<P> The process of analysis often involves breaking the piece down into relatively simpler and smaller parts . Often, the way these parts fit together and interact with each other is then examined . This process of discretization or segmentation is often considered, as by Jean - Jacques Nattiez (1990), necessary for music to become accessible to analysis . Fred Lerdahl (1992, 112--13) argues that discretization is necessary even for perception by learned listeners, thus making it a basis of his analyses, and finds pieces such as Artikulation by György Ligeti inaccessible (Lerdahl 1988, 235) while Rainer Wehinger (1970) created a "Hörpartitur" or "score for listening" for the piece, representing different sonorous effects with specific graphic symbols much like a transcription . </P> <P> Analysis often displays a compositional impulse while composition often expresses "display (s) an analytical impulse" but where "intertextual analyses often succeed through simple verbal description there are good reasons to literally compose the proposed connections . We actually hear how these songs resonate with one another, comment upon and affect one another...in a way, the music speaks for itself" (BaileyShea 2007,). This analytic bent is most obvious in recomposition including the mash - ups of popular music . </P> <P> Analysis is an activity most often engaged in by musicologists and most often applied to western classical music, although music of non-western cultures and of unnotated oral traditions is also often analysed . An analysis can be conducted on a single piece of music, on a portion or element of a piece or on a collection of pieces . A musicologist's stance is his or her analytical situation . This includes the physical dimension or corpus being studied, the level of stylistic relevance studied, and whether the description provided by the analysis is of its immanent structure, compositional (or poietic) processes, perceptual (or esthesic) processes (Nattiez 1990, 135--36), all three, or a mixture . </P> <P> Stylistic levels may be hierarchized as an inverted triangle: </P>

A person who analyzes musical compositions and musical systems is a