Just out of a pure interest one day, I stumbled upon a video of Schenkerian analysis, and in my pursuit of comprehending music I decided to learn how to functionally do it as well. Based on denoting note-by-note relationships over time, it's incredibly helpful for music which has little developed chordal body but several lines of interacting musical voices.
Why you might ask?
Because I'm trying to play around with what type of theoretical methodologies might be best and most useful in comprehending the relationships of notes and musical actors in rap music. As I begin to create some sheet music of my Master dissertations' case study (that being Husky's 2020 album Hoshkhonog), I am realizing that because most of the music is going to inevitably be notes and not necessarily chords (this is why neo-Riemannian theory is a less-helpful analytical strategy as that relies more on full chords). Therefore, in order to use some type of music-theory-based methodology onto rap, one must consider what can actually be applied to simple combinations of melodic groupings rather than coherent triadic motion. Anna Vilenskaya has orchestrated rap music, but this is more based on her attuned conception of the music rather than any actualized composed scoring of the music by the musicians. Here strategy, while useful in many ways, is less a truthful realization of the music and more based in quixotic ideations of what could be there. Her technique is novel I will give her that but overall untruthful as simply denoting chordal schemas does not equal the truth of how the music was constructed, no matter how convincing the argument.
However, I may be incredibly wrong but because I am going off what I can do myself, I needed a methodology that could be applied to notes and useful in understand their relationships over the span of an entire piece of music. And that is where Schenkerian Analysis comes in, the inflammatory figure himself. Whether he was a good or bad person is of no concern to me because his theory is helpful is realizing note relationships and their usage in forming short-range and long-range structures. I could go on with a summarization of the dialectic around him but who has the time or interest? I certainly don't and won't.
Some interesting things appear, at least in my very rough recreation of a Schenkerian analytical realization (both rhythmically reduced and "Schenkerianized" if you will. As you can see, there are groupings of p(assing tone), N(eighbor tones) and Consonant skips present in almost regularized intervals, and if you looked at the music the pattern of eight-notes--lull repeats two times before turning into eighth note---quarter pulse. Another cool element of the work is the relationships of the bass chords and the oscillation of the major seconds in the third voice as echoed in the bass note, traversing a B-C-A#-B, while the upper voice goes D-E-E-D. There are bellowing layers of movement going, and the music (at least in these seven measures) repeats. One thing only seeing now is the arpeggio in m. 5 (F#-B-D), as well as the I7 arpeggio in m. 1 (F#-D-B-A#). I'm probably missing a few things but the point is that through Schenker's theory you can visualize relations that would otherwise go unseen if not for this type of critical focus on the note-by-note movements!
More work has to be done to apply this to Hip-Hop but in the mean time, lots more to write.
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