Analysis follows practice

Something I’ve been thinking about recently is how musical analysis or music theory follows the musical practices. It always comes after them, not before. We only have a way to analyze jazz music because we have jazz music to analyze and that music has patterns within it that are shared between different songs.

It doesn’t go the other way around.

Knowing theory can help you understand music and communicate your ideas better, but it doesn’t necessarily change those ideas. In learning theory you’re exposed to different ways of making music and putting notes and rhythms together. Those are the new ideas you might use, not the theoretical ideas.

In studying music and theory you have to study actual pieces, rather than just examples of music. That’s where you get the input and the experience to use those ideas.

But the analysis always comes afterwards. It’s always a little behind the current practice of where music is.

Take electronic music for example. There’s very little music theory frameworks to analyze electronic music, especially modern electronic music. And that’s not a knock on music theorists and musicologists. That to me just makes sense because that will always be the case. Electronic music hasn’t been around for that long, especially compared to older styles of classical music and jazz that have been around for 100 years or more, and any somewhat standardized analytical framework for it will be older.

It’ll have to be.

ISJ