penseroso.” The work’s title is an

Italian phrase that roughly translates to something like “the thinker,” “the serious

man,” or “the man deep in thought.”

First, you will listen to the whole piece which is 4’10’’ long. I’ll ask you to

describe the piece, what you think it conveyed or expressed, and any emotional

response you had while listening to it.

35

Next, you will listen to the same recording divided into 21 clips, averaging ten

seconds each. You’ll hear the clips in their composed order. After each clip, I’ll

ask you to describe the passage of music, what you think it conveyed or

expressed, and any emotional response you had while listening to it. At times, you

may want to use some of the same descriptors for different clips; you are

encouraged to do so if it reflects your listening experience.

I may prompt you with a few questions to get you to describe as much as you can

about what you heard. I will be transcribing your remarks on a laptop, so I might

ask you to slow down or repeat what you said.

As you listen, please do your best to fully experience the piece and let it affect

you.

Do you have any questions?”

Data Collection and Content Analysis

Participant responses were not transcribed verbatim, but each descriptive

statement made was represented in transcription. For example, when a participant

responded to Clip 17 saying something like, “This is its own action. The contemplation in

the last one has now moved into a small action, like it’s crying,” the experimenter

recorded, “Its own action. Contemplation in 16 moved into small action, as if crying.”

According to the experimenter’s judgement, no essential information was excluded in the

transcription process. However, some information, such as whether participants perceived

emotions as felt or evoked, was lost in the absence of verbatim transcription.

After all data collection was completed, the experimenter segmented each

response into discrete thoughts by separating them with periods. As an example, Table 1

shows each participant’s simplified and segmented response to Clip 1. Segmentation of

the participant responses resulted in 390 discrete thoughts, or bits of data. The complete

table of responses can be viewed in Appendix A.

36

Participant 1 Participant 2 Participant 3 Participant 4 Participant 5

Clip 1

Responses

a start. no

emotion so

much as setting

the stage.

darkness to

come.

negatively

valanced

emotions.

second chord is

sadder. second

chord is

unexpected, at

least the first

time. dramatic.

noble.

determined.

feels like an

opening.

setting

something up.

like a call and

response. like a

proposition

[melody] and

conclusion/result

[chord]. the

melody asks

"what if i did

this?" and the

chord responds,

"that's what

would happen."

seriousness. the

response to the

knocking is

very serious.

the chords are

two different

colors, both

important or

serious

messages but

with different

colors. as if to

say, "life is

multifaceted

undertaking."

Table 1. Segmented responses to Clip 1.

The method used in analyzing the data collected from participant responses was

based both on Albrecht’s study and on Qualitative Data Analysis: A User-Friendly Guide

for Social Scientists (Dey 1993). Dey writes, “the core of qualitative analysis lies in these

related processes of describing phenomena, classifying it, and seeing how our concepts

interconnect” (Dey 1993, 31). Therefore, the first objective for analysis of the collected

data was to categorize each bit.

Independently, I and a researcher unfamiliar with the piece and my analysis of it

(henceforth “Researcher 2”) manually organized the 390 data into categories. According

to Dey, practitioners of qualitative content analysis should infer distinctions from the data

rather than imposing a priori categories (Dey 1993). Therefore, the resulting categories

tell us what exists in the data, rather than the data telling us about the relative existence of

each pre-selected category. Dey writes, “Categories are created, modified, divided and

extended through confrontation with the data, so that by the end of this initial

37

categorization we should have sharpened significantly the conceptual tools required for

our analysis.” (Dey 1993, 143) Our only instructions, then, were to arrange the data into

categories based on their content and to define the stipulations of each category we

designed. We worked from an alphabetical list of the 390 bits abstracted from their

stimulus and participant. Both researchers sorted the data two times before discussing

their results.

Researcher 2’s categorization resulted in 14 categories and mine resulted in 23.

Tables 2 and 3 demonstrate our respective categories and their stipulations. The left

column represents our initial categorizations (pass 1) and the right our final

categorizations (pass 2). There was a strong tendency for the second pass to result in the

breaking down of large categories into more specific constituent categories. This process

is demonstrated in the tables: categories in pass 2 are positioned next to those in pass 1

from which they were derived.

38

Table 2. Researcher 2’s categorization process and category operationalizations.

Researcher 2's Data Categorization

Pass 1 Pass 2

Music Quotation Music Quotation - Response included quotation marks. No

reference to the sentiment underlying the quotation.

Previous Excerpt Previous Excerpt - Compares or refers to a previous excerpt

in any way that is not strongly connected to another category.

Negative Emotion

Negative Emotion 1: Serious/Somber/Gravitas -

Discussion of fate, darkness, heaviness. These terms seem to

carry more narrative significance than the more descriptive,

other Negative Emotion terms.

Negative Emotion 2: Intense/Despair - Terms that are grief-

or anguish-related (including emotions like anxiety).

Negative Emotion 3: Hopeless/Sad - Low-intensity negative

emotion terms that contrast to the other two categories. More

descriptive than narrative-driving.

Other Emotion

(Positive, Neutral)

Other Emotional Terms 1: Positive Valence/Beauty/Hope - These tend to coalesce around "beauty" and "hope." Most of

the terms seem to be in comparison to terms from the

Negative Emotion categories.

Other Emotional Terms 2: Neutral - Low-intensity/low-

valence sections of the music.

Uncertainty/Movement

Progression 1: Movement, Drive, Expectations -

Discussion of the progression of the music in terms of the

feeling of moving the music forward.

Progression 2: Uncertainty, Confusion - Discussion of the

progression of the music in terms of uncertainty about where

the music is going.

Arrival/Resolution

Progression 3: Progression: Arrival/Resolution -

Discussion of the progression of the music in terms of where

it has actually gone.

Interpersonal

Narrative 1: Main Character - Relates to specific

thoughts/actions/responses of the "main character."

Narrative 2: Scenic, Non-associative - refers more to

general comments about the narrative that are less emotional.

These are mostly descriptive terms.

Music Theory

Music Theory - Terms that referred to specific musical

moments like chords, cadences, etc. Words referring to the

music without any sense of narrative attached.

Thinking/Pensive - Terms related to thought.

