Review of Dora Hanninen, A Theory of Music Analysis: On Segmentation and Associative Organization (University of Rochester Press, 2012)

[1] The innovative perspective set forth in Dora Hanninen's A Theory of Music Analysis: On Segmentation and Associative Organization can be glimpsed in its very title. The title proper states the scope of the project at hand: this theory is not a theory of any particular technique, composer, or body of music, but of the practice of analysis-which here seems to encompass any committed, particularized thinking about any piece of music-construed broadly. This immediately evokes one of the most conspicuous of the book's virtues: in order to accommodate the theory's generality, the specific analytical tools proposed are almost infinitely flexible. The subtitle, "On Segmentation and Associative Organization," states implicitly what the book will soon make explicit in great detail, that the act of forming and relating segments is basic to analysis in this most general sense, independent of any particular repertoire, analytical technique, or governing theory. The title further suggests a motivation for the book: the process of forming and relating segments, despite the fact that it is basic to music analysis, is complex, and worth addressing directly. The result is a challenging but rewarding reimagination of analytical practice with insights and implications for almost every music analyst. A brief analytical demonstration will present some of the issues involved.Example 1. Milton Babbitt's Composition for Four Instruments, measures 1-9. Score in C. Accidentals affect only those notes which they immediately precedeExample 2. Trichordal array for the first two aggregates of Composition for Four Instruments. Dotted lines reflect partitioning, solid lines reflect aggregate boundariesExample 3. Segmentation of the second aggregate of Composition for Four Instruments into temporally discrete (013) trichordsExample 4. Segmentation of the second aggregate of Composition for Four Instruments into dynamically discrete (027) trichordsExample 5. Hanninen's "Schematic representation of the general theory of music analysis" (Example 1-1, page 6)[2] Example 1 presents 24 notes. It also presents the opening of a piece of music called Composition for Four Instruments, by Milton Babbitt.(1) Surely, an understanding of those 24 notes as part of the larger whole is dependent, at the very least, on understanding them as more than just 24 isolated events, but as members of various groups that relate to each other in various ways and that themselves, eventually, compound into even larger groups. But an attempt at isolating the segments in this passage leads to numerous, conflicting possibilities for how this process might unfold. Example 2 presents the passage's trichordal array. This perspective highlights registrally distinct (014) trichords, their combination into hexachords, and the division of the whole passage into two aggregates. However, if we instead proceed from the presumption that silences define segment boundaries, we get a somewhat different perspective. The first trichord, as in the trichordal array analysis, is set apart from the rest of the passage by the rest that follows it. But continuing to follow the pattern of notes and rests, one would also be led to understand segment boundaries between G and D and D and F in measures 5 and 6, isolating D and F at the end of the first aggregate. The second aggregate presents a similar conflict between segmentations: rests separate the first aggregate from the second aggregate and the first pair of trichords of the second aggregate from its second pair, but two further rests appear in measure 8, isolating D in measure 8 and G in measure 9. There is an underlying relation to the trichordal array-rests follow the last-stated note of every trichord in the array-but, generally, tracking sounds and silences leads to a very different segmentation than that indicated by Example 2. From the perspective of articulation, the long slur over the first six measures divides the passage into two, the first six measures separated from the last three. …