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English Pages 454 Year 2022
New Horizons in
Schenkerian Research Edited by
Allen Cadwallader • Karen M. Bottge Oliver Schwab-Felisch
OLMS
New Horizons in Schenkerian Research Vol. 1 Texts
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Studien und Materialien zur Musikwissenschaft Band 115.1
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New Horizons in Schenkerian Research Edited By
Allen Cadwallader, Karen M. Bottge, Oliver Schwab-Felisch
Georg Olms Verlag Hildesheim | Zürich | New York
2022
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This work and all articles and pictures involved are protected by copyright. Application outside the strict limits of copyright law without consent having been obtained from the publishing firm is inadmissable. These regulations are meant especially for copies, translations, and micropublishings as well as for storing and editing in electronic systems. The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Cover design, layout and typesetting: Oliver Schwab-Felisch, Berlin Music examples: The authors Proofreading: Ulrike Böhmer, Hildesheim
© Georg Olms Verlag AG, Hildesheim 2022 www.olms.de ISBN 978-3-487-42331-9
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In Memoriam John Rothgeb (1940–2020)
John Rothgeb, a good friend and colleague, was an exceptional scholar. His encyclopedic knowledge of Schenker and his work is evident in his many articles and conference presentations. But it is his love of language and translation that perhaps best defines John’s legacy in the community of music scholars. In his translations (with editorial commentary) of Kontrapunkt I and II, the monograph of Beethovens neunte Sinfonie, the Erläutungsausgaben of Beethoven’s last piano sonatas, to name only a few, we experience John’s ability to capture the essence and inner meanings of Schenker’s often difficult prose. Moreover, his uncompromising attitude toward scholarly excellence and the faithful representation of Schenker’s ideas sets a standard for us all to aspire. John’s influence on the field of Schenkerian scholarship is timeless, and it is to his memory that this volume is dedicated. Allen Cadwallader
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Vol. 1 Texts
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Acknowledgements This publication is made possible through the generous support of Wayne Alpern, with additional assistance from the Research Fund of the University Mozarteum Salzburg and other contributing authors.
We are grateful to several individuals who helped bring this project to fruition. Eric Wen gave generously of his editorial expertise and served as Production Consultant for the preparation of many examples. Hedi Siegel frequently advised on matters of editorial detail and provided the background for Carl Schachter’s contribution. Finally, we thank Doris Wendt and Ulrike Böhmer of Olms Verlag. The Schenkerian community is indeed fortunate to have a strong association with Olms, a collaboration spanning almost two decades. We look forward to future publications with them in Schenkerian research.
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Contents Part i: Theory and Influence 1 Schenker and the Fundamental Bass William Rothstein
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2 Schenker and Sechter: A Discontinuous History
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3 Schenker’s “Free Forms of Interruption” and the Strict: Toward a General Theory of Interruption
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4 The “heilige Trapezoid ” and the Galant Recapitulation
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Martin Eybl
Frank Samarotto
L. Poundie Burstein
Part ii: Analysis 5 Chopin’s Mazurka, Op. 59, No. 2: A Tribute to Mendelssohn?
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6 J. S. Bach’s Fugue in B minor, BWV 869: Rameau oder Schenker?
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7 Schenker, Sonata Form, and the Schubert Symphonies
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Carl Schachter Eric Wen
David Beach
8 Displacement, Superimposition, and Dissonance in Ravel’s Late Style
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9 Motivic Elaboration and Chromaticism in the Andante cantabile of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in B! Major, K. 333
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Sigrun Heinzelmann
Roger Kamien
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Part iii: History and Reception 10 The Reception of Heinrich Schenker’s Music Theory in German Speaking Countries after 1945 Oliver Schwab-Felisch 11 Heinrich Schenker and August Halm Patrick Boenke
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Part iv: Cultural Studies 12 Musical Justice and Tonal Inequality in the Theory of Heinrich Schenker Wayne Alpern
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13 Race, Nation, and Jewish Identity in the Thought of Heinrich Schenker Barry Wiener
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Index of Composers and Authors
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Index of Subjects
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Foreword In the fall of 1931, Schenker conducted a seminar with four of his students. He assigned them several compositions on which to work, and the results became the Fünf Urlinie-Tafeln (Five Analyses in Sketchform), published in 1932 by the David Mannes Music School in New York City, but engraved in Vienna by Waldheim-Eberle with Universal-Edition serving as the European distributor. The works analyzed were a J. S. Bach chorale, the first Prelude of the Well-tempered Clavier I, a section of a Haydn sonata movement, and two Chopin Etudes. In his Foreword, Schenker cited the “Eroica” Symphony graphs in the third volume of Das Meisterwerk in der Musik and declared, “the presentation in graphic form has now been developed to a point that makes an explanatory text unnecessary.” Nearly a century later, Schenker would be amazed at how widely his ideas have been practiced, discussed, and disseminated. Classes in Schenkerian theory in the United States are a required part of the curricula in many colleges, universities, and conservatories. Many professional conferences devote sessions to his work. An entire website, Schenker Documents Online, archives his correspondence, diaries, and other documents from his Nachlass. Since about 2005, this trend has also taken hold in Europe, particularly in Austria and Germany where, as a resident of Vienna, Schenker published his theoretical works. In 1990, Schirmer Books published Trends in Schenkerian Research, a collection of essays by a current generation of Schenkerian scholars. New Horizons is inspired by that 1990 publication; it presents the most recent significant work in the ongoing “Schenker Project.” The reception of Schenker’s ideas in the United States has been well documented and need not be detailed here. An excellent article by David Carson Berry, “Schenkerian Theory in the United States: A Review of Its Establishment and a Survey of
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XIV Foreword ii
Current Research Topics,” covers this history up to 2005.1 Since then, in addition to the appearance of Schenker Documents Online mentioned above, something remarkable has occurred: All of Schenker’s major published writings now exist in English translation. Most recent and notable are John Rothgeb’s translations of Schenker’s Erläuterungsausgaben published by Oxford University Press in 2015. This plethora of translations is fortuitous. Because of Schenker’s sometimes difficult writing style, even German-speaking readers often prefer to read his works in English translation. Probably no other music theorist in the history of Western music is represented by such a large body of primary sources accessible in translation. This is the latest achievement in the American development of Schenker studies. The essays of New Horizons, some of which are mentioned here, are divided into four sections. Those of the first section, Theory and Influence, focus on theoretical precepts that Schenker did not develop fully in Free Composition. Frank Samarotto, for instance, aims for a general theory of interruption, describing types of interruption not recognized by Schenker in Free Composition. Also included is the examination of thinkers who influenced Schenker. Martin Eybl illuminates the far-reaching influence of Simon Sechter’s ideas on Schenker’s work, and William Rothstein elucidates the inspiration of Sechter and of the fundamental-bass tradition on Schenker’s thought. Schenkerian theory, of course, is known to many (sometimes primarily) through the explanatory power of his analyses. In our second section, Analysis, Carl Schachter convincingly argues that Mendelssohn’s Song without Words, Op. 62, No. 1, might have served as a kind of model for Chopin’s Mazurka, Op. 59, No. 2 (which Mendelssohn actually requested from Chopin). And Eric Wen, in his essay on the exposition of Bach’s B-minor Fugue (WTC I), seeks to reconcile Rameau’s harmonic approach, as exemplified in Johann Kirnberger’s analysis, with the voice-leading principles characteristic of Schenkerian analysis. The reception and development of Schenker’s ideas have been fertile territory for research since the 1930s in the United States. Essays in this area are presented in the third section, History and Reception. As mentioned above, German-speaking scholars are now contributing significantly to the canon of Schenkerian studies. Oliver SchwabFelisch chronicles the reception of Schenker's work in German-speaking countries since 1945; Patrick Boenke reviews the regular correspondence and exchange of ideas between Schenker and August Halm, a German theorist and composer. The final section, Cultural Studies, presents two essays that place some of Schenker’s cultural and extra-musical thoughts and statements into historical context. In one of these studies, Wayne Alpern argues persuasively against the notion that Schenker’s 1
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David Carson Berry, “Schenkerian Theory in the United States: A Review of Its Establishment and a Survey of Current Research Topics,” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie 2 (2003/05), no. 2–3: 101–37.
