Understanding the way music unfolds to the listener is a major key for unlocking the secrets of the composer’s art. Musical Form and Analysis, highly regarded and widely used for two decades, provides a balanced theoretical and philosophical approach that helps upper-level undergraduate music majors understand the structures and constructions of major musical forms. Spring and Hutcheson present all of the standard topics expected in such a text, but their approach offers a unique conceptual thrust that takes readers beyond mere analytical terminology and facts. Evocative rather than encyclopedic, the text is organized around three elements at work at all levels of music: time, pattern, and proportion. Well-chosen examples and direct, well-crafted assignments reinforce techniques. A 140-page anthology of music for in-depth analysis provides a wide range of carefully selected works.

Music is an art form which is realized in time. This dissertation presents computational methods for examining the temporality of music at multiple time-scales so that both short-term surface features and deeper long-term structures can be studied and related to each other. The methods are applied in particular to musical key analysis (Chapters 2-4) and also adapted for use in performance analysis (Chapters 5-6). The essential methodology is to examine all sequential time-scales within a piece using some analytic process and then arrange a summary of the analytic results into a maximally overlapped arrangement. Chapter 2 defines a two-dimensional plotting domain for displaying musical features at all possible time-scales which forms a basis for further analysis methods. The resulting structures in the plots can be examined subjectively as a navigational aid in the music as illustrated in Chapters 3 and 5. They can also be used to extract musically relevant information as discussed in Chapters 4 and 6.

This book demonstrates, in fascinating diversity, how musicians in the nineteenth century thought about and described music. The analysis of music took many forms (verbal, diagrammatic, tabular, notational, graphic), was pursued for many different purposes (educational, scholarly, theoretical, promotional) and embodied very different approaches. This, the first volume, is concerned with writing on fugue, form and questions of style in the music of Palestrina, Handel, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner and presents analyses of complete works or movements by the most significant theorists and critics of the century. The analyses are newly translated into English and are introduced and thoroughly annotated by Ian Bent, making this a volume of enormous importance to our understanding of the nature of music reception in the nineteenth century.

This extremely practical introduction to musical analysis explores the factors that give unity and coherence to musical masterpieces. Having first identified and explained the most important analytical methods, Nicholas Cook examines given compositions from the last two hundred years to show how different analytical procedures suit different types of music.

My doctoral thesis has involved two related tasks. The first was to analyse Zoltán Kodály’s philosophy of music education and, on this basis, to develop a computer-assisted instruction method (CAI) for teaching music theory and solfège (ear-training). The second task was to experiment with the effectiveness of this method and compare it with traditional approaches to teaching. Many student find music theory and ear training difficult. During the 1990s, in connection with my licentiate thesis “Solfège in the Computer Classroom” (2000), I initiated this research project, and developed a CAI method for teaching music theory and solfège. I wanted to see just how useful Kodály’s approach could be in computer-aided teaching and learning. The results show that the Kodály approach can be successfully applied to the development of a computer-aided solfège programme and the Kodály system is applicable to new learning environments and teaching practices. In music education CAI is an area with great potential for development. It offers multiple learning options and can enhance students’ motivation to study music theory and ear-training; some of the learning outcomes were even better than with the traditional ways of learning. The results also show, however, that the teacher-pupil interaction is essential in a computer-aided learning programme.