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Here are some definitions and reminders on the meanings of foundational terms in this discourse: analysis, synthesis, theory, practice, empiricism and criticism. All from their Greek roots.
Analysis is the revelation of (sometimes hidden) parts and their relationships to a perceived whole^1. Analysis—derived from Greek ana- (“back” or “away”) lysis (“loosening”), thus “to loosen up” or “to release from entanglement”—refers to comprehension through understanding the separate parts of a perceived whole, and discerning their relationships to eachother. Use this term when you want to let people know that you plan to look at something in an unusual way: unusual in the sense that our usual experience of it makes no immediate distinction among its aspects and features, and the less obvious view, with those distinctions, might be useful—as when comedian John Mulaney analyzes a social phenomenon like mainstream news watchers adjusting to Trump’s presidency, or a pianist or guitarist shows that adding “flat 9” can strengthen the force of resolution in a dominant or dominant-functioning chord.
Analysis can be a precursor to an opposite thought process, called synthesis (from syn-, meaning “together”, and tithenai, meaning “placing, putting”). Synthesis brings together things normally perceived to be separate, and yields a whole or a pattern that might otherwise go unrecognized^2. Synthesis is necessary, for example, to show that lake core samples in sub-saharan Africa and glacial core samples in Mongolia tell the same centuries-long story of atmospheric carbon and global climate … or to tell that songs like Bessie Smith’s Empty Bed Blues, Ray Charles’ Night Time is the Right Time, the Beatles’ Hard Day Night, and Prince’s Kiss, are derived from the same melodic form.
Analysis and synthesis can work together to support theory (from roots meaning “to speculate” or “look over”): the imaginative use of known ideas, and known patterns, as starting-points for contemplating new phenomena. One could think of successful theory as the result when analyses show components that are shared among a variety of experiences (and practices). Those commonalities can be synthesized to show a pattern or a system that has explanatory or predictive power^3. For example, I might describe the relationship between the first and second vertical intervals that form cadences in the music of late 15th- and early 16th-c. French/Burgundian composers. Observing a high frequency of 6ths and 10ths, followed by octaves, or 3rds followed by unisons (all of which are relationships between parts), I then move to composers from other regions, and notice that elsewhere a wider variety of intervals is used in cadences. From this I can form a theory that might help me predict what I’m likely to find in Burgundian music, or in other music, at that time—it might even help me explain why some Florentine composers display similar patterns in their cadences, if I can associate those common features with some other information—for example, questions of French influence on the Italian madrigal^4.
Good theory should involve at least some projection—that is, it needn’t merely explain known experiences, but can be a basis for imagining and exploring the unknown—it might help me understand a tradition of improvisation in the next generation, or it might help me guess at the chains of influence that affected later composers, or even how musicians and listeners might have regarded the music in question. Einstein’s theory of general relativity uses information from common experiences of gravity and connects them hypothetically to scales beyond common experience—to speculate that space and time are connected in a single fabric^5. Dahlhaus theorizes the relationship between a “cult of genius” in the 19th century and the tendency of 19th century composers to rely on ever-smaller thematic materials, and to make use of modulatory sequences in those basic materials^6.
Theory complements practice (or praxis, from prattein, meaning “do”), first in that practice is actually where questions arise that theory might answer (like why are 19th-century compositions longer, and more chromatic?). On the other hand, theory can economize and facilitate practice^7—as practicioners, for example, we learn new melodies more easily because we begin with some idea, intuitive or otherwise, of what other melodies have in common. But that sword has another edge—in philosophy of mind, starting with Immanuel Kant—theory is often contrasted with empirical ”observation” and/or “pure experience”^8 (just recall that empirical studies are studies in which the main source of information is supposed to be observation, rather than reasoning). A view of the world that’s conditioned by theories or other abstract expectations is said to be “theory-laden”^9: theory can inhibit sponteneity, and cement expectations, in ways that limit how we take in new experiences—in other words, it can be more of a burden than an asset. (The sciences are supposed to regard theory skeptically, framing questions and collecting information that could falsify it, and always privileging observation over theory, when they conflict.)