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Foreword
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advocacy of the musical superiority of certain notes over others parallels a Current philosophy Research Topics,” covers this his elevating certain people over others. He demonstrates that Schenker’s ideas hierartheofappearance of Schenker Documents O chy and the inequality of tones in fact derive from his legal studies and contemporary able has occurred: All of Schenker’s maj jurisprudence. This very recent area of Schenkerian research will undoubtedly receive Most recent and notable are translation. more attention in future scholarship. Erläuterungsausgaben published by Oxfor Allen Cadwallader of translations is fortuitous. Because of S Kareneven M. Bottge German-speaking readers often pre Oliver Schwab-Felisch Probably no other music theorist in the his a large body of primary sources accessible in the American development of Schenke The essays of New Horizons, some of four sections. Those of the first section, precepts that Schenker did not develop f for instance, aims for a general theory of i not recognized by Schenker in Free Comp thinkers who influenced Schenker. Martin of Simon Sechter’s ideas on Schenker’s w inspiration of Sechter and of the fundame Schenkerian theory, of course, is kno the explanatory power of his analyses. In o convincingly argues that Mendelssohn’s S have served as a kind of model for Chopin sohn actually requested from Chopin). A of Bach’s B-minor Fugue (WTC I), seek as exemplified in Johann Kirnberger’s characteristic of Schenkerian analysis. The reception and development of Sc research since the 1930s in the United St third section, History and Reception. As m are now contributing significantly to the ca Felisch chronicles the reception of Sche since 1945; Patrick Boenke reviews the re between Schenker and August Halm, a G The final section, Cultural Studies, pr ker’s cultural and extra-musical thoughts a of these studies, Wayne Alpern argues pe 1
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David Carson Berry, “Schenkerian Theory i and a Survey of Current Research Topics,” Ze no. 2–3: 101–37.
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Part I: Theory and Influence
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1 Schenker and the Fundamental Bass W ILLI A M ROTHSTEIN
Thirty years ago, Harald Krebs published an essay (Krebs 1988) on Schenker’s changing attitude toward Jean-Philippe Rameau. According to Krebs, Schenker maintained a respectful view of Rameau until the First World War. After the war, Schenker turned sharply against all things French, including Rameau’s theories. This negative stance is expressed most forcefully in Schenker’s essay “Rameau or Beethoven?”, which bears the subtitle “Creeping Paralysis or Spiritual Potency in Music?” (Schenker [1930] 1997, 1–9).1 In the present study, I will demonstrate that Rameau’s theory of harmony retained its hold on Schenker throughout his career. The imprint of Rameau began to wane in Schenker’s final decade, but it never disappeared. The principal vehicle of Rameau’s influence was not his writings, however; it was the Viennese theoretical tradition in which Schenker himself was trained.2 Since the impact of Rameau on Schenker was mostly indirect, Rameau’s presence in these pages will be similarly indirect. My immediate subject is the relation of Schenker’s ideas to nineteenth-century Viennese harmonic theory, a topic that has been addressed by others, including Robert P. Morgan and Robert Wason (Morgan 1978; Wason 1983).3 As we near the centenary of Schenker’s most influential writings, Schenkerian analysis is increasingly viewed not only as a living tradition but as part of the history of theory. Schenker had strong views about the history of theory, views that are important to understand whether one accepts them or not. Stated as briefly as possible, 1 Eight years earlier, in 1922, Schenker expressed respect for Rameau’s achievement as a composer but claimed that Couperin and Rameau were the last artistic composers that France produced (Schenker [1921–24] 2004, 70). 2 Krebs (1988) claims that Schenker knew Rameau’s Traité de l’ harmonie (Rameau [1722] 1971) but none of Rameau’s later writings. 3 Damschroder (2008) provides conceptual background for that author’s later writings on Schenkerian theory, which I discuss briefly at the end of this essay.
