Abstract
This study analyzes the complete thirteen volume set of "POLYPHONE", which is a highly respected journal of music criticism within Japan, in order to illustrate and highlight differences between and transitions across periods. To that aim, the paper tentatively categorizes articles into two groups, distinguishing between those referring to pre-twentieth century classical music and post-twentieth century classical music. A network analysis is applied to extract the structure of central concepts within the thoughts of musical critics from the texts of journal articles. The analysis results reveal that the primary key word is 'music'; with 'musical composition', 'creation' and 'period' being strong adjacent words for both concepts. Moreover, while 'century' and 'time' conceptualize the thinking of the earlier period, 'sound' and '-ism (principle)' conceptualize the later period.