39

Table 3. Experimenter’s categorization process and category operationalizations.

Experimenter's Data Categorization

Pass 1 Pass 2

Action

Action: Discussion of physical or musical motion, narrative action, or

words that describe types of actions.

Expectation

Expectation: Discussion of expectations either created, satisfied, or denied

by the clip.

Fate/Hope

Hope: Any use of the word "hope."

Negative Inevitability: Discussions of hopelessness, inevitability, fate, or

otherwise perceived inescapable negativity.

Resisting Fate: The music or its subject are said to resist, attempt to avoid

or escape a negative fate.

Important/Serious Importance/Serious: The music is described as serious or said to be about

something important.

Low Valence

Indication Affect

Low Valence Indication Affect: Descriptions that discuss or imply

emotionality with little indication of positive or negative, such as

"dramatic," "complex emotions," or "mysterious."

Negative Valence

Affect

Negative Valence Affect: Negatively valanced emotional descriptions that

do not fall into Negative Inevitability, Importance, or Tension.

Non-Affective

Non-Affective Description: Non-interpretive information about the notes

or performance, such as "descending" or "very low."

Other Imagery: Imagery descriptions that do not suit any other categories

nor contain strains that prompt the creation of another specific category.

Positive Valence Affect

Positive Valence Affect: Positively valanced emotional descriptions that

do not discuss hope.

Stability/Resolution

Stability/Resolution: The opposite of tension, the music is said to be

stable, relieving, or resolved.

Tension

Tension: The music is described as tense, intense, or other words that

imply tension or instability.

Temporality

Descriptions Regarding Time: Discussions of aspects of length, relative

formal placement. Descriptions regarding persistence or long-term change

of musical features.

Ending: Music is described as concluding, ending, or being in a state of

resolution.

Same As: Music is described as essentially the same as a previous clip.

Start: Music is described as beginning or setting something up.

Thinking

Decision-Making: Discussions of either a character making a decision or

the presentation of options.

Determination: A character or the music is said to be determined or to be

gathering determination

Thinking: Descriptions of thought process conveyed by the music.

Voices

Separate Voices: Differences between or separateness of melody and

chords are highlighted.

Solitude: Independence or aloneness of a single voice is described.

Synthesized Voices: Musical voices are discussed in terms of relative

interaction or synthesis, or are said to have transformed each other to be

more similar.

40

After these individual categorizations were complete, we shared our results and

collated them into the final list of categories. That the two researchers had different ideals

regarding the type of results seems evident in some respects, but our independent

strategies for categorization were not essentially far-removed from one another. Table 4

contains our collaborative correlation of the two lists of categories; it also demonstrates

the final categories in which these correlations resulted. In the end, we compromised our

respective 14 and 23 categories into a final 18. These final categories are defined in Table

5.

This process was advantageous for several reasons. For one, since the act of reporting

one’s perceptions is difficult, the categorization process reflects the sentiment rather than

the exact wording of the response. Another advantage was the use of two researchers

with opposite levels of involvement in the project. I hoped for data that would correlate

well with my own analysis while Researcher 2 had no preconceptions regarding the

desired results. Since qualitative analysis is not wholly objective, it is often pliable

enough to enable the discovery of some level of desired result, but incorporating an

uninvolved researcher tempers the level with which the data might be skewed to create

desired results.

41

Table 4. Correlation of two category lists and resultant new category list.

Comparison Process

Experimenter Researcher 2 Final Category Name

Action Progression 1: Movement, Drive,

Expectations Action

Decision-Making Progression 1: Movement, Drive,

Expectations Action

Descriptions Regarding

Time

Previous Excerpt; Music Theory Temporality: Comparison

Determination Progression 1: Movement, Drive,

Expectations Action

Ending Progression 3: Progression:

Arrival/Resolution Temporality: End

Expectation Progression 1: Movement, Drive,

Expectations Expectation

Hope Other Emotional Terms 1: Positive

Valence/Beauty/Hope Hope

Important/Serious Negative Emotion 1:

Serious/Somber/Gravitas Negative Emotion:

Seriousness

Low Valance Indication

Affect

Other Emotional Terms 2: Neutral Neutral Emotion

Negative Inevitability Negative Emotion 3:

Hopeless/Sad; Negative Emotion

1: Serious/Somber/Gravitas

Negative Emotion:

Fate/Hopelessness

Negative Valance Negative Emotion 3: Hopeless/Sad Negative Emotion: Low

Intensity

Non-affect Description Music Theory Score Description

Other Imagery Narrative 2: Scenic, Non-

associative Imagery

Positive Valence Other Emotional Terms 1: Positive

Valence/Beauty/Hope Positive Emotion

Resisting Fate - Negative Emotion:

Fate/Hopelessness

Same As Previous Excerpt Temporality: Comparison

Separate Voices Music Theory Voices: Individuals

Solitude - Voices: Individuals

Stability/Resolution Progression 3: Progression:

Arrival/Resolution Resolution

Start Progression 1: Movement, Drive,

Expectations; Progression 2:

Uncertainty, Confusion

Temporality: Start

Synthesized Voices Music Theory; Narrative 1: Main

Character Voices: Synthesized

Tension Negative Emotion 2:

Intense/Despair Negative Emotion: High

Intensity

Thinking Thinking/Pensive Thinking

42

Table 5. Operationalizations for the final category list.

Final Data Categorization

Action Discussion of physical or musical motion, narrative action,

or words that describe types of actions, such as “heroic.”

Expectation Discussion of expectations either created, satisfied, or denied

by the clip. The significant existence of this category will not

tell us anything on the surface but indicates that its

constituent statements may be worth analyzing.

Hope Any use of the word "hope."

Imagery Imagery descriptions that neither suit any other categories

nor contain strains that prompt the creation of another

specific category.

Negative Emotion:

Fate/Hopelessness

Discussions of hopelessness, inevitability, fate, darkness, or

otherwise perceived inescapable negativity.

Negative Emotion:

High Intensity

Negatively-valanced emotions with high arousal such as

“tension” or “despair.”

Negative Emotion:

Low Intensity

Negatively-valanced emotions with low arousal such as

“sad” or “somber.”

Negative Emotion:

Seriousness/Importance

The music is described as serious, heavy, or said to be about

something important.

