Musical analysis
Musical analysis examines a musical work’s structure, materials, and relationships through features such as form, harmony, rhythm, and melody.
Musical form: The large-scale organization of a musical work into sections and their relationships. Analysis traces how sections such as themes, returns, and transitions shape a work.
Schenkerian analysis: A method that interprets tonal music through nested levels of voice-leading structure. It models how surface events elaborate deeper harmonic and melodic frameworks.
Sonata form: A large-scale form commonly organized around exposition, development, and recapitulation. Its thematic and tonal processes make it a canonical case for formal analysis.
Music criticism: Interpretive and evaluative writing about music and its cultural significance. Criticism often makes value judgments that are distinct from describing musical organization.
Harmony: The organization and relationship of simultaneous pitches, especially chords and their progressions. Chord relationships reveal tonal direction, tension, and structural emphasis.
Roman numeral analysis: A system for labeling chords by their scale-degree roots and harmonic functions. Its labels make harmonic progressions comparable across keys.
J. S. Bach's The Art of Fugue: An unfinished collection of contrapuntal works built from a recurring subject by Johann Sebastian Bach. Its systematic transformations invite analysis of counterpoint, form, and thematic unity.
Music theory: The study of musical practices, structures, and concepts through systematic models and explanations. Analysis applies theoretical concepts to particular works, while theory also addresses broader systems.
Melody: A succession of pitches perceived as a coherent musical line. Analyzing melodic shape and recurrence helps identify themes and their transformations.
Set theory (music): A method for classifying and comparing pitch-class collections, especially in atonal music. It offers a way to describe pitch relationships without relying on tonal function.