But before you look askance at “theory” as the dark side of the force, beware of imagining yourself somehow free from theory… or trying to dwell unencumbered in a world of objective, unmediated experiences. Since all perspectives—without exception—are limited and filtered, theory, at its best, helps us look at the world together, and see dissent more clearly. In place of empirical pretenses to “transcendant” knowledge, it might be better to presume that all our perspectives have limits and biases, and work to identify those limits with humility. Following that impulse, the popular term “scientific method” usually refers to conservative and skeptical thought in which nothing is presumed until tested from a wide range of perspectives, i.e. until we know its true scope in the world of real experiences. Theory, by contrast, is an exceptional world of the imagination, in which we at least hope for some point of view on the unknowable. Theory shouldn’t be worn like ideology^10 (for example, the way a shallow reading of Marx’s theory of Capital might make everything associated with bourgeois culture seem inherently oppressive). But in its best uses, be the study of our particular positions and practices, guarding carefully against false universals.
Theory’s relationship to practice, finally, is distinct from that of criticism (or critique^11—from kritikos: to sort good grain from bad, or to sort types of grain from one another), which is any examination of the relationship of a practice to cultural values and ideals.
NOTES
^1. Edward N Zalta (ed.). “Analysis”, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. See also David Lewin, “Behind the Beyond: A Response to Edward T. Cone”, in Perspectives of New Music. Vol. 7, No. 2 (Spring - Summer, 1969), pp. 59-69. See also “Kant’s Moral Philosophy”, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. [Retrieved 8 Dec 2017.]
^2. This is a somewhat simpler view of synthesis than Hegel’s, where the operation is the end of a triad launched from “thesis” and “antithesis,” but the logic still applies; theses can be analytical claims, and antitheses can be the limits of those claims’ relevance within a typology or a range of related experience. See also Sarah Schnitker and Robert Emmons, “Hegel’s Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis Model” in the Encyclopedia of Sciences and Religions (Berlin: Springer, 2013).
^3. For a good primer on modern uses of the term “theory”, see the introduction of Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Theory and Reality: An introduction to the philosophy of science, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. For more polemics on the limits of theory, see Feyerabend, Paul K. [1975], Against Method, Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. Reprinted, Verso, London, UK, 1978.
^4. See William Bowen (“The Contribution of French Musicians to the Genesis of the Italian Madrigal”, in Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme | New Series / Nouvelle Série, Vol. 27, No. 2 (SPRING / PRINTEMPS 2003), pp. 101-114.
^5. Nola Taylor Redd, “Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity.” Space.com November 17, 2017. [Retrieved 1 January 2018.]
^6. Carl Dahlhaus’s “Issues in Composition” in Between Romanticism to Modernism. Translated by Mary Whitall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.
^7. Oliver Quinlan, “Praxis: Bringing theory and practice to teaching” [blog, retrieved 14 Dec 2017]. The contemporary use of the term praxis to resist conventions of established and institutionalized knowledge in favor or process-based and situated knowledge was powerfully initiated in Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Penguin, 1970.
^8. See William James, “A World of Pure Experience” in Essays in Radical Empiricism. New York: Longman Green and Co., 1912; or [it’s easier, if indulgent:] Ben Leeds Carson, “Empiricism (, radical)” in ibid. Dialogues and Questions — a framework for new media dialogue (web: UCSC DANM/Mus, 2009).
^9. Relevant to our seminar: Mark DeBellis’ “Is there an observation—theory distinction in music?” in ibid. Music Conceptualization (New York/Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995): 80-116. The contemporary debate is most prominent in Jerry Fodor’s “Observation Reconsidered,” in Philosophy of Science 51, no. 1 (Mar., 1984): 23-43, and a reply from my doctoral mentor Paul M. Churchland, “Perceptual Plasticity and Theoretical Neutrality: A Reply to Jerry Fodor,” Philosophy of Science 55, no. 2 (Jun., 1988): 167-187; these are summarized beautifully in Jim Bogen and Jim Woodward, “Observations, Theories and the Evolution of the Human Spirit,” Philosophy of Science 59, no. 4 (Dec., 1992): 590-611.
^10. In popular use, ideology means something like “a view of right and wrong in the world”, but I’m using it here in the way that Michel Foucault uses it (see especially “The Means of Correct Training / The Examination,” in Discipline and Punish, trans. by Alan Sheridan, New York: Vintage, 1977; pp 184-194)—to mean, more specifically, a framework that reduces diverse ideas to their rightness or wrongness on one moral continuum. if theory (or an academic discipline) becomes ideology—or becomes a way of moralizing about learning—we’ve fa
^11. Raymond Williams, Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society. Waukegan, IL: Fontana Press, 1976: 74–76.