Through the last decades of the twentieth century, music analysis was a largely positivist and formalist enterprise—artworks were tacitly or explicitly viewed as quasi-natural objects, containing inviolable laws to be identified and formalized by their observers. The New Millennium introduced an international movement broadly characterized as historically informed theory and analysis, which has reoriented analysis to the description and explanation of cognitive and socio-cultural human activity: studies in schema theory, Satzmodelle, and partimento theory have collectively viewed musical scores and pedagogical artifacts as traces of the cognitive, social, and cultural behaviors of musicians in a specific time and place.
In a recent editorial published in Eighteenth-Century Music, Giorgio Sanguinetti characterized these various areas as an un-unified and “multifaceted ‘new theory’” (2014). Though as-yet systematically un-unified, they find much common ground in their philosophical and methodological assumptions regarding the act of music analysis—namely, their analytic focus on musical models (schema, Idealtypus, Satzmodell), and their interpretation of these models as the cornerstone of musical learning and creativity from roughly 1680–1830.
Music analysis as exemplified in schema and partimento research may serve to describe and explain creative processes in late Baroque, Galant, and Classical repertoires, their pedagogical media, and the creative reception of these practices in the nineteenth century—how music analysis, in effect, may (re)enact the creative act by tracking model transmission, learning/assimilation, and use/appropriation.
The session papers are case studies, which collectively illustrate that musical models were central to music-creative faculties in the long eighteenth century.
