Why analyze music?

Doesn't analysis spoil it?

This is a stream of words about music. It is not music. I could link this to music files or show images of printed music, but none of that is actual music. We talk about music in abstraction and in order to remove misconceptions or deal with controversies or the particulars of this is that piece, we must share a language which is analytical in mature.

We need to take it as a given that we have some means to figure out what a piece of music is about, any piece of music, it doesn't have to be a classical piece. It can be a rock song or a blues, or jazz. What I can begin to help you deal with is to find a language for thinking about why you like particular music and extend it to other music, and to demystify what music you may have thought was unapproachable.

One cannot categorically deny the protest that to think analytically about music spoils the experience. After all, one responded naively to the musical experience, perhaps as a tiny child, with no formal knowledge. Acknowledging that leads directly to an unconscious and universal reality to music with deep psychic roots. If, after being emotionally connected to music for a long time you begin to ask practical questions like "How can I remember better what I hear?" or "How did the composer of that piece invent it?" or "How should I play that piece?", then an analytical language is needed.

A friend of mine has been listening to music available on the Internet for some time and observed to me that there were a fair number of songs that he didn't like because it was obvious that the sounds making up the piece were samples repeated over and over again without much "development", his words. That is the clue to formal analysis and composition, the same approach that one can take with extended pieces of music like a Wagner Opera or a Mahler Symphony. There are good reasons why music must have formal characteristics which composers use more or less consciously, and we are all able to process them.