Have you ever wanted to give your listeners a map to what they’re hearing? Then, graphical analyses might be a great complement to your next musical event!
Here’s what they are: a graphical analysis uses visual elements to highlight certain aspects of a musical piece. Often, its intended function is to guide the listener through a musical performance.
For example, Hannah Chan-Hartley’s fantastic “visual listening guides” for the Toronto Symphony use elements like themes, instruments, and key relationships to take listeners through complex orchestral works.
A graphical analysis is different from a graphical score. A graphical score is intended to guide a musician’s sonic realization of the score (not a person’s listening experience). (Here are some examples of graphical scores.)
A Graphical Analysis Is Like a Map
Think of a graphical analysis as a kind of map. Maps can be roadmaps, tourist/walking maps, topographical maps. Each kind shows something different, but of the same area.
Graphical analyses are like that: you could make many visual guides to the same musical piece, each highlighting different aspects of the piece.
Last year, I designed a program of minimalist organ music and prepared graphical analyses of all six pieces. Here’s the process I used to make the program:
1. Analyze Musical Pieces with Your Goals in Mind
There’s no obvious or only way to analyze music. So, use your goals to guide the kind of analysis you do.
Here’s what I did: I wanted listeners to understand where they “were” in each piece, since they were all fairly unfamiliar. So I analyzed each piece’s form. Since the aural cues for the forms varied, my analyses looked different for each piece.
Here are the basic elements I included for each piece on my program:
2. Decide on Visual Elements and Spoken or Written Supplement
After you’ve finished your analysis, choose visual elements to illustrate your interpretation. Depending on your context, you may be able to explain the graphs during the concert. If not, you may want to provide a key to each graph so that listeners can appreciate its meaning.
Your visual options may include: colors, shapes, illustrations/icons, and letters/numbers.
Here are some examples (and I bet you can dream up more):
Colors can show:
- rhythm
- tonality
- melody
- volume
- different layers of a multi-textured piece
- additive pattern (through intensifying the same tone from light to dark)
For example, in my graphical analysis of Annum per Annum by Arvo Pärt, I used 2 colors to show major and minor tonality:
For my analysis of Mad Rush by Philip Glass, I used three colors to show three distinct textures in the piece. For Annum per Annum, I used blue and green—which are adjacent on the color wheel—to show how similar the major and minor pitches are to each other. But for Mad Rush, I used blue and red to show two different textures which Glass combines in the purple sections.
Shapes can show:
- sections or movements of a piece
- volume
- different layers of a multi-textured piece
For example, The Twins (Prague) by Max Richter has three textural layers. I showed these through three visual layers. Dots show the distinct pitches and contours of the upper and lower registers. Rectangles and squares in the middle show the sections of smooth Alberti-esque accompaniment.
In my graphical analysis of Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel, thin bars ascend and descend to show an expanding scalar pattern, while a recurring rectangle shows the repeating “home base” of the piece.
Letters and numbers can show:
- formal analysis (e.g. A and B themes)
I used numbers, letters and brackets to show my analysis of Satyagraha Act III, Conclusion by Philip Glass—a choice I made based on the arithmetic predictability of the composition.
Icons and illustrations can show:
- instruments
- specific moments pointed out with arrows
In my analysis of Infra 3 by Max Richter, arrows signal the highest and loudest moments of the piece.
3. Sketch Your Ideas
Before you open up any computer software, play around with paper and pencil or art supplies like markers, paints and so on. Use the elements you’ve identified above and see what they look like visualized together on paper.
4. Transfer Your Sketches into Graphic Design Software
Don’t worry. This isn’t that hard. I designed my program in Canva. It’s free and easy to use. In fact, it’s quite fun!
(Of course, there are plenty of other options to make graphical analyses, such as Illustrator. But if you know how to use them, you also don’t need me to direct you to them.)
5. Print Proofs
This is an important last step. Print out proofs to make sure they print as you intend—sometimes what you see on the screen isn’t exactly what you get on the page.
Here’s what my final program looked like:
So there you have it! Graphical analyses can be a great way to enrich a concert. If you give them a try, I hope you’ll let me know—it’s always fun to see the amazing things we musicians create!