Neutral Emotion Descriptions that discuss or imply emotionality with little

indication of positive or negative, such as "dramatic,"

"complex emotions," or "mysterious."

Positive Emotion Positively valanced emotional descriptions that do not

discuss hope.

Resolution Stability, arrival, relief, or resolution.

Score Description Non-interpretive information about the notes or performance,

such as "descending" or "very low."

Temporality:

Comparison

Comparison to previous clips. Discussions of aspects of

length, relative formal placement. Descriptions regarding

persistence or long-term change of musical features.

Temporality: End Music is described as concluding, ending, or being in a state

of resolution.

Temporality: Start Music is described as beginning or setting something up.

Thinking Descriptions of thought process conveyed by the music.

Voices: Individuals Differences between or separateness of melody and chords

are highlighted or one voice is described as existing as an

individual.

Voices: Synthesized Musical voices are discussed in terms of relative interaction

or synthesis, or are said to have transformed each other to be

more similar.

43

Results

Definition of the categories enables uniform interpretation of the responses given

to each stimulus. Several decisions regarding analysis of the categories were made post

hoc. To compare the participants’ responses to my own analysis, I decided to analyze

only the responses that fell into the following categories: Negative Emotion:

Fate/Hopelessness, Negative Emotion: Seriousness/Importance, Negative Emotion: High

Intensity, Negative Emotion: Low Intensity, Neutral Emotion, Positive Emotion, Hope,

Action, Expectation, and Resolution. I will henceforth refer to these selections as the

“expressive categories;” the first seven of them will be further specified as the “affective

categories” leaving Action, Expectation, and Resolution as the “other” expressive

categories. This selection excludes Thinking, Imagery, Score Description, and all

constituent categories regarding Temporality or Voices because these don’t contain

significant information regarding affective expression.

Due to the free nature of participant responses, a single response often contained

multiple expressions of the same category. Therefore, in accounting for appearances of

categories in a stimulus response, a category would receive a maximum of one count per

participant. For example, Participant 4’s response to Clip 1 was, “Like a call and

response. Like a proposition [melody] and conclusion/result [chord]. The melody asks,

‘what if I did this?’ and the chord responds, ‘that's what would happen.’” The response

includes three data bits that each represent the category Voices: Individuals. For analysis,

this would count as one Voices: Individuals response for Clip 1. In other words, the

maximum number of times a category could occur for each stimulus was five, once per

participant.

44

Additionally, some sentences expressed ideas that might equally belong in

multiple categories. For the process of defining categories, the researchers had to choose

only one placement for each bit. For analysis using the decided categories, on the other

hand, I count all categories represented in a bit. That is, the distribution of bits in the

creation of categories is in some ways different from the distribution of bits in the

analytic application of categories. For example, I initially used the response, “more of a

discussion with a negative conclusion,” as a member of my Negative Valance category.

Researcher 2 placed it in their Thinking/Pensive category. For analytic purposes, this

statement can simultaneously represent the final categories Voices: Individuals

(“discussion”), Negative Emotion: Low Intensity (“negative”), and Temporality: End

(“conclusion”).

The tallied results of this approach to analysis of the expressive categories are

shown in Table 6; from left to right, the affective categories are ordered from most

negative to most positive, and the other expressive categories are shown on the right after

Hope. I will address this data’s collation to the musical content in the following chapter.

Limitations

The methodology used in this study generates some limitations regarding the

power and reliability of the results. The participant population, both small and

homogeneous, presents one significant limitation. This study only represents the reported

perceptions of a few expert listeners. A larger and more diverse population might enable

greater understanding of expert listeners’ perceptions of “Il Penseroso.” Furthermore, it

would be very interesting to perform this study with non-expert listeners or those with a

variety of musical experiences.

45

Table 6. Tallied number of participants who used each expressive category by stimulus.

Fate

/

Hop

eles

snes

s

Ser

iou

snes

s/

Imp

ort

an

ce

Neg

ati

ve:

Hig

h I

nte

nsi

ty

Neg

ati

ve:

Low

In

ten

sity

Neu

tral

Em

oti

on

Posi

tive

Em

oti

on

Hop

e

Act

ion

Exp

ecta

tion

Res

olu

tion

Whole

Piece

III III I I I

1 I II II I II

2 III I I I I I

3 III I I

4 II I II II

5 I I I III I

6 I I II I I

7 II I II I

8 III I I

9 I I II II I

10 I I I IIII I

11 III I IIII

12 III I I I I III

13 III I I II

14 II II II II I

15 III I I I II II

16 I II I II II

17 III I I II I

18 I II II II

19 IIII II II I II

20 I I IIII I I I I II

21 II I II II IIII

Total

(excluding

whole

piece):

36

14

17

12

10

10

7

26

20

16

46

The number of times participants heard the piece might also present a limitation.

Participants only heard the piece in its entirety once due to considerations of experiment

length. Repeated listenings might have changed interpretations, as might have listening

only to the diachronic chunks. Evidence of this arose in one participant’s comment that

their initial interpretation changed somewhat as they listened through the chunks.

Moreover, participants might have given different responses to an experimenter with

whom they were unfamiliar. There may have been undetected social pressures that

change the way participants discuss affect due to acquaintance with the experimenter.

Additionally, that the analyst-experimenter performed the collection and

segmentation of participant responses indicates a consistent element of interpretation

throughout the entire study. Despite all efforts on my part to be impartial, the results may

certainly have differed had a different researcher or a computer performed these

processes. After data categorization, again, all efforts to analyze the categories were post

hoc decisions. Therefore, in this study, analysis of the data, much like analysis of the

music, is, in part, an interpretive process.

47

Chapter 4: Descriptive Strategies

Recall that participants were asked “to describe the passage of music, what [they]

think it conveyed or expressed, and any emotional response [they] had while listening to

it.” This open-ended wording was chosen to encourage participants to freely describe

their experience with somewhat of a focus on emotional or narrative impression.

The goal now is to construct an experiential descriptive analysis of the piece as

heard by combining their responses with my own analysis. Each participant listened in

the same conditions with the same knowledge of the piece (when asked, they each said

they were previously unfamiliar with the piece) and yet each participant’s descriptions

were substantially different. We can track significant similarities among listeners by

examining the points at which participants most used the same categories of responses.

