This thesis examines four iconic piano works composed from 1949 to 1952 in relation to the discipline of music analysis: Olivier Messiaen’s Mode de valeurs et d’intensités (1949), Pierre Boulez’s Structures Ia for two pianos (1952), Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Klavierstück III (1952) and John Cage’s Music of Changes (1951). The primary aim is to investigate how music analysis has engaged with these four works over the last fifty years. Investigating the nature and content of earlier analyses reveals various aspects of the discipline: its aims and functions, its governing ideologies and, most importantly, its achievements. This investigation also allows for recent criticism of the discipline of music analysis to be reconsidered. In total, 29 analyses of the four works are closely evaluated. Building on these observations, the author contributes a further perspective on each work by offering her own analytical insights, at times challenging some of the common analytical approaches to them. Rather than applying an analytical system based on a particular theory, concepts from each composer’s own writings and theories are used to provide an appropriate analytical angle. This approach recognises that analysis should be a meaningful dialectic between the conceptual understanding of compositional theory and the perceptual experience of surface musical phenomena.