Rich media (that is, interactive multimedia) has a substantial power to put across theoretical concepts as well as innovative analyses. In the realm of Schenkerian analysis, it provides the theorist with a tool to present the parts “in between” specific stages or nodes of the traditional analytical result. The session will offer practical, even hands-on demonstrations of rich media techniques that address some of the problematics of analysis.
Synchronically we can employ multimedia to represent reductive stages with animated transparency. An analysis that presents reductive stages immediately posterior (on the third-dimensional z-axis) to higher levels and animates the transformation in that same representational space is a more compelling communication of Schenker’s thought than his own static, printed analyses could ever be. Diachronically, multimedia affords the analyst the to represent changes in perceived structure through an evolving experience of a piece in real time. Our “hearing” of a passage is often not satisfactorily represented by a static graph; that is, musical gestures heard one way, initially, may be found, in retrospect, to have a different perceived structure. An analytic treatment that unfolds in real time can show these kinds of structural shifts.
The session will also include some analytical scenes from a larger treatment of a Mozart string quintet. Some examples demonstrating the readiness of this methodology to support Schenker pedagogy may also be offered.