ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with what has been aptly described as the ideological centre of Keller's work. Whether functional analysis is in fact his most important contribution to the understanding of music is debatable, as is the significance of his wordless scores as a method of musical analysis. But to Keller himself it was without doubt the core of his enterprise, its wordlessness the symbol of his belief in music's autonomy. The BBC files do not record any discussion of which work was to be the subject of the analysis, and it is therefore not clear when the decision to choose Mozart's Quartet in D minor, K. 421, was made, nor who made it. The BBC agreed to a live quartet, although initially only scheduled them to play the analytical interludes, with the complete movements of the actual work being provided by a gramophone recording of the Amadeus Quartet.
