The two opposing principles of music analysis

The General Introduction to volume I of the present work opened with Jérôme-Joseph de Momigny's self-important proclamation in 1803 of a new kind of music theory. Momigny's implementation of that theory foreshadowed to a remarkable degree the tendency of nineteenth-century theory to resort more and more to analysis. However, while that implementation typified the newly dawning one, the theory itself typified the outgoing era: the frame of mind in which Momigny wrote was explicitly that of ‘the man of enlightenment’, and his theory was rooted in the Enlightenment's reliance upon exact observation of natural phenomena, upon empirical sensationism – upon, in short, the scientific mode of viewing the world. Fairly or unfairly, we used Momigny as the paradigm for that scientific impulse toward musical phenomena which, already strong in the eighteenth century, continued through the nineteenth and on into the twentieth. To a greater or lesser extent, all the analyses presented in volume I, and especially those in Parts I and II of that volume, were imbued with the impulse to describe exactly, to measure, to quantify, the material attributes of music – its sounding phenomena (the Greek plural ‘phenomena’ means ‘things that appear’, ‘appearances’).

Volume II is driven by the opposite impulse. All of its analyses – again to greater or lesser extent (and ironically they include an analysis by Mornigny, one of only two writers to be represented in both volumes) – are imbued with the impulse to interpret rather than to describe.