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William Rothstein Schenker regarded his own work as the fulfillment of the promise contained in the best of eighteenth-century theory. He and his closest followers viewed nineteenthcentury theory as essentially sterile, leading away from rather than toward musical art. In their view, theorists of this era impeded music’s living flow with their vertically conceived harmonies and their formal recipes, which yielded only the lifeless simulacra of sonatas and fugues. For Schenker, nineteenth-century theory served almost entirely as a negative example.4 What about the eighteenth century? In the first volume of Counterpoint, Schenker treats Fux, Rameau, and C. P. E. Bach as his forerunners in the theory of counterpoint (Fux), harmony (Rameau), and free composition (Emanuel Bach) (Schenker [1910] 1987, xxv–xxx). He viewed each of these masters as having grasped some part of the truth, but himself as the first to grasp all of it—including, crucially, how the parts fit together. Fux revealed the archetypes of voice leading, but not their ramifications. Emanuel Bach described foreground voice leading exquisitely, but he failed to ground it in the archetypes. Rameau discovered the basic laws of harmony, but he shackled voice leading too closely to his fundamental bass, treating voice leading as result rather than cause. To Schenker, harmony and voice leading were, in effect, coequal branches of musical government. He himself would adjudicate their occasional differences because, apart from the great composers themselves, he alone could see the musical phenomenon whole. This is a brief description of Schenker’s view before 1918. Yet Schenker was inevitably a man of his time, a man with a late-nineteenthcenturyeducation. We continue to learn about that education through the efforts of people like Wayne Alpern, Lee Rothfarb, and the contributors to Schenker Documents O nline (Alpern 1999; Rothfarb 2018; http://www.schenkerdocumentsonline.org/ index.html). My focus in this essay is harmony, and where harmony is concerned, Schenker was a product of the Viennese tradition that began with Simon Sechter (1788–1867).5 Other inheritors of the Sechter tradition include Anton Bruckner, Schenker’s harmony teacher at the Vienna Conservatory;6 Carl Mayrberger, best known for his analysis of Wagner’s Tristan prelude (Mayrberger [1881] 1994); the textbook-writing team of Rudolf Louis and Ludwig Thuille (Louis and Thuille [1907]); and Arnold Schoenberg (Schoenberg [1922] 1978, [1948] 1969). Most of these people were composers, as was Schenker in his younger years. All either grew up or studied in Vienna. 4 The description in this paragraph paraphrases passages in Schenker’s writings from 1904 (Ein Beitrag zur Ornamentik) to 1935 (Der freie Satz). See also Salzer (1937). 5 See the essay by Martin Eybl elsewhere in this volume [Ed.]. 6 Schenker criticizes the teachings of Sechter and Bruckner at various points throughout his writings. For Sechter, see Schenker ([1910] 1987, xxxi); for Bruckner, see Schenker ([1954] 1980, 177n–178n).
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Sechter’s teaching centered on the fundamental bass, introduced by Rameau over a century earlier. A fundamental bass is an imaginary bass line consisting of the roots, or fundamentals, of the chords that underlie a piece of music. Rameau represented his fundamental bass in musical notation, on a bass staff separate from the basso continuo. But Rameau’s fundamental bass was no aimless succession of chordal roots: the intervals between fundamentals were subject to certain rules, which included a strong preference for motion by perfect fifth. The fundamental bass shown in Example 1.1 (2) appears in Schenker’s Harmonie lehre.7 It demonstrates how close Schenker’s conception of the fundamental bass was to Rameau’s, right down to the separate bass staff and the emphasis on motion by fifth. As we shall see, this Rameau-like fundamental bass remained the foundation of Schenker’s view of harmony until very late in his career. In the second half of the eighteenth century, Rameau’s German followers split over his rules of fundamental-bass progression. Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg (1718–1795) declared all such rules irrelevant. For Marpurg, a fundamental bass should show the root of each chord taken individually, without regard to chord succession; roots may move by any interval, whether consonant or dissonant. By contrast, Johann Philipp Kirnberger (1721–1783) accepted Rameau’s rules of fundamental-bass progression with only minor changes, although he posed (probably through ignorance) as Rameau’s opponent.8 Marpurg’s view became the dominant one in North Germany, but it was Kirnberger’s view of the fundamental bass—the Rameauvian view—that shaped Sechter’s ideas seventy-five years later.9 During those seventy-five years, German theorists began to represent harmonic roots with Roman numerals, replacing the musical notation used by Rameau and Kirnberger. The first to do this was Georg Joseph Vogler (1749–1814). The following is from Vogler’s Handbuch zur Harmonielehre: A harmonist must know the origin, use, and tendency of every harmony, i.e., must know (1) what kind of harmony it is, (2) how it arose, (3) how it is used, and (4) to where it can progress. . . . Here I provide, in summary fashion, a precise idea of the place that each [harmony] takes or may take, as well as the quality of the third, fifth, or seventh on each tone of the scale.
7 The legend Grundtöne (“fundamentals”) in example 1.1 is omitted from the English edition. 8 For a discussion of the dispute between Marpurg and Kirnberger, see Lester (1992, 231–57). 9 On Sechter’s self-reported knowledge of Kirnberger’s writings see Wason (1984, 62–63). According to Ludwig Holtmeier (2010, 89n), Sechter also borrowed ideas from the eighteenth-century theorist Christoph Nichelmann.
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William Rothstein M3 and P5 occur on the I
V
IV in major.
m3 and P5 occur on the I
V
IV in minor.
III VI VII in minor.
III II VI in major.
m3 and d5 occur on the VII# IV# II
in both.
in major.
in minor.10 (Vogler 1802, 111; translation mine)
Because Vogler derives scales directly from the overtone series, his major mode includes the raised fourth degree, corresponding to the eleventh partial; on this degree one finds a diminished triad. This is why Vogler’s analyses often include the Roman numeral #IV. Although Vogler devotes much attention to chord quality, his Roman numerals are all the same size because they do not represent chords; they represent scale degrees, which are not chords but pitch classes, expressed in relation to a tonic. Vogler’s pupil Gottfried Weber (1779–1839) introduced the now-familiar distinction between large and small Roman numerals. Example 1.2 (3) is Weber’s analysis of a passage from Mozart’s Magic Flute. Weber reduces each vertical sonority to a root-position triad or seventh chord, which he represents with a large or small Roman numeral. The Roman numeral now shows both the scale degree of the root and the quality of the triad built on it—either major, minor, or diminished. Like Marpurg, Weber places no restriction on fundamental progression; any root may move to any other. Letters next to each note of the score tell if that note is root, third, fifth, or seventh of the fundamental chord. In the case of thirds and sevenths, the letters also tell whether the interval above the root is major or minor. Sechter’s treatise on harmony appeared in 1853. Several ideas that are often credited to Schenker are already present in Sechter. One such idea is the composing-out of a triad or seventh chord through voice leading: passing motion, neighboring motion, or suspension, sometimes in two or more voices simultaneously, sometimes combined with voice exchange. Example 1.3 (3) offers a relatively simple illustration. The progression is what was known in Vienna as “Sechter’s chain” (sechtersche Kette): the complete diatonic circle of descending fifths, I–IV–VII–III–VI–II–V–I. In bars 1, 3, 5, and 6, the chord in the second half of the bar arises through a chordal skip in the bass, from the root to the third of the fundamental harmony, combined with a descending 10 I have omitted the part of Vogler’s table that deals with seventh chords.
