Essays in Musical Analysis
Encyclopedia
Donald Francis Tovey
Donald Francis Tovey
Sir Donald Francis Tovey was a British musical analyst, musicologist, writer on music, composer, conductor and pianist...

's Essays in Musical Analysis are a series of analytical
Musical analysis
Musical analysis is the attempt 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, and according to the purpose of the analysis. According to Ian Bent , analysis is "an...

 essays on classical music.

The "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
Edinburgh
Edinburgh is the capital city of Scotland, the second largest city in Scotland, and the eighth most populous in the United Kingdom. The City of Edinburgh Council governs one of Scotland's 32 local government council areas. The council area includes urban Edinburgh and a rural area...

. Between 1935 and 1939 they were published in six volumes as Essays in Musical Analysis. Each volume focused on a certain genre of orchestra
Orchestra
An orchestra is a sizable instrumental ensemble that contains sections of string, brass, woodwind, and percussion instruments. The term orchestra derives from the Greek ορχήστρα, the name for the area in front of an ancient Greek stage reserved for the Greek chorus...

l 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
Chamber music
Chamber music is a form of classical music, written for a small group of instruments which traditionally could be accommodated in a palace chamber. Most broadly, it includes any art music that is performed by a small number of performers with one performer to a part...

.

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
Humpty Dumpty
Humpty Dumpty is a character in an English language nursery rhyme, probably originally a riddle and one of the best known in the English-speaking world. He is typically portrayed as an egg and has appeared or been referred to in a large number of works of literature and popular culture...

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).

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 through time before the ear of his imaginary "naive listener".
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