The very small participant pool results in data that are not generalizable to a population,

but analysis of the data nevertheless tell us about how some expert listeners describe “Il

Penseroso” and what implications those descriptions might have for the practice of

descriptive analysis.

“Thinking” Descriptions

The most prominent theme across all the responses was Thinking; this is almost

certainly due to knowledge of the title. The idea that the music was “about” an internal

thought process completely shaped some participants’ descriptive strategies. It is

48

probable that some affective descriptions depended on the participant’s overarching idea

of narrative. This sense-making process of describing expression and emotion may not

have occurred without the programmatic title. I provided listeners with the title and its

translation because I was aware of them during my first experience of the piece and I

assume this is the most likely context in which an expert listener would hear it. I am sure

that the programmatic idea strongly influenced my narrative and therefore the way I

interpret expression in each musical event. To me, this was an indispensable aspect of the

listening experience and thus something I wanted participants to deal with as well. Some

comments participants made reveal this process. One participant noted, “I tend to be a

programmatic listener… For people like me, knowing the title sets up a story.” Perhaps

too, knowledge of a programmatic title is the only thing that prompted any narrative

response from some listeners. One participant noted that they are “not normally a very

narrative thinker.” In fact, they said, “the process of listening in pieces prompts me to put

together a narrative of the process.”

It would certainly be interesting to compare the expressive descriptions collected

in this study with those from a population who do not know the work’s title. After

responding to each of the stimuli, another participant noted, “It’s interesting that it’s

called ‘Il Penseroso;’ it feels way more active than just sitting and thinking somewhere.”

This participant also gave a large majority of the responses in the Imagery category (this

category contains imagery descriptions that neither suit any other categories nor contain

strains that prompt the creation of another specific category). These responses imply that

a variety of narrative stories might be perceived by listeners ignorant of the title.

49

Even among the current participants, despite knowledge of the title, there were

strong narrative differences. Among the three listeners who initially heard long-term

narratives about thinking, there remained plot differences. Participant 1 heard a story of a

man struggling to decide between actions he must take to achieve a task; he reluctantly

resolves that he must take an undesirable action but continuously tries to find other

options. Participant 4 also heard a decision-making process but two possible stories: a

thought process about a difficult decision in which the thinker felt trapped, or “a film

scene” in which someone is being physically led to complete a difficult task. Participant 5

heard a “concentrated, on-track kind of reflection” in which a person is trying to answer a

specific question, later specifying that it was one of “the big (important, profound)

questions of life.” These narratives contrast, too, with my own. My penseroso’s thought

process was one of sense-making after he was initially presented with new, confusing

information. These discrepancies seem to point to an inability of narrative analysis, even

in a clearly programmatic piece, to describe a generalized experience of listening. I will

now turn to response data that appears to be more generalizable, at least to the

participants of this study.

Expressive Categories

A detailed view of the expressive categoric responses as they relate to the

musical progression is given in Table 7. The right-most column displays those

expressive categories that were used by more than one participant in response to

the clip represented in notation on the left. The number of categoric responses is

shown in parentheses. The central columns reproduce the language used in my

analysis from Chapter 2.

50

Table 7. Expressive categoric responses compared to initial analysis.

Continued

51

Table 7 Continued

Continued

52

Table 7 Continued

Continued

53

Table 7 Continued

Continued

54

Table 7 Continued

55

Negative Emotion: Fate/Hopelessness

Of the ten expressive categories, Negative Emotion: Fate/Hopelessness was by far

the most prominent. This category included discussions of hopelessness, inevitability,

fate, darkness, or otherwise perceived inescapable negativity. While the high

concentration of Thinking responses was expected from the work’s title, the high

concentration of Fate/Hopelessness responses comes from no stimulus other than the

listeners’ mental representations of the music. This category was mentioned by three

people in response to the whole piece and was mentioned by at least one participant for

all but four of the clips. The category also shows the most agreement throughout the

clips, appearing in three participant responses for six clips and in four for one. It would

appear, then, that Fate and Hopelessness are the most pervasive themes that the

participants hear in this music. Interestingly, this was not represented in my analysis. I

wrote about hopelessness only in response to the chromatic descent in Clip 8. The data

seem to suggest that a description of this piece is incomplete without discussion of the

pervading senses of fate and hopelessness.

Moments of Highest Agreement

There were five clips that led to the use of the same expressive category by four

different participants. I will consider these moments to be maximally powerful moments

of agreement. In a set of data rife with disagreement and nuance, we should be able to

consider these five examples as moments for which the participant approach has maximal

utility for the description of a more generalized listening experience.

The first maximally powerful moment of agreement is, unsurprisingly, the

discussion of expectation at the interrupting half cadence in Clip 10. However, even

56

among the four participants who agreed on the feeling of expectation, some responses

were almost diametrically opposed. For example, despite agreeing on the expectation

associated specifically with the last note, Participant 1 heard in Clip 10 “constant

indecision; [the] character is thinking, ‘I don’t really know why I want this,’” where

Participant 5 heard that the “main character has gained the courage to act independently

and shape his own future; [it’s] less reactive [and] more active.” These opposite

responses may be a demonstration of the effect of narrative conception on affective

description.

The next moment of maximal agreement immediately follows the half cadence;

four participants discussed Action at the start of the second half, usually directly

attributed to the moving bass line. In my analytic and narrative listening, I heard this bass

line as representing gears turning, an active image that I understood as representative of a

more active thought process. Two participants heard this bass line as representative of

walking (“I picture that the person is walking around the room deep in thought,” and,

“this is when it starts to feel like a story with action… I feel like I’m watching someone

walking”). Two other participants simply described its resulting sense of motion (“trying

to… create momentum,” and, “sense of motion whereas before it was more static”). This

sense of motion might be caused by the moving bass line in abstract or it might only be

heard as opposition to the preceding music. Either way, the participant-based

phenomenological approach demonstrates that action is probably a generalizable element

of hearing this moment in this piece.