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passing tone in one of the upper voices, usually the soprano. Here Sechter shows fundamentals using letter names, as Marpurg, Vogler, and Weber had done before him. I have translated Sechter’s letters into upper-case Roman numerals (Sechter’s Roman numerals are always upper-case). There appears to be a C-major triad in the second half of bar 5. This triad is illusory, according to Sechter: its fifth, G, is really a dissonant seventh above the fundamental A, which was heard on the downbeat of the same bar; a dissonance has been transformed into an apparent consonance. This idea of transforming a passing or neighboring dissonance into an apparent consonance underlies Schenker’s later theory of free composition. The idea itself seems to originate in Rameau’s later writings, especially Code de musique pratique (Rameau 1760, 125–26 and example IIIe N). It is more prominent in Kirnberger (1773), which was known to Sechter, and more prominent still in Sechter’s treatise. Schenker amplified it into an all-encompassing theory. Tonicization is another Schenkerian concept that does not originate with Schenker. The underlying idea may be traced to the sixteenth century (see Zarlino [1558] 1983, 54–91), and it was a commonplace of eighteenth-century theory; Schenker merely coined the term.11 Whatever its origin, the concept is clearly expressed in Sechter’s treatise, as the following passage demonstrates: The use of chromatic (leiterfremden) tones cannot be extended to the fundamentals. Therefore, in the chromatic C major scale (in der chromatischen C dur Tonleiter), the fundamentals remain exactly the same as in the diatonic scale, viz.: the diatonic degrees, C, D, E, F, G, A, and B, which may be treated for a short time as degrees of a related scale. For example: I. The tones C, F, D, and G may be treated as the same degrees in C major and C minor, that is, in both as the 1st, 4th, 2nd, and 5th degrees.
II. The tones D, G, E, A, the 2nd, 5th, 3rd, and 6th degrees in C major, may be treated as 1st, 4th, 2nd, and 5th degrees in D minor.
III. The tones E, A, B, the 3rd, 6th, and 7th degrees in C major, may be treated as the 1st, 4th, and 5th degrees in E minor. IV. The tones F, G, C, the 4th, 5th, and 1st degrees in C major, may be treated as the 1st, 2nd, and 5th degrees of F major or F minor. V. The tones G, C, A, D, the 5th, 1st, 6th, and 2nd degrees in C major, may be treated as the 1st, 4th, 2nd, and 5th degrees in G major or G minor.
11 Zarlino speaks of regular and irregular degrees for cadences within each of the twelve modes; many cadences require the use of an artificial leading tone—i.e., musica ficta. Theorists of the long eighteenth century, such as Henry Purcell, speak of cadences on various degrees of the major and minor scales (Purcell 1694, 155–56). Schenker introduces the term Tonikalisierung (“tonicization”) in Harmonielehre (Schenker 1906, 337ff.).
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VI. The tones A, D, B, E, the 6th, 2nd, 7th, and 3rd degrees in C major, may be treated as the 1st, 4th, 2nd, and 5th degrees in A minor. (Sechter 1853, 121–22; translation modified from Sechter 1871, 130)
This passage describes how each of the seven diatonic degrees, or Stufen, of C major may be treated temporarily as other degrees of other keys, without ceasing to be degrees in C major. This idea underlies Sechter’s theory of chromaticism, which holds that every chromatic chord is based on some diatonic chord. To regard chromaticism as having a diatonic basis, rejecting the chromatic scale as an independent construct, has a long history in Viennese theory. Emanuel Aloys Förster (1748–1823) rejected Vogler’s claim for a chromatic scale for the same reason that Sechter rejected it: be cause every chromatic note—especially one that forms part of a chord—may be regarded as a diatonic note in a related key (Förster 1804, 37–39; Sechter 1853, 119–21). Example 1.4 (3) shows Sechter’s chromatic principle in practice. The first progression, entirely diatonic, is another Sechter chain; I have added the Roman numerals. Beneath it is the same progression modified by chromaticism. The chords on E and D, degrees III and II respectively, have become secondary dominants, but there is no change of key: E and D remain the third and second degrees of C major. Schenker would have labeled these chords III# and II#; Schoenberg, in his later years, would have labeled them III and II (Schoenberg [1948] 1969). Sechter rarely uses Romannumeral labels in his chromatic examples, but he describes the harmonic step-progression of each example—what Schenker would later term its Stufengang—in his prose. Example 1.5 (4) is organized by Sechter as a theme with variations.12 The “theme” is a progression of eight diatonic triads in C major, written in whole notes. The fundamentals move by Sechter’s favored intervals of fifths and thirds. In variation 1, each triad is extended by means of its own dominant, a secondary dominant. C major appears in bar 5 not as tonic but as the dominant of F major. In variation 2, each triad is extended by means of its own subdominant, a secondary subdominant. In the penultimate bar, C major appears as the subdominant of G major; the progression in this bar should be read locally not as V–I–V in C but as I–IV–I in G. In variation 3, each main triad is extended by a complete cadential progression, I–IV–II–V–I. In variation 4, finally, the entire eight-chord progression, reduced to eighth notes, is applied to each main triad in turn; the same progression unfolds simultaneously at eighth-note and whole-note levels. Sechter emphasizes that each variation remains in the key of C major throughout, despite the local tonicizations. The fundamental harmonies in Sechter’s variations are not composed out by passing or neighboring motion, as they were in Example 1.3. Instead they are extended by means of closed harmonic progressions, progressions that begin and end with a local 12 Sechter’s variations are discussed by Morgan (1978, 89–92).
