L'analisi musicale nel XXI secolo: bilanci e prospettive

The article aims to discuss some issues in the trends of music analysis studies in the twenty-first century, by relating the cultural policies that inspired the editorial line of the Italian journal «Rivista di Analisi e Teoria Musicale» (directed by Susanna Pasticci from 2012 to 2017) with the parallel developments of research within the wider international community of scholars. Starting with an overview of the events that in the last decade of the twentieth century spurred a great expansion of music analysis studies in Italy, the article focuses on the recent transformations determined by the interaction of analysis with the perspectives explored in New Musicology, cultural studies, performance studies and embodied cognition. These transformations put into question not only methods and objects of study but the very concepts of music and musical "text", emphasizing the centrality of the sound and calling for a radical reshaping of paradigms and goals of musical analysis. Only by combining methodological rigor and breadth of cultural vision, and enhancing the interaction between different areas of expertise and knowledge, music analysis in the twenty-first century will be a gathering place for an interdisciplinary knowledge able to interpret the complexity of musical experience.