Donald Francis Tovey's Essays in Musical Analysis are a series of analytical essays on classical music. Sir Donald Francis Tovey (July 17, 1875 - July 10, 1940) was a British musical analyst, musicologist, writer on music, composer and pianist. ... Musical analysis can be defined as a process attempting to answer the question how does this music work?. The method employed to answer this question, and indeed exactly what is meant by the question, differs from analyst to analyst. ... Classical music is music considered classical, as sophisticated and refined, in a regional tradition. ...
These 'essays' came into existence as programme notes written by Tovey to accompany concerts given (mostly under his own baton) by the Reid Orchestra in Edinburgh. Between 1935 and 1939 they were published in six volumes as Essays in Musical Analysis. Each volume focused on a certain genre of orchestral or choral music (for example, Volumes I and II were devoted to 'Symphonies'; Volume III to 'Concertos'), with perhaps two or three dozen works discussed with the help of plentiful music examples. In 1944 a posthumous seventh volume appeared on chamber music. Edinburghs location in Scotland Edinburgh viewed from Arthurs Seat. ... Orchestra at City Hall (Edmonton). ... This article is about choirs, musical ensembles containing singers. ... Chamber music is a form of classical music, written for a small group of instruments which traditionally could be accommodated in a palace chamber. ...
As befits their origin in introductory notes for the concert-going public, Tovey's Essays are unforbidding and occasionally even light-hearted in tone. His fondness for 'Humpty-Dumpty-ish' language may irritate at times, but overall Tovey's achievement is impressive: very few commentators have been able to communicate clearly with a non-specialist readership at the same time as revealing so much that is of interest to the trained musician and musicologist. (Readers who wish to see Tovey at his most densely technical may care to examine his book A Companion to Beethoven's Pianoforte Sonatas and its 'bar-to-bar' analytic commentary). Humpty Dumpty is a character in a Mother Goose rhyme, portrayed as an anthropomorphized egg. ...
In the Essays Tovey saw his role as being "counsel for the defence" (Introduction to Volume I): in speaking up on behalf of the work about to be performed, he was seeking to facilitate the listener's appreciation of its artistic content and technical merits. As a result, his approach tends to 'track' the structure of a work as it unfolds though time before the ear of his imaginary "naive listener".
Analysis is an activity most often engaged in by musicologists and most often applied to western classical music, although music of non-western cultures and that of an oral tradition, rather than written, is also often analysed.
Jean Molino (1975a: 50-51) shows that musicalanalysis shifted from an emphasis upon the poietic vantage point to an esthesic one at the beginning of the eighteenth century (Nattiez 1990: 137).
Musicologists associated with the new musicology often use musicalanalysis (traditional or not) along with or to support their examinations of the performance practice and social situations in which music is produced and which produce music, and vice versus.
These 'essays' actually came into existence as programme notes written by Tovey to accompany concerts given (mostly under his own baton) by the Reid Orchestra in Edinburgh.
Each volume focused on a certain genre of orchestral or choral music (for example, Volumes I and II were devoted to 'Symphonies'; Volume III to 'Concertos'), with perhaps two or three dozen works discussed with the help of plentiful music examples.
In the Essays Tovey saw his role as being "counsel for the defence" (Introduction to Volume I): in speaking up on behalf of the work about to be performed, he was seeking to facilitate the listener's appreciation of its artistic content and technical merits.
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