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tonic. Variations 3 and 4, as already noted, extend each triad with a complete cadential progression. In the early 1920s, Schenker began to call such a complete progression a “circle” or “circuit” of harmonic degrees; Schenker’s term is Stufenkreis. For Schenker, a Stufenkreis usually begins and ends with the tonic, but he also describes V–I–IV–V as a Stufenkreis (Schenker 1921–24, 10: 11; Schenker 2004–5, 2: 135). Schenker used this term for only a few years, but during those years he published the later issues of Der Tonwille and the first two volumes of Das Meisterwerk in der Musik. During these same years, his term for the V in a I–V–I progression was “upper-fifth divider” (Oberquintteiler), a term he uses to distinguish a tonic-extending V from a cadential V; his term for the IV in a I–IV–I progression was “lower-fifth divider” (Unterquintteiler). He eventually dropped “lower-fifth divider,” almost certainly because a triad does not contain its own subdominant as a pitch. He retained the concept of “upper-fifth divider” because a triad does contain its own dominant as a pitch. The upper-fifth divider acts, in Oswald Jonas’s words, as the triad’s “joint”—articulating the triad, rendering it mobile, and assisting in its composing-out (Jonas [1934] 1982, 44–46; see also Cadwallader and Gagné 2016). One might ask why Sechter never uses labels such as V/V for secondary dominants. It would be far more remarkable if he had used them. Although secondary dominants had been described by earlier Roman-numeral theorists, including Gottfried Weber (who called them Wechseldominanten), compound Roman numerals such as V/V were not introduced until the twentieth century. The earliest example that I have found is in an American textbook from 1913; its author, the composer John Mokrejs, adapted Hugo Riemann’s symbol for secondary dominants, [D], into Roman-numeral terms (Mokrejs 1913).13 Sechter’s Roman numerals are all upper-case, like Vogler’s, but their meaning is subtly different. Vogler’s Roman numerals are minimally abstract: each represents a single pitch class, the root of some triad. By contrast, Sechter’s Roman numerals represent not only a harmonic root but also a triad, seventh chord, or ninth chord built on that root (Sechter 1853, 13, 19, 101–2, 116, and passim). In this sense, Sechter’s Roman numerals resemble Weber’s; yet Sechter’s are more abstract. Whereas one of Weber’s Roman-numeral symbols specifies the complete pitch-class content of a given chord, much as a figured-bass signature would do, Sechter’s Roman numerals specify the pitch class of the root but not of all chord tones above it. When Sechter writes the Roman numeral II, for example, he indicates not a specific chord but what Matthew Brown has termed a harmonic state—the state of being on a harmony rooted in the diatonic second degree of some major or minor key (Brown 1986, 14).14 Chords labeled 13 In his harmony textbook, Allen Forte adopted Riemann’s symbol more directly: [V] indicates the dominant of the following harmony, exactly like Riemann’s [D] (Forte [1961] 1979). 14 The term “harmonic state” seems to originate with William Benjamin.
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by Sechter as II of C major include not only D–F–A and D–F–A–C but also F–A–C and A–C–E. In C minor, II includes both D–F–A!–C and D–F#–A!–C (Sechter 1853, 103–4, 116, 176, 191; see also Damschroder 2008, 171). Unlike Vogler, Sechter insists that fundamentals must always be diatonic. In Sechter, therefore, one never finds Roman numerals like #IV or !I, as one does in Schenker.15 Schoenberg remained closer to Sechter in this respect. Once one understands Sechter’s Roman numerals, one is in a better position to understand Schenker’s. Example 1.6 (5), from Schenker’s Harmonielehre, shows how any root motion by descending fifth may be transformed into a local V–I progression without ceasing to represent the original progression in the original key; all that is required is chromatic raising of the third (usually) and the fifth (occasionally) of the first triad in the pair.16 The possibilities, in major, are VII–III, III–VI, VI–II, and II– V. (I–IV is omitted because, in major, the tonic triad requires no chromatic alteration to act as V of IV.) At the bottom of the same example, Schenker extends his local V–I progressions to local II–V–I progressions, where the local II triad is always minor and the local V triad is always major. (Here IV does appear as a local tonic.) As in Sechter’s variations (Example 1.5), Schenker’s harmonies often function simultaneously in a primary key and a secondary, more local key. Schenker’s II#, for example, usually acts as V of V, but it also functions as II in a harmonic circuit such as I–II–V–I, I–VI–II–V– I, or I–IV–II–V–I. The label V/V would not capture this sense of being part of a larger progression; like Riemann’s symbol [D], it refers only to the next harmony. In Example 1.7 (5), also from Harmonielehre, II appears as a secondary dominant of V; I appears as a secondary dominant of IV. The Roman-numeral progressions I–II–V–I and I–IV–II–V–I are Stufenkreise, but they are also progressions approved by Sechter. The Stufenkreis, as a concept, might be regarded as an abbreviated form of Sechter’s Kette.17 Example 1.8 (6) shows extended fundamentals in the context of a more complex progression, an incomplete harmonic circuit (IV–II–V–I) followed by a complete circuit (I–IV–V–I). The Roman numerals are Schenker’s; I have added whole notes as a fundamental bass in some passages. These whole notes help to reveal how some of Bach’s bass notes act as passing or neighboring tones (marked P or N in the example) to notes of the fundamental chord.18 As in Sechter, the rhythm of Schenker’s Roman nu15 Apparent counterexamples in Sechter (1871), such as the table on p. 107, were added by the translator, Carl Christian Müller. 16 This table, like many tables and examples in Harmonielehre, is omitted from the English edition. Some examples in the English edition appear without their original annotations. For both reasons, the German original must be regarded as the only adequate version of Harmonielehre. 17 Schenker discusses the interpolation of additional descending fifths, up to and including the full sechtersche Kette, in Schenker ([1935] 1979, 116–17). 18 In Bach’s original, a low F is sustained in the pedal from the first bar of the example (b. 17) through the first quarter of the fifth bar (b. 21).
