As an undergraduate music major a long time ago, I really hated Schenkerian analysis.  It was heavily taught when I was in school.  I was probably learning from the masters, but I resented it.

My memory of it is that we were told (implicitly, at least) that a piece was "really" about a simple harmonic gesture.  Say, 3 to 2 to 1 (the tonic).  Movements, symphonies, could be understood as "really" three or four key moves over a long period of time.  These moves could be prolonged, but they would always be revealed by the diligent Schenkerian.  (I undoubtedly have this completely wrong, but stay with me for a few more more paragraphs.)

From Wikipedia:

"The primary means of describing the structure of a musical passage for the Schenkerian analyst is to show hierarchical relationships among the pitches of the passage. This can be done through making reductions of the music and through a specialized symbolic form of musical notation that Schenker devised to demonstrate various prolongational techniques.

The musical reductions of Schenkerian analysis are usually arrhythmic. This reflects Schenker's belief that the deep, long-range structure of a piece of music has no particular rhythm."

Can you imagine?  Say you're 18 or 19 and you're told that that great Tchaikovsky movement (when I was a teenager I loved Tchaikovsky) is "really only" a slow move from 3 to 5.  That's it, that's all that's going on, and if you were just a little more sophisticated you'd hear the key things and ignore the rest.

This is a problem with how people talk about "the internet" too. 

For the telecom-trained, it's "really only" three sets of connections -- from user to ISP, ISP to backbone, content provider to backbone.

For the originalist engineer, it's "really only" the protocol used to interconnect machines and networks.  Once spoken, that language (knowing the protocol) says it all to the engineer.  To this group, the internet is "really only" its logical architecture.

I'm not persuaded.  The internet (for me, the human semantic communications part of it) is a serenade cooked up on the fly, a swirl of meaning.  It's not "really only" the pipes, it's not "just like" a railroad or a broadcast network, and it's not "really" a content delivery system.  There are big bossy applications out there online, but they're primitives.  It's irreducible, this layer of communication, it's not a machine. 

But because our minds live only through metaphors, we keep talking about transport and highways and trucks.  I don't think we're well served by reducing things this time around.