Michael Roberts 
Dartmouth College
Major: Music
Mentor: Cleveland L. Howard, D.M.A. - Associate Professor of Music
Analysis for Performance: A Reasonable Study
As musical scholarship begins to free itself from the stifling purism created by a reaction to nineteenth century European Romantic thought, the strict separation between musical disciplines becomes less and less accentuated. Studies have begun to refer to or encompass aspects of the ideologies that previously distinguished areas of musical thought. Regardless of the growing inclusiveness seen in many recent papers, the musical community still lacks a model for a comprehensive analytical study for performance that incorporates relevant historical information and is supported by an explicit set of enabling premises.
This study proposes such a model, realized with the concept of time as central to its framework. The self-contained temporal reality of music in performance is explored in relation to music's position as part of a relevant historical continuum. In order to create a reasonable model it was necessary to come to a compromise between current and historical sentiments and practices. The result of this compromise and the time-based framework is a method of theoretically grounded, practical musical analysis that will aid musicians in their performative consideration of entire works. The musical material used in the model will consist of selected songs by Franz Schubert and Richard Strauss.