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merals aligns with the meter; fundamentals change almost exclusively on downbeats. This correlation between harmonic progression and meter is an under-appreciated aspect of Schenker’s method; it probably derives from Sechter’s theory of harmonicmetric correlation (see Caplin 1980). Example 1.8 also includes the chromatic fundamentals !II and #IV, forbidden in Sechter’s theory. Sechter probably would have given the Neapolitan sixth chord a fundamental of F, extending the previous IV harmony. He certainly would have given the chord on F# a fundamental of D, regarding the diminished seventh chord as an incomplete ninth chord and keeping its root diatonic (Damschroder 2008, 171 and 200–204). In his writings of the late 1910s and early 20s, Schenker reveals his allegiance to the fundamental-bass tradition especially clearly. The following passage, translated from the incomplete early version of Der freie Satz (1916–18), is revealing: The Stufe works its greatest influence on the shaping of the bass line. If the bass progresses solely according to the Stufen, it will inevitably show the form that I have often shown here for purposes of schematic presentation: it will consist of fifthsteps [sic], third-steps [sic], and second-leaps [sic], and also of leaps that substitute for these. In relation to an upper voice, which moves freely and variously according to the law of composing-out (Auskomponierung), the stiffness of such a bass would sound completely unnatural. It is precisely the law of composing-out that grasps hold of the bass line as well and thus answers the law of composing-out in such a way that the bass acts as if it, too, were an upper voice, like the voice that moves above it. And in fact, if one holds fast to the ideal character of the Stufe … the voice that appears to us as the bass should be regarded as an upper voice in relation to the ideal Stufen, so that the two-voice counterpoint of the outer voices makes up a three-voice counterpoint once the Stufen are taken into consideration: the Stufen represent the true bass; the two outer voices are upper voices to this bass. Nothing is so conducive to an understanding of the voice leading of free composition than the recognition of the bass as an upper voice in relation to the Stufen. If one wishes to account for this precisely and requires a convincing, material embodiment of the aforementioned three-voice counterpoint, one needs only to bring the Stufen out from their abstract realm and to play them, for example, on the piano, in a register separate from that of the given bass line—a simple expedient that has the additional advantage of revealing the difference between the Stufe and the living bass line even when they happen to coincide in the same tone, i.e., in a tone that is simultaneously a part of the bass composingout and carrier of the Stufe-idea.19 19 From the chapter Von der Auskomponierung (“On composing-out”). Oster Collection, New York Public Library, file 51, items 42ff.; translation mine. Schenker’s references to bass “steps” and “leaps” are based on Sechter’s idea that the interval of a second in the fundamental bass represents an abbreviation of two consonant intervals, either a third plus a fifth or a fifth plus a fifth (Sechter 1853, 18–20, 31–34; Schenker [1954] 1980, 236–40).
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This passage suggests that Schenker would play the fundamental bass on the piano, in a low register, perhaps while a student played the melody and the literal bass line. In other words, the bass notes that I have added to Example 1.8 are notes that Schenker himself probably added at the piano in real time. In later years, on Hedi Siegel’s testimony, Schenker seems to have switched from playing fundamental basses to playing fundamental lines, a promotion at least in terms of register (Siegel 2015, 269). The discovery that every piece has a fundamental line, or Urlinie, is one that Schenker seems to have made around 1918, while he was revising the early version of Der freie Satz. It led to a renewed preoccupation with melody and a temporarily diminished concern with bass lines. Hence an analysis such as Example 1.9 (7), from the second issue of Der Tonwille (1922), where the melody is much more exhaustively analyzed than the bass. The composition represented is the Andante from Mozart’s Piano Sonata in A Minor, K. 310. The melody shows, in large note-heads, a series of descending fifth- and sixth-progressions; their beginnings and ends are marked by square brackets above the treble staff. Incomplete square brackets show what Schenker would later term Gliederungen, divisions of a linear progression into shorter segments, which might include changes of direction (for example, 5–4–3 / 4–3–2–1, summing to the fifth 5–4–3–2–1). Small notes in parentheses signify melodic detours. As we know from the long quotation above (and from the second volume of Counterpoint, published in the same year as the analysis of K. 310), Schenker would have regarded Mozart’s bass line as an inner voice; the true bass is represented by the fundamentals, which Schenker represents with Roman numerals. In bars 1–8, commas after certain Roman numerals signify points of musical punctuation (corresponding to the ends of slurs in the treble) that are also interruptions in the flow of harmonic circuits.20 Reading the Roman numerals from left to right, we see: I–V–VI, comma; VI has substituted for a closing I. Then I–II–V, comma; the circuit-ending I is again lacking. A third try: I–V–VI again. Now comes the breakthrough: IV–V–I–IV–V– I, a double circuit of which the first lacks an initial tonic. Later, Schenker would coin the term auxiliary cadence to denote a harmonic circuit that lacks an initial tonic (Schenker [1935] 1979, 88–89). That this term refers to the fundamental bass—the Roman numerals—and not to the literal bass line is revealed in Example 1.10 (7), from Free Composition, which shows the beginning of the transition in the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in D Major, Op. 28. Despite Beethoven’s stepwise bass lines and inverted dominants, Schenker refers to these II–V–I progressions as auxiliary 20 Schenker uses many more commas in his graph of the finale of K. 310 (Presto), and he uses them slightly differently. Here, Schenker’s commas mark moments of musical breath-taking in this short-breathed movement. They also separate Stufen that represent apparent retrogressions: bars 1–8, for example, read I–V, IV–I–V. A conversation with Nathan Pell helped to clarify my thinking about Schenker’s use of commas in Der Tonwille.
