Music 773/223: Electronic Music Literature

Analyzing Electronic Music by Listening

Listen to the composition several times before even beginning this process.

1. As you listen to the music, write down the times at which important events occur in the music. It is best if you can use a CD player (or computer with a CD player) that has a display of the minutes and seconds. If you do not have this available, all you need is a watch with a second hand. Write down the time of day when the piece begins and the time of day at which each event you wish to describe occurs. Then subtract the times from the beginning to determine the event-times.

There are some compositions for which this will not be necessary, because there aren’t enough clear indications of where new events happen. The main reason for having the timeline is to guide you in making your sound descriptions.

2. Describe what is happening in the music at each of the event-times that you have indicated, using any terms you may consider relevant. You may use words describing musical instruments, musical textures or other aspects, or non-musical ideas such as sounds of nature, people talking, and so forth. This list will both grow and become more refined as you listen repeatedly to the music and your understanding increases. Try to grasp the differences between passages that sound similar. Also try to uncover all aspects of passages that present several different sounds simultaneously.

One of the difficulties of this process is that there is no standard terminology that has been developed to assist you, beyond some technical jargon. You will need to use words that come from other contexts or that describe other sounds. Nevertheless, you must also be cognizant of the fact that your descriptions may not be accurate and may need to be refined. You need to be able to distinguish one sound from another in what may originally appear to be a kind of blur. In desperation, you could resort to describing a sound as “that which appears at 5:21,” but this is not mas useful as having a description that tells something about what the sound is like.

3. From your list of times and descriptions, try to determine where important sectional divisions occur in the music. Sometimes, especially when the piece goes on in the same manner for a long time, this may not be an important thing to determine, and you may just consider the piece to be in one large section. But most compositions have some kind of divisions. Once you have divided the piece into sections, you should also consider whether some sections are related to others, such as variations, developments, or contrasts.

4. Once you have completed steps 1-3, you may begin to think about generalizations that may apply to the music. These may involve individual sounds, sections, or the piece as a whole. What ideas and feelings are aroused by the piece? Why did the composer write it? Try to withhold your evaluation of the piece until at least this step.