Basic Motivic Analysis

Chapter 5 establishes the rules and guidelines for basic motivic analysis (BMA), the more elementary mode of analysis limited to examining the pitch and rhythmic content of music. The first part of the chapter establishes a standard procedure for reduction, or extracting motives from ornamented melodies; this includes rules for motives spanning multiple phrases. The second part of the chapter establishes rules for associating shapes within a work. Such associations are required to be literal, in stark contrast to Schoenberg’s philosophy of Developing Variation. The allowable transformations in pitch are transposition, inversion, and retrograde, and in rhythm are the duration scaling operations, augmentation and diminution. A single, informal associative relation, “sensed connection,” may be used to indicate an analyst’s artistic intuitions about motivic relationships that are unprovable. A last set of rules delineates a proper format for BMA. An analysis must be structured around a single source event called a Focal Point, that occurs near the beginning and furnishes all or nearly all relevant shapes in the piece. Motives must be derived from the Focal Point in forward order (propagative). Discussion is supported by analyses of excerpts by Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Rossini, and Pierre Leemans.

Principal elementary mode analysis (PEMA)

Principal elementary mode analysis (PEMA), provides an easy way to identify metabolic patterns in large fluxomics datasets in terms of the simplest pathways of the organism metabolism