Analytical preliminaries

This book, with its focus on the First Symphony (1908) and Falstaff (1913), addresses a number of problematic issues in the analysis of early modernist music. Chief among them is the difficulty of finding a way into an analysis at all. Which methodology is best to use as a basis for analyzing music that is neither classically common-practice tonal nor yet post-tonal, and which therefore inhabits a troublesome gap between idiolects that many people believe we have come to grips with? Post-tonal theories will inevitably miss the predominantly tonal surface and larger-scale architecture of much of this music, but an orthodox Schenkerian approach is always at risk of skirting round surface ambiguities for the sake of exegetical expediency, and its contrapuntal dependence on a form-generating opposition of tonic and dominant may be anachronistic in a style which has long since discovered other possibilities for structural tension. Section 2 will offer a methodological framework for the analysis of early modernist music in general and Elgar's music in particular.

I want to suggest that a modified Schenkerian approach is the best way to pursue our investigation, because the kinds of difficulties we (viz. Anglophone musicologists) face when attempting an analysis of early modernist music invite us to think in terms of voice-leading and contrapuntal prolongation. When confronted, for instance, with a passage without any obvious cadence, we still search for contrapuntal configurations suggesting recognizably functional chords that we hear prolonged.