Explaining how a piece of music works: structure, harmony, rhythm, timbre, and how they unfold in time.
Key thinkers: Heinrich Schenker, Fred Lerdahl, Pauline Oliveros
The longer story
Musical analysis has multiple traditions serving different purposes. Schenkerian analysis reduces tonal music to fundamental structures. Set theory analyses pitch organisation in post-tonal music. Topic theory decodes musical meaning through conventional associations. Spectromorphology describes electroacoustic sound. Which approach you need depends on what kind of music and what question. The danger is analytical methods that impose inappropriate frameworks. What does this music require you to notice?