The next three moments of maximal agreement occur as the three successive

sections of the coda. The progression through the coda should be described as initially

57

hopeless (Clip 19: “the thinker is trying, even now when he’s lost all hope, to change the

outcome,” “hopeless,” “dark,” “the options that were present in the beginning are

eliminated”), then tense (Clip 20: “ascending passage brings an increase in tension,”

“despair… third relation creates tension,” “very unsettling,” “there was also this horrible

thing that happened over here! …crying”), and finally resolved (Clip 21: “much more

obvious ending,” “conclusive, but not quite satisfactorily so,” “felt like an ending,”

“conclusion”).

Overall Emotional Trajectory

In general, the expressive categoric response data (presented in Table 6 at the end

of Chapter 3) demonstrate a wide spread of affective descriptions per stimulus. Aside

from the moments of maximal agreement, it is difficult to generalize an experiential

description from the data. It does little to demonstrate a trajectory of affect over the

course of either a few clips or the whole piece. To this end, Figure 3 shows a reduction of

the information from Table 6 that enables the visualization of change in affective

response from one stimulus to the next. The “average affective response” represents the

mean response for each stimulus where:

Negative Emotion: Fate/Hopelessness = 1

Negative Emotion: Seriousness/Importance = 2

Negative Emotion: High Intensity = 3

Negative Emotion: Low Intensity = 4

Neutral Emotion = 5

Positive Emotion = 6

Hope = 7

58

Figure 3. Average affective trajectory of participant responses across 21 ordered clips.

This is not to say, for instance, that we should think of the average of Hope and

Hopelessness as Low Intensity Negative Emotion, but considering the affective

categories as a spectrum of negative to positive emotions does provide in an interesting

way to abstractly view the disparate affective responses as a progression. The data points

represent averages for each stimulus, but each stimulus did not receive the same number

of affective responses; despite the interesting correlations with my analysis, this chart

should be viewed critically. The trendline indicates an overall sense of rising positivity

toward the end of the piece as compared to the beginning, though extremely slight.

Some points on this trajectory reflect my initial analysis well. For example, the

spike in positivity at clip 4 coincides with the cadence in E-minor, the key in which I

noted that the initially puzzling A-minor first makes tonal sense. The marked decrease at

Clip 7 coincides with the augmented triads I referred to as “empty” and the very slight

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Average Affective Trajectory of Responses

Aff

ecti

ve

Res

ponse

s

More

Neg

ativ

e M

ore

Posi

tive

59

rise at Clip 8 coincides with their “unsatisfying” “filling in.” The final two clips also

correlate to my analysis: in Clip 20 the triumphant F-major returns and in Clip 21, the

melodic ↓6 from the F-major resolves to 5, representing a positive resolution.

On the other hand, some information here opposes my analysis. For instance, I

wrote that the arpeggiated V7b9 at Clip 10 was a representation of confusion that il

penseroso needed to resolve. Here, that moment is shown as the peak positivity of the

entire piece. Staggeringly, I heard Clip 14 as the triumphant emotional apex of the piece

whereas this reduction of responses shows Clip 14 as perhaps the least marked of the

clips.

Conclusion

Considering the categoric descriptions of “Il Penseroso” given by the five

participants and myself, there was low between-listeners agreement. Gathering

descriptions from a larger population might reveal more obvious trends in thought

and description. However, there are lessons to be learned from the obvious

variation found in this study.

At the beginning of this document, I posed the question, “How, then, can a music

analysis truly reflect the sublime, non-analytic, artistic experience of listening?” The truth

is that a descriptive analysis cannot reflect non-analytic listening. Even without the score,

the participants had to be analytic and critical in their listening activity to report on their

experiences. Any act of intentional listening is inherently analytic.

As for the sublime and artistic aspects of experience, I posit that each person

involved in this analysis did reflect a sublime and artistic experience of listening. Each of

us gave sincere attempts to describe our perceptions of “Il Penseroso.” Although mine

60

was confounded by the score, each participant’s description was truly one of personal

aural experience, of music as heard. As each participant described the music through a

different lens, I could hear it the way they described it – a hearing experience that was

different both from my initial hearing and from my post-analytic hearing. Therefore, their

responses simultaneously described the experience of hearing the music and prescribed,

or suggested, a new way for me to hear it. In Temperley’s 1999 article, he draws a hard

line along the dichotomy of descriptive versus suggestive analyses, claiming that a single

analysis cannot do both. In pursuit of a generalized descriptive analysis of this affectively

profound and moving piece of music, I have found this dichotomy to be false.

This study indicates the high degree of difficulty involved in the generalization of

experienced musical expression. This should not, however, discourage analysts from

describing their experiences with music that has affected them. Leonard Meyer, who

Temperley cites as a practitioner of descriptive analysis, writes,

The primary goal of criticism [analysis] is explanation for its own sake.

Because music fascinates, excites, and moves us, we want to explain, if

only imperfectly, in what ways the events within a particular composition

are related to one another and how such relationships shape musical

experience. (Meyer 1973: 16–17)

This is the beauty of music analysis. While an analyst describes in what ways the musical

events shape their experience, even when striving for infallibility, they cannot possibly

describe all of the ways that those events shape someone else’s musical experience. They

can estimate, they can use empirical tools, and they can find fascinating tendencies for

the mental processing of a passage of music. But as music is an expressive entity that

exists in the brain of its hearer, it cannot be wholly objectified. There will always be

unknowable differences in listener experiences.

61

Despite their fallibility, descriptive music analyses are valuable. They give their

author the opportunity to confront and define what about a piece of music affects them.

By focusing on the phenomenological hearing experience of music, we can learn what

compositional strategies translate into affective and sublime music. Well-written

descriptive analyses can create appreciation for their readers for whom perhaps there was

a prior lack of understanding of the music or simply a different interpretation. These are

the things that make music analysis a rich, enjoyable, and valuable activity for the

musical community.

In “Il Penseroso,” I heard a man struggling with confusing thoughts, processing

them, eventually reaching an exciting realization, and integrating it into his world. I did

not know that the decision to analyze the piece would result in the same process for me. I

struggled to pursue description of experience in music analysis, processed my thinking

through participant-based study, and the process led me to a new way of thinking about

descriptive analysis. Like il penseroso’s apex of realization changed the ensuing music,

this realization will change the way that I practice and appreciate the descriptive analysis

of music as heard.

