[AlbertCory]

I've never quite understood that POV, although my piano teacher had it. Clearly she had another way of understanding it which I'm sure is more useful. I lack that training.

Pick an example everyone knows: Bach's Prelude in C. I wrote in chord symbols over every bar of that, except for that one very weird bar near the end. It helped me a lot in memorizing it.

[pclmulqdq]

IMO when you're playing music, everything you want to do is on the table. If you're going to make music theory and music history arguments, you should be sensitive to the theory and history you are arguing about.

By the way, a 19th century functional harmonist would also find that prelude sort of odd. Not in terms of the chords themselves, but they don't always obey their usual functions.

Also, many modern players and theorists reach toward Schenkerian analysis and its derivatives to sort of explain why music sounds the ways it does. Unlike counterpoint and harmony, Schenkerian analysis is almost entirely descriptive, not prescriptive. I have no idea what your teacher would have suggested.

[AlbertCory]

> IMO when you're playing music, everything you want to do is on the table. If you're going to make music theory and music history arguments, you should be sensitive to the theory and history you are arguing about.

I don't even understand this paragraph. I'm not arguing.

[pclmulqdq]

That wasn't directed to you, but rather toward your teacher and the OP. The intent was that as a player, I think you should go ahead and use roman numerals or jazz theory or any other form of analysis that helps you think about things. However, if you are publishing an analysis of a piece (which you did not do), you should be thinking differently than that.

As someone with a significant background in historical performance, my books of Bach preludes are still full of Roman numerals because that is a really good way to "compress" information about what notes to play.

[AlbertCory]

OK. For sure I wouldn't publish that set of chords, since anyone could create it as a shorthand.

I'm actually interested in other ways of analyzing it.

[pclmulqdq]

I mentioned this in a sister comment, but I will add:

* Schenkerian analysis is probably the modern method of looking at Bach. A sister comment also indicates that Schenker was a controversial figure (he was a German fascist), but I believe the follow-ups from other theorists on his methods are the modern ones to use for analysis.

* Analyzing otherwise in the context of counterpoint and intervals - see Gradus ad Parnassum and Kennan's book on counterpoint.

[bonzini]

I guess you could use figured bass notation. It's more complex than modern chord notation because it tells you which inversion to use, and it notates secondary dominants (e.g. V of V, which you'd write simply as D7 in jazz notation if you're in C). Personally I know too little about it to use it effectively and therefore I would stick with modern chord notation even when talking about classical pieces.

[adw]

While not disagreeing with anything you’ve said (music theory is one part acoustic physics to several parts history and sociology), the specific primacy of Schenkerian analysis is a particularly American trait.

It’s also, interestingly, illustrative of your argument. Musical analysis is necessarily socially contextual and therefore revealing of the author’s values and priorities, and Schenkerian arguments often imply, or directly come with, some really quite right-wing positions. Schenker was very much into motivated reasoning to defend his deep-rooted racism; many Schenkerian analysts have, deliberately or otherwise, wound up following in those footsteps.

[zozbot234]

Schenkerian analysis is, broadly speaking, a rediscovery and popularization of melodic reduction approaches that were well known to composers and performers in the 18th century. There's very little that's specifically American about it, let alone German. See Nicholas Baragwanath, The Solfeggio Tradition: A Forgotten Art of Melody in the Long Eighteenth Century. And of course, Schenker's "imaginary continuo" is readily understood as a popularization of historical partimento (and closely comparable approaches such as the so-called Partitura known from German sources).

It's true though that Schenker's treatises included plenty of political asides of such an extreme chauvistic character that to call them "quite right wing" is a huge understatement. (It's also true that, as scholarly research has pointed out in recent years, he seems to have expressed similarly extreme views in his private correspondence and other private writings.) Part of this might perhaps be explained as Schenker's awkward overcompensation for what would've been his remarkably humble origins back then (he came from a small village in what was then Austrian Galicia, now in modern Ukraine). Regardless, I think we nowadays have so many sources proving the relevance of melodic reduction/elaboration approaches (some of them quite early indeed, from the 16th-17th centuries) that to tie these analytical approaches polemically to Schenker and his specificities is really quite pointless, perhaps even misleading.

[pclmulqdq]

Ah yes, the good old "fascist dog whistle" argument. Schenker himself was an outright fascist. However, many theorists from the late 20th century who have come up with methods for analyzing tonal music have done so mostly on the back of Schenker's work. I'm also not suggesting you should read Schenker himself - his own work on what we call "Schenkerian analysis" is quite primitive and limited.

I'm curious what you would suggest to perform a modern analysis of Bach (what the original comment chain on this was about) if not Schenkerian analysis. I didn't see any alternative analysis tools proposed in your post, even though it sounds like you are educated on the subject.

[madcaptenor]

Ethan Hein, who teaches music and blogs about it, comes from a jazz background and wrote out chord symbols when he was trying to learn Bach’s Chaconne on the guitar: https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2019/chord-progressions-in-the-...