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cadences. Poundie Burstein was therefore incorrect to equate the terms “auxiliary cadence” and “incomplete transference of the fundamental structure” (Burstein 2005), because there is no hint of a fundamental structure, transferred or otherwise, in Example 1.10. Example 1.11 (8) shows part of a graph published in 1925 (Bach, Largo from Sonata No. 3 for Unaccompanied Violin, BWV 1005). In his analyses of the mid-1920s, Schenker introduces some important notational distinctions. He encloses certain Roman numerals in parentheses, introducing a sense of hierarchy into the horizontal flow of Stufen. In this example, the Roman numerals enclosed in parentheses at level c) are precisely those that disappear at level b): these are elaborating harmonies, not structural ones. The label Oberquintteiler, or “upper-fifth divider,” at levels c) and a) similarly denotes elaborating triads. Interestingly, the upper-fifth divider in level a) is a minor triad, an apparent II of F major, dividing the V triad at its fifth, G. The most interesting distinction in Example 1.11 is also the easiest to miss. Schenker’s strings of Roman numerals show nothing but root-position triads and seventh chords. The only Arabic numerals that appear next to a Roman numeral, as a superscript, are 3 and 7, indicating the third and seventh of some root-position chord. All other Arabic numerals on the page are either Urlinie designations (distinguished by the familiar carets) or figured-bass numerals that lie near, but are not affixed to, 5 the Roman numerals. Where Schenker writes 6– 4–3 , for example, the Arabic numerals are not part of the Roman-numeral label; they are to be read separately from it. The designation “V 64 ” for example, is not a chord label for Schenker. It represents, rather, the juxtaposition of a Roman numeral, indicating a fundamental-bass note, and two figured-bass numerals, indicating voice leading above the fundamental. John Rothgeb, in an article on undergraduate pedagogy (Rothgeb 1981), has argued for just such a separation of Roman numerals from figured-bass numerals. As late as the Five Graphic Music Analyses (Schenker [1932] 1969), Schenker’s Roman numerals represent fundamental-bass analyses, not labels for specific chords in specific inversions. Example 1.12 (9) shows excerpts from Schenker’s graphs of two Chopin etudes, nos. 8 and 12 from Op. 10. The harmonies that Schenker designates as modifications of II are not in root position; in both cases, the actual bass note is the chordal third. Roman numerals, with chromatic alterations, represent the fundamental harmonies. This explains why the Roman numerals are all written as if the chords were in root position. As late as 1932, a mere three years before his death, Schenker is still a fundamental-bass theorist. Although they were published late in Schenker’s career, Examples 1.10 and 1.12 do not represent Schenker’s final thoughts on harmony. They are vestiges of an earlier way of thinking, of a time when he still played fundamental basses on the piano. The beginning of a change may be detected in the second volume of Das Meisterwerk in der
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Musik, published in 1926. Example 1.13 (10), taken from that volume, shows Schenker turning his attention back to bass lines. The passing motion shown at b) indicates that these are intended as real bass lines—bass melodies, in William Caplin’s felicitous phrase (Caplin 2008)—and not as fundamental basses. Schenker explains how the bass helps to clarify which tones of the upper voice belong to the Urlinie. The bass melody, he says, is usually easier to interpret than the upper-voice melody, in part because it is less extensively elaborated. In Example 1.13, he shows the path from I to V and the intermediate harmonies that lie along the way.21 It so happens that all of the intermediate harmonies shown here are root-position triads, so the bass melody and the fundamental bass coincide. This coincidence represents, I think, a failure of nerve on Schenker’s part, because intermediate harmonies often aren’t root-position triads. But Schenker is paying closer attention to the bass melody than he had for some years, and his failure of nerve would soon be rectified. Example 1.14 (11), from Free Composition, is a revised version of Example 1.13. Here Schenker almost ceases to be a fundamental-bass theorist; he comes close to being a partimento theorist. In effect, he has discovered the rule of the octave, at least its lower pentachord.22 I and V remain root-position triads, the anchors of the key, as in the rule of the octave. Where intermediate harmonies are concerned, however, the scale degree in the bass matters more than the type of chord built on it. 3 may support any of several chords, including a root-position III (either diatonic or chromatic, as in the first line of Example 1.14) or a 63 chord, which Schenker labels I6. As far as I have been able to determine, I6 as a unitary chord symbol—not the juxtaposition of a fundamental-bass symbol (I) and a figured-bass signature (6)—makes its Schenkerian debut here, in Free Composition. That juxtaposition may still be seen a few years earlier, in Schenker’s analysis of Beethoven’s Eroica (Example 1.15 [12]), where the 1 of the Urlinie, in the first of two 3–2–1 descents, is harmonized by a first-inversion rather than a root-position tonic—to avoid redundancy, Schenker says (Schenker [1930] 1997, 51). In Figure 44, Schenker places the Arabic 6, accompanied by an exclamation mark of surprise, above the Roman I, not next to it as a subscript or superscript. At the corresponding place in Figure 45, he shows the Roman numeral only. He is s aying, in effect, that Beethoven’s I6 is a weak representative of the final I in a harmonic circuit— a negative characterization.23 What it is not is a chord distinct in function from rootposition I, a chord with its own, constructive role to play. 21 The term “intermediate harmony” is used extensively in Aldwell and Schachter (1978, 1:109). It originates, however, with Felix Salzer (1952, 1:15). 22 On Schenker’s view of the relation between the lower pentachord and upper tetrachord of the bass octave, see Brown (1986, 22–25), and the related discussion in Clark (2011, 209–20). 23 Many eighteenth-century theorists would have called this a deceptive cadence. See Neuwirth (2015).
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The I6 in Example 1.14 is another matter. Instead of representing two concepts, tonic triad and chordal inversion, yoked together ad hoc, the new I6 is one thing with one purpose: harmonizing 3 in an ascending bass melody. The new I6 is thus more closely related to III, with which it shares a bass note, than it is to I, with which it shares a root. In short, the new I6 is an intermediate harmony. Because its bass note is part of the tonic triad—part of a tonic arpeggio in the bass melody—Schenker places its symbol in parentheses, as he does with Roman III, whereas he gives IV and II greater weight (owing, apparently, to their greater contrast with I and V). Nevertheless, a shift of power has occurred from the fundamental bass to the bass melody. The change comes so late in Schenker’s career than one must wonder how his thinking would have evolved had he lived longer. The situation is similar for 4. As in the rule of the octave, an ascending 4 in the bass may support any of several chords: 53 , 63 , 65 (the chord most commonly cited in this connection), or !6 (Neapolitan sixth). Schenker’s example shows only the consonant, diatonic options. Which option is chosen matters less than one might imagine. Schenker writes that some chords built on 4 represent IV and II simultaneously: IV by virtue of the bass melody’s leap from 1 to 4, outlining the defining interval of the IV triad; II by virtue of the Urlinie reaching 2 at the same moment (Schenker [1935] 1979, 114–15). There are earlier examples in Schenker of his conflating IV and II in this manner, 24 but it is remarkable to see him doing so in Free Composition, his final work. That said, I regard the chapter on the Stufe as one of the less satisfactory chapters in Free Composition. Schenker’s ideas about harmony were once again in flux, and that made definitive theorizing impossible. Because conceptual flux was a constant for Schenker, we shouldn’t hope to find the consistency that Emerson warned is the hobgoblin of little minds. Example 1.16 (13), again from Free Composition, is offered as illustration. Schenker uses this figure to show the simultaneous growth of voice-leading and harmony from deeper to shallower levels. In that process, Schenker explains, voice-leading transformations (Stimmführungsverwandlungen) are the primary engine of growth; harmony plays a supporting role. Nevertheless, we will focus on the harmonic aspect. Fundamental-bass and partimento perspectives are conflated in Schenker’s Roman numerals. The plain II designation is used to label both root-position II, at level c), and II6 at levels a) and b). Both ways of labeling the cadential II6 appear in Free Composition. II expresses the fundamental-bass perspective, II6 what I am calling the partimento perspective. 24 See especially Schenker ([1925] 1994, 105, Fig. 1; Mozart, Piano Sonata in A Major, K. 331, b. 4). See also the discussion of IV and II in the unpublished early version of Der freie Satz (Oster Collection, New York Public Library, file 79, items 1892–94, 1939–40, 1952, 1969–70, and 1985–89).