62

References

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Bent, Ian D. and Anthony Pople. "Analysis." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music

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2017, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.proxy.lib.ohio-

state.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/41862pg1.

Bowman, Wayne. 1989. Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education 99: 83–

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Cross, Ian. 1998. “Music Analysis and Music Perception.” Music Analysis 17 (1): 3–20.

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Dey, Ian. 1993. Qualitative Data Analysis: A User-Friendly Guide for Social Scientists.

London: Routledge.

Dubiel, Joseph. 2000. “Analysis, Description, and What Really Happens.” Music Theory

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Hatten, Robert. 2004. Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and

Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Huron, David. 2006. Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation.

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Kane, Brian. 2011. “Excavating Lewin’s ‘Phenomenology’.” Music Theory Spectrum 33

(1): 27–36.

63

Kerman, Joseph. 1980. “How We Got into Analysis, and How to Get out.” Critical

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Lewin, David. 1986. “Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception.” Music

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Lerdahl, Fred, and Ray Jackendoff. 1983. A generative theory of tonal music. Cambridge,

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Meyer, Leonard. 1973. Explaining Music: Essays and Explorations. Berkeley: University

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Narmour, Eugene. 1990. The analysis and cognition of basic melodic structures: the

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64

Appendix A: Segmented Participant Responses

The following table contains the entire log of simplified, segmented participant

responses referenced in Chapter 3. The left-most column lists the stimulus to which the

participants in the right five columns respond. Periods in the responses represent

decisions by the experimenter to divide the responses into discrete thoughts. The final

row includes some comments that participants desired to share at the end of the

participation process, unless otherwise noted.

65

1 2 3 4 5

whole

piece

like a man

struggling with

his thoughts.

slow ascent in

first half

sounds like

trying to figure

out

possibilities,

contemplate

options for

actions to

achieve a task.

second half,

descent,

sounds like

pacing but also

resolving to do

an option that

they don't like,

giving up. very

end, extended

cadential part,

they're

resolved to do

what they

don’t want to

do, but they

still try to find

other options.

even when you

know you have

to do

something you

have to, still

try to find

other options.

the ending

says "maybe?

no, i need to

stop."

sad. brought

me down.

depressive.

everything was

negatively

valanced. if

not sad,

serious.

introspective.

heavy. serious.

there was a

feeling of

descent

through all of

it. pretty dark.

ponderous in

the sense that

it's heavy too.

repetition of

the motive

sounds like

rumination,

obsessive but

not high

energy

obsessive.

linear.

very

cinematic.

dread/inevitabi

lity, a pulling

forward. feels

like a decision

is being made.

one of two

things: it was

in someone’s

head thinking

about a

difficult

decision, very

dark, or they

felt trapped. or

a film scene

where

someone's

being led to do

something

difficult. such

as the kings

speech, when

he goes to give

speech about

war. heavy.

complex

emotions.

from the title:

pensive

definitely

pervades.

constant

knocking

motive that

stays there all

the time. kind

of thought

process that's

not free

association. it's

a concentrated

on-track kind

of reflection.

the person

reflecting has a

specific

question that

they are trying

to answer.

maybe the

main character

knocking on

the wall of life

and life is

giving sort of

answers back

that can have

all kinds of

colors. a wide

variety of

harmonies that

meet you when

you knock on

the wall. the

big questions

of life.

important/prof

ound

questions/situa

tion.

Do you

know this

piece?

no No no no probably but i

don't

remember

66

1 a start. no

emotion so

much as

setting the

stage. darkness

to come.

negatively

valanced

emotions.

second chord

is sadder.

second chord

is unexpected,

at least the

first time.

dramatic.

noble.

determined.

feels like an

opening.

setting

something up.

like a call and

response. like

a proposition

(melody) and

conclusion/res

ult (chord). the

melody asks

"what if i did

this?" the

chord

responds,

"that's what

would

happen."

seriousness.

the response to

the knocking is

very serious.

the chords are

two different

colors, both

important or

serious

messages but

with different

colors. as if to

say, "life is

multifaceted

undertaking."

2 length. sets up

expectation for

this to be

drawn out; this

experience is

going to take a

while. more

darkness.

despair at the

end. not just

sad, hopeless.

the cadence

projects an

attitude of "it's

over".

drive of

increased

seriousness.

then a

reflective

moment or a

stepping back

at the chord

right before

the last chord

and the last

chord

similar to 1.

two voices.

more of a

discussion

with a negative

conclusion.

hopeless.

agreement on

hopelessness

the end

redirects to a

more internal

reflection,

because it

becomes

quieter.

contrast to 1. 1

said "this is

serious and

important," 2

says "but i’m

also fragile"

3 almost exactly

the same as 1.

if anything,

more of the

feelings of

pain thoughts,

serious

thought. this is

a serious issue,

something that

requires a lot

of thought.

like 1 but the

effect of

surprise on the

second chord

isn't there

anymore.

stable. not

different

affectively.

more serious,

not as noble or

determined as

1.

like 1 but less

like two

separate

entities.

return to the

first one but

with the

knowledge of

the second

one. the

seriousness

here is

tempered by

the fragility

expressed in 2.

67

4 that the second

sonority is

major implies

that there is a

good (positive)

possibility.

descent.

brevity. sounds

like the good

possibility is

not a real

option

anymore.

therefore

looking for the

lesser of two

evils.

exactly the

same as 2 but

somehow not

as dramatic or

as hopeless.

first chord is

brighter than

2, maybe

because it's

rolled

toys back and

forth between

darkness and

light (I felt this

through the

whole piece).

there are

moments when

the clouds are

parting but

they're always

foiled and

there's never

fully light.

clouds parting

sound is

because of

harmony and

timing.

like 2;

combined

discussion.

conclusionary

thought. feels

like they have

agreed on the

conclusion

more than in 2

and it's

definitely

negative.

maybe less

negative than

in 2.

internal

reflection

again. nothing

new.

5 the higher

interval sounds

like the man is

resolving to

focus more.

facing reality.

