L’Analisi musicale è morta: è nata la meta-analisi?. Alcune considerazioni su Tonal Pitch Space di Fred Lerdahl (Musical analysis has died: has meta-analysis been born? Some considerations upon Tonal Pitch Space by Fred Lerdahl), in "Rivista di Analisi e Teoria Musicale", Anno IX, n.1 (2003), pp.51-61.

In the field of musical art, one of the basic issues is ‘rules’ determining usual procedure. About this, two opposite trends have been emerging in time: the one according to which music is a discipline which is similar to maths, referable to a series of objective and well quantifiable rules, and another one according to which the numerical aspect is only an apparent and superficial fact, since the essence of music is in its quality, which is neither numerable nor schematizable. If during the age of the so called ‘classical music’ these two aspects had found a sort of balance, with the disruption of the tonal system the problem of  ‘rules’ has come up again in a new form, going almost exclusively towards  the numerical and computational: on one hand by investigating the past repertoire to identify rules which could have determined its development, one the other hand looking at the future in search of rules which could act as basis for a language renewal. This type of research, which developed after the crisis of universally accepted ‘rules’ of classical tonal system has given rise to moder “Musical analysis”.

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