Charting the Score in a Multimedia Context

Abstract

Interested in what a contemporary practice of paradigmatic analysis might look like, the authors describe their research project aimed at studying past practices as well as conceiving of future possibilities in the form of a software tool. This article provides working, interactive samples of a prototype of this tool, which can be accessed by clicking on the applications contained in the article. By examining the “situatedness” of the analyst, the paradigmatic approach is seen not only as a precursor of the automatizing ambitions of late 20th-century music theory and musicology, but also as a structuralist reinvention of a tradition of listening that began with the analytical practices which emerged in Wagnerian Europe at the end of the 19th century.