Analysis, Description, and What Really Happens

The distinction between analysis and description is not a useful one to make if our aim is to distinguish between writing about music that helps us hear and understand it better and writing that does not. If the distinction is supposed to depend on analysis being explanatory and description not, and if explanation depends on teleology (a conception inferable from much theoretical literature, here called the “received view”), then this methodological stance both overestimates the force of analytical explanation and underestimates the variety of ways that music can go. There is not much point in arguing against this conception, when we can instead simply ignore it—that is, stop taking positions with respect to it, thereby freeing ourselves to value work that falls on either side of it, or on neither side, depending only on how we find our musical experience illuminated and expanded.