For a long time, Western music analysis has been epistemologically grounded in a visual–textual paradigm, treating notated scores, formal structures, and visualized relationships as its primary analytical objects. While this paradigm has greatly facilitated the systematic development of music theory, it has also, often implicitly, obscured music's core nature as a sonic and temporal art. As a result, auditory experience, performance practice, and historical perception have tended to be marginalised as merely “auxiliary” materials. In contemporary musicology, however, the rise of performance studies, sound studies, and cross-cultural research has subjected this score-centered analytical paradigm to fundamental challenges. When musical meaning is understood as emerging through listening and performance, and when music no longer exists primarily through fixed textual representations, the objects, methods, and epistemic legitimacy of music analysis demand renewed critical reflection.

This article draws primarily on Theodor W. Adorno's concept of constellation, while engaging with the work of Walter Ong, Pierre Schaeffer, Paul Cilliers, Richard Taruskin, and Iain McGilchrist on auditory–visual relations, complex systems, and brain science, in order to critique the visual-centered modes of musical analysis shaped by Hegelian dialectical thought. Through case studies of the Siciliano in the Classical period and Convergence by Alexander Schubert, the article demonstrates the analytical significance of auditory-oriented approaches and argues for the irreplaceability of listening-based analysis when confronting non-textual or weakly notated musical practices.