"i need to

determine

what it is I'm

going to do

about this."

same motive

idea but

moved up.

sort of a

schism

between

melody and

chords.

melody feels

brighter but

chords are

dark. the first

chord is

unexpected,

perhaps a

major chord is.

dissonant. not

much evoked

emotion

yearning

(new).

agitation.

building

agitation.

melodic

chords are

pleading, more

desperate. as if

asking lower

chords not to

punish them.

the main

character

knocking and

life responding

are starting to

mix in a way.

the response is

not a passive

response

anymore, its

more active.

the texture: the

response

becomes

knocking-like.

maybe a

beginning of

some kind of

synthesis.

6 still higher

interval but

eventually

descends.

because of

descent,

person is

already kind of

resolved that

whatever

decision he

ends up

making is not

going to be

happy/good.

cadence brings

a sort of relief.

still negatively

valanced but

not as dark as

part before.

compared to 5,

it's decreasing

in agitation.

harmony at

end is another

parting of

clouds.

melody has

finished its

case. two

voices still not

agreeing.

continuation of

the

interactivity

between parts.

harmony is

driving the

main character

(melody) to

move in a

different

direction.

68

7 up another

interval. more

of a sense of

person really

doesn't want to

make the

wrong

decision, or do

the bad thing,

because the

motive

ascends.

similar to 5.

melody and

chords

separate. keep

expecting a

resolution to

major, but it

doesn't

happen.

noble. the

lower range

seems like an

introduction of

a

heavier/disturb

ing aspect that

wasn't there

before.

sounds a lot

like 5. new

hesitation

because of

timing.

perhaps the top

voice is

making some

kind of

progress. sort

of but not

really.

resistance.

the knock has

become an

octave knock,

that makes it

more chord-

like; an

example of

how the two

forces are

mixing. the

chords are

more

knocking-like

and the

knocking is

more chord-

like. more

tense. the main

character

perhaps feels

more

vulnerable (the

listener

identifies with

that).

8 descent from

higher register.

like a

resolution, but

still a need to

figure out

what’s

happening

next.

every time it

goes down, it

gets darker.

from

emotionally

brighter to

darker with

every move

another foiling

of hope.

descending.

not going the

way you want

it to go.

the top voice

gave up. they

suggested

some things

but were

denied. the

chromatic

descent and

decrescendo

suggests

acceptance.

the response is

influencing the

main character

to slow down,

decrease

dynamic level.

beauty

emerges and

that influences

the main

character to

become less

persistent and

more

appreciative.

69

9 more of the

feeling from 9.

confusion and

lack of

confidence

implied by

overall descent

but sometimes

going up a bit.

mixture of

tonalities, not

distinctly

minor as it has

been. more

lack of

confidence

than

confusion.

feels more

mysterious or

unknown. the

note after the

first N figure

feels

particularly

mysterious.

anxious and

then

suspenseful.

the second

phrase is more

suspenseful.

not agitated

but maybe

anxious/concer

ned.

emotionally

neutral. like a

conclusion but

it's lost its

intensity. i

keep picturing

a courtroom.

this is like a

guilty verdict

has been made

and now

they're just

cleaning up the

paperwork. not

very

emotional.

this

development

has made

things less

fragmented.

you start

seeing longer

phrases

emerge. the

last chord has

expectations

attached. more

prospective -

driving

forward. now a

simultaneous

retrospective

reflection

about things

and starting to

think what can

happen

differently in

the future.

10 sounds like a

resolve, but

that very last

note sounds

like it needs to

resolve

upward.

constant

indecision.

character is

thinking "i

don't really

know why i

want this."

expecting a

cadence. feels

the narrative

paused for a

moment. when

it starts,

expecting it to

go to major

(for some

reason) but it

doesn’t.

it made me

feel very

suspended,

holding my

breath waiting

for what was

gonna happen.

the music was

downward

motion but

slow, sinking

to the bottom

of an ocean (as

opposed to

falling off a

cliff).

like a coda. an

echo of what

happened. not

any individual

voice. like a

narrator came

on and

summed up

what

happened.

saying it was

tragic.

like a

recitativo.

main character

has gained the

courage to act

independently

and shape his

own future.

thinking

forward. end

note has clear

expectation

attached. main

character is

their own

driving force.

less reactive,

more active.

70

11 i picture that

the person is

walking

around the

room deep in

thought.

reminds of 1

but instead of

quietly sitting,

person is

moving around

room.

more dramatic,

almost too

much. like

phantom of the

opera or

something,

almost over

the top. trying

to evoke more

tension or

create

momentum but

not sure if it's

successful or

not.

implying

inevitability of

something

ahead. sense of

motion

whereas before

it was more

static. the

repetition had

that

ruminating

quality before;

now it's

moving

forward

(i like this

part). more

cinematic. like

an

accompanimen

t to action, not

individual

voices

anymore. more

broad. more

like a

soundscape of

emotion as

opposed to

particular

characters. the

bass and the

chords feel

connected, like

they're

working

together. same

as the overall

emotion:

dread,

ominous,

heaviness,

inevitability.

this is when it

starts to feel

like a story

with action.

the bass line

feels like

walking. I feel

like i'm

watching

someone

walking.

makes me

think about

dies irae which

signifies fate.

some kind of

repetitive,

unavoidable

thing. you feel

independent

now, but there

are still other

forces driving

you.

12 continuing

movement.

like 2 or 3.

more serious.

person thinks

"i want to

devote more

time to this".

very low, hard

to pick up

what's

happening.

most

impressions

based on

register and

not harmony

anymore.

dramatic. not

especially sad.

dark.

inevitability.

motion

forward.

toward the end

when the bass

by itself, it's

less dense and

more a sense

of aloneness.

same as 11.

like a march.

sad.

procession.

searching

upwards.

trying to get

out of the

darkness and

hopelessness.

this excerpt

transforms: it

starts as

fate/dies thing,

and moves into

something

freer, more

hopeful.

71

13 pretty much

same as 12.

devoting time

to importance

of topic.

exactly the

same as 12

more

determination

and

inevitability.

procession.

dark. i feel like

i'm watching

non-verbal

events. no

words of any

kind are being

spoken.

sinking down.

fluctuation

between hope

and

hopelessness.

