Harmonic Analysis as a Method to Build a Musical Composition Model

The article presents a new synthetic method for analyzing musical works using special musical examples that allow you to present the entire piece in a compressed form. Each analytical method allows you to describe a work in some special language, tell about it in symbols and graphs, and sometimes through notes. To present a work in a different form, which became the result of analytical procedures, means to build a model of the work. The objects of the study are: "Winter II" from the "Album for Youth" by Robert Schumann; "Et La Lune Descend Sur Le Temple Qui Fut" by Claude Debussy; the romance "Выхожу один я на дорогу" by Nikolay Myaskovsky. The analysis methods used in this study are as follows: 1) reduction according to the Heinrich Schenker system; 2) functional harmonic analysis; 3) identification of the main mode and melodic polychords. Reducing the musical texture, it is not necessary to adhere to the H. Schenker method in everything. In this case, the reduction does not lead to the Ursatz, but to the scheme of the pitch lines, which emphasizes the horizontal aspect of the musical texture. Linear analysis makes visible the hidden lines traced behind the audible melodic pattern. The method of analysis based on the identification of the main and secondary melodic stable tones (melodic functions) is poorly developed in modern music theory, although its initial premises were indicated in the works of Boleslav Yavorsky, Lev Kulakovsky and Yurii Kholopov. In this article, all these methods are combined in order to display the work in a single analytical musical example, which becomes its model. By immersing this model in a verbal and conceptual environment, we get the opportunity to express the intramusical "plot" of each piece in several sentences.

analysis of harmony, model of musical piece, Heinrich Schenker, melody, linear analysis, intramusical content, melodic stable tone, tonality and modality, musical form, reductional method