[te_chris]

The article was down, but I assume this will be relevant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenkerian_analysis

We spent a lot of time doing this sort of stuff to flesh out harmonic and melodic patterns/meaning of pieces while at music school. To (grossly) simplify, it's essentially a form of reduction analysis, but the final step of the analysis is always I - V - I chord progression (tonic - dominant) with the 3 blind mice melody above (stepwise descending). I never found the final reduction particularly useful as, though he had a point about the prevalence of the tonic dominant relationship, it was over blown. The reduction steps were very useful for stripping away flourishes though, in order to see what was happening at a more base level in a piece (we analyzed a lot of Mahler this way).

Kinda like Map/Reduce in some ways.

[dfan]

He's doing stuff at a way way lower of musical theory (just saying things like "what chords occur the most?") than Schenkerian analysis. He's certainly not looking at the shape of a song as a whole.

Schenkerian analysis is a ton of fun, although you have to remember to just use it as a tool and not take it too seriously.