14 the motive has

moved into a

major motion.

the bass line is

loud and

pounding.

thinker is

determined to

find a good

way out. bass

line means he

still knows

there's no way

out. the bass

line says "stop

trying to focus

on what you'd

like to happen

and get back to

reality of

situation."

more intense.

emotional

relief based on

chords. heroic.

building up of

determination.

gathering

conviction.

dramatic.

things got

intense. the

dynamics went

up. the chords

felt more

intense. i

wouldn't say

triumphant,

but some kind

of climax.

something was

achieved, it

was a negative

thing. maybe

not the final

goal. highest

emotional

significance so

far.

the fate thing

is breaking

through,

insisting that it

has the power.

threatening.

powerful.

15 bassline

slowing is a

stronger

indication of

giving up or

resolving to do

thing.

accepting

inevitability,

also because

bass line drops

out.

heroicism dies

very quickly.

very dark and

sad again.

the beginning

makes me feel

in

suspense/suspe

nded. very

unsettling

when the

higher chords

come in. range

is part of

what's

unsettling as

well as

dissonance.

the action that

had led up to

the climax in

14 is over. this

is the

aftermath with

no action.

something bad

happened.

wrapping up

the action.

threatening

thing becomes

projected into

the

background.

main character

realizes that in

spite of risks

and fate, there

are still

beautiful

things that I

can appreciate.

recall of the

beginning.

coming to

terms with the

fact that fate

exists.

72

16 chromatic

descending

chords,

bassline is

gone.

chromatic

descent sounds

like an

unhappy

acceptance.

not angry but

pained, "this is

gonna hurt".

mysterious.

unstable. not

clear where's

it's going

emotionally.

interrogative.

asking

questions.

suspended, not

knowing what

to expect.

wondering

when it's

gonna stop

sequencing.

still the

wrapping-up

feeling. more

emotional than

15. emotional

aftermath.

perhaps this is

the last person

left at the

funeral.

storyline is

moving on.

contemplative.

sequence is

perfect

example of

how the one

part of the

texture

interacts with

the other.

intertwined.

moving

forward in a

predictable

way. not bad.

it feels safe.

17 more of a

fighting back,

or anger

against thing

he has to do,

because of the

dynamic

increase at

beginning.

sudden drop of

dynamics and

sparser texture

sounds like

defeat (as

opposed to sad

acceptance).

defeat.

same as 16 but

more hopeful,

brighter. last 2

chords give

expectation of

sadness

angsty.

softening of

angst but still a

persistent

sense of

dissatisfaction,

both evoked

and invoked.

its own action.

contemplation

in 16 moved

into small

action. crying.

there was an

action and then

it died, it was

not very

effective.

despairing. one

of the saddest

clips.

continuation of

the sequence.

sequence is

perfect

example of

how the one

part of the

texture

interacts with

the other.

intertwined.

moving

forward in a

predictable

way. not bad.

it feels safe.

18 culmination.

expect this to

be final

cadence. i

expected it to

end. resolution

of the defeat.

it gets sad

again at the

cadence.

expectation

satisfied.

resignation. conclusionary.

fade to black.

generally sad

emotion. not

intense. as if

an echo.

very clear

cadence. scale

degrees 3-2-1

is the clearest

signal of

ending.

resolution of

this problem.

ends as a very

solitary thing.

ending as an

individual

because of the

lack of bass

73

19 motive comes

back,

continues to

show the

thinker is

trying, even

now when he's

lost all hope,

to change the

outcome.

feels like first

excerpts.

despair.

hopeless.

serious. dark. like its own

conclusion.

same general

sad feelings

but the dread

is over because

the action has

already

happened.

commemorativ

e. remorseful.

grave. almost

more for the

audience than

for whoever's

in the piece.

knocking

(opening

motive) comes

back but is

transformed.

more

cadential.

more

conclusive. the

options that

were present in

the beginning

(represented

by different

harmonies) are

eliminated.

20 motive back,

weaker. quiet

part says "i've

lost; whatever

happens, this

is defeat."

ascending

passage is

stronger and

brings an

increase in

tension,

depicting that

there's still a

spark of hope.

first half:

despair,

hopeless.

second half

seems like

there's maybe

some hope. the

third relation

[L] creates

tension and

gets unstable.

expecting it

could go to

major again.

hoping it will

go major.

very

unsettling. a

sense of arrival

at the end. the

note it ends on

is satisfying.

some detail

that the

audience

forgot. or: "but

wait! there was

also this

horrible thing

that happened

over here!"

resurgence of

action. crying

out action.

seemed like it

would be an

echo but it

took off with

an unexpected

power.

importance/ser

iousness has

returned. new

state of

resolution. a

more clear

mind is

mirrored in

this

seriousness.

clearer mind

than beginning

seriousness

21 much more

obvious

ending. the

whole thing

has been a

battle, but the

staccato here,

evenly spaced

out is the way

of saying "ok,

we really are

done. this is

the way things

are, this is the

way things

are.."

not as sad as

expected. still

negatively

valanced but

not as gloomy

as opening

where there

was no hope.

probably

because of the

5th up.

the first part

feels

somewhat

conclusive, but

not quite

satisfactorily

so. like there's

no good

options, so it's

resigned. not

ideal. the

staccato notes

had at least

one less than

expected.

felt like an

ending. the last

action was so

late, it feels a

little

incomplete.

generally

hopeless.

sadness. heavy

weight. like it

moved from

dread through

action and

despair to a

mourning,

commemorativ

e vibe. felt

very story

oriented.

conclusion. a

bit of the

beauty in the

high notes

(referenced

beauty at 11).

the knocking

in a very slow

version. the

last notes like

the knock but

so extended.

unified,

without

contrastive

response.

74

Com-

ments

i tend to be a

programmatic

listener. i tend

to invent

programmatic

things. for

people like

me, knowing

the title set up

a story.

said at 12: the

process of

listening in

pieces prompts

me to put

together a

narrative of the

thought

process. when

the music

started

"moving

forward" at 11,

it started

moving away

from an

obsessive

thought and

putting things

together to

arrive at some

sort of

conclusion

which might

be "the

inevitable

thing." I'm not

normally a

very narrative

thinker.

it's interesting

this is called

penseroso. it

feels way more

active than just

sitting and

thinking

somewhere.