Analysts of late nineteenth-century chromatic harmony must often reconcile both the conservative and progressive aspects of the music. On the one hand, the music has a venerable history to which it is indebted; on the other, musical works are subject to the creativity of individual musical voices, with resultant effect on tonal relations. This situation presents a problem that is perhaps more difficult than a first glance might suggest. In deference to its history, a sensitive analyst might opt to mimic the historical process by applying tried-and-true analytical techniques that have served so well for earlier musical styles. An equally sensitive analyst may be drawn to the opposite pole; in an effort to capture the music's forward-looking, individual nature, an analyst may apply newer methodologies, adapting them to account for the music's veiled tonality.

Certainly, it is a truism that an analytical methodology will return results that betray its bias. For example, Edward Laufer accounts for many of Bruckner's bold harmonic progressions by illustrating how a traditional classical model might be distorted to produce the end result. One of the techniques that Laufer insightfully asserts to be typically Brucknerian is ‘elision’, the process whereby a composer omits essential voices in a texture that provide the understood consonant support for a prolongation. The musical texture present is shown to take its meaning from a set of passing tones originating in a traditional, yet unstated harmonic model. Thus, Laufer's analytical technique is used to normalize Bruckner's composition to a classical model.