Performing Arts - Ferrara, "Introduction"

Ferrara is concerned with figuring out, and puzzling together, the best possible way to completely analyze a musical experience from all angles.  That is, to analyze it's sound-in-time, it's musical reference, and it's syntax.  He understands the inefficiency of today's common analysis of a musical experience.  "What makes up a musical experience?", Ferrara wonders.  Well, in the first sentence he openly states his beliefs: "A musical experience is marked by the synthesis of passion and rationality, emotion and understanding, body and mind."  Most theorists, he continues, acknowledge the existence of these internal relationships, and that there is in fact something "extra-musical" about music.  However, many back these feelings up by calling them psychological; that is, in the mind of the listener, and not built into the music.

A formal analysis, the most common, of music can be judged in its correctness by looking at the score of music.  It's either right, or it's wrong.  "But as is the case in science," Ferrara writes, "musical understanding cannot be limited to the observable"(xiv).  The way in which we understand music, when we step back and look at it, should not simply be through the eyes of syntax.  We must understand it, he contends, through many different sets of eyes in order to fully grasp the multi-leveled message the music is attempting to convey.

Additionally, we must consider time.  "All musical understanding is rooted in a particular historical perspective," Ferrara maintains.  And the "original significance of the work is merged" with whatever it means to the analyst or the present time period in general (xvii).  Meaning, being in the year 2009 affects the way we analyze a piece by J.S. Bach, and we must take this into account, as one more factor added to a growing list of "how to analyze a piece or performance."

Lawrence Ferrara is seeking to organize this list, into an "eclectic system" - a ten-step method - as a way to approach musical analysis.  He challenges the idea of narrowly using one method, and suggests, rather, to combine the strengths of all methods, both conventional and not, to create a method of analysis that truly considers musical significance.  He wants for analysts to break out of their shells and fully explore music, rather than let it "mean only what methods allow it to mean," (xvi).