analysis, musical

As recently as the 1950s, the analysis of music was widely understood to denote any kind of description with some technical component. But for more than a century there has been a growing academic discipline that attempts to explain musical phenomena by means as rigorous and logical as possible, to approach formal models of how music works, or to break down the organism of musical structures into smaller components. Pure musical analysis often eschews value judgement, which is more the province of the critic or aesthetician. See Hans Keller, Leonard Meyer, Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Rudolf Réti, and Heinrich Schenker.