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The symbol I6 features both in level a) of Example 1.16 and in Example 1.17 below. In this piece, I6 fulfills the double role that Caplin has described (Caplin 2008, 163–64): it is the turning point of the progression, marking both the end of the initial tonic prolongation—symbolized, in Example 1.16 (level a), by Schenker’s bass slur from G to B—and the beginning of the cadential progression, counterpointing the Urlinie descent from 5.25 Example 1.16 (level a) emphasizes the tonic-inversion aspect, perhaps because Schenker hears the definitive arrival of the Kopfton over I6, not over the preceding divider; at the deepest level (not shown here), the Kopfton will appear above the opening tonic itself. He shows the entire piece, at level a), as expressing a single harmonic circuit, I–II–V–I. The same harmonic circuit, in the local key of D major, accompanies the portion of the initial ascent shown in level c). An incomplete form of the same harmonic circuit defines level b). This replication from one level to another is Schenker’s point: he comments on the importance of differentiating the same Stufen at different structural levels. This is probably why he uses the unmodified Roman numeral II at each level of Example 1.16. In Example 1.17, the two roles of I6 appear evenly balanced. The series of half notes beginning at bar 15 emphasizes the first-species counterpoint between outer voices that governs the structural close; this underscores the role of I6 as the beginning of the end. Meanwhile, the plain Roman numeral I written beneath the first I6 (bar 12) emphasizes the inversional relationship to the opening tonic; this underscores the role of I6 as the end of the beginning. Aldwell and Schachter accurately reflect Schenker’s thinking when they use the term “intermediate harmony” in preference to “pre-dominant.” Nobody, to my knowledge, has ever called I6 a pre-dominant, but it can and often does serve as an intermediate harmony. As we have seen, Schenker’s relation to Viennese Stufentheorie was changing in his last years. Today, David Damschroder is the theorist who has most explicitly taken up Schenker’s intellectual evolution where harmony is concerned.26 More than most, Damschroder understands the history behind Schenker’s conception of harmony. Occasionally, he even adopts one of Sechter’s solutions in preference to Schenker’s.27 However one may feel about that, Damschroder’s views on matters such as fundamental-bass progression, chromatic alteration, and the 5–6 technique reflect Schenker’s theory far more closely than the literal-minded, Weber-like Roman numerals that one sees in many Schenkerian analyses today (including the use of lower-case R oman numerals). Such concessions to undergraduate-level harmonic pedagogy, however 25 Caplin notes (2008, 183n13) the resemblance of his “basic model” to Schenker’s middleground bass lines (shown in Example 1.14 above). 26 See especially the early chapters in Damschroder (2010, 2016). 27 See the treatment of augmented-sixth and diminished-seventh chords in Damschroder (2010, 5; Ex. 1.2 and passim).
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pragmatic, are difficult to justify on theoretical grounds. They make understanding Schenker’s thought harder, not easier. Example 1.18 (14), from Damschroder’s Harmony in Beethoven, is not a voiceleading graph but a continuo-style reduction, with harmonic analysis, of the opening thematic group in Beethoven’s op. 28 piano sonata. Aside from bar numbers, Arabic numerals represent voice-leading motions above their respective fundamentals. As in Schenker’s Eroica analysis and Five Graphic Analyses, Roman numerals refer to fundamentals, not to notes of the bass melody. The inverted secondary dominant (bars 21–22) substitutes for I6 in the overall progression (it has 3 in the bass and a root of D), and it marks the end of what Schenkerians often call the tonic’s prolongational span. 28 The entire thematic complex is based on a single harmonic circuit, I–IV–V–I. A local II harmony is interpolated between IV and V, and part of that II is chromaticized as a secondary dominant to V. Within the complete harmonic circuit, this II is an offshoot of IV by means of a 5–6 shift above the fundamental, G. (That G major never appears in root position is irrelevant to the analysis.) The hierarchical superiority of IV over II is suggested not only by temporal priority—IV precedes II—but also by the chromaticized I to which I have already referred: IV is tonicized; II is not. The analysis seems to me very much in the spirit of Schenker circa 1930. Damschroder’s work does not reflect Schenker’s late turn toward seeing even deeplevel Stufen as mere supporting actors; for Damschroder, Stufen take center stage, as the titles of his books suggest. Allan Keiler long ago complained of Schenker’s tendency to explain away, as side effects of counterpoint, all Stufen except the background tonic (Keiler 1977). Keiler is far from the only one to have felt unease in this regard; I have expressed the same concern (Rothstein 1992). Schenker probably pushed his theoretical monism too far in this case, as by common consent he did when he tried, in the first volume of Counterpoint, to derive all dissonance from the dissonant passing tone of second species (Schenker [1910] 1987, 260–78). That Schenker’s theoretical motivations in his last years were ideological and ultimately religious is abundantly clear from his letters and diaries: his monism was displaced monotheism.29 Although in the early version of Der freie Satz he allowed for multiple sources of causality in music, that very pluralism surely contributed to his 28 The term “prolongational span” originates with Allen Cadwallader, but it has been used by Carl Schachter, Peter H. Smith, and others. See the discussion in Cadwallader and Gagné (1998, 379– 85). The prolongational span of a Stufe usually begins with the harmony in a relatively stable position, but it often ends with the same harmony in a chromatic, dissonant, or otherwise less stable position. For example, a tonic-prolongational span may begin with a root-position I and end with V 65 of IV or VII o 65 of II, either of which may act as a chromatic transformation of the tonic Stufe. 29 “In the cosmos, the one origin in God; in music, the one origin in the Ursatz; thus, monotheistic thinking in both cases” (Schenker, 1933). See also Arndt (2018) and Schenker ([1935] 1979), Appendix 4.
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decision to abandon the much-revised draft.30 Like Rameau in his last years, the later Schenker had room in his philosophy for only one unmoved mover. For Rameau it was the fundamental bass, which he claimed as the source not only of music but of mathematics (Christensen 1993, 291ff.). For Schenker it was the Ursatz, the timeless tonic triad set into motion. Within the Ursatz, even the cadential V acts not as a discrete harmony but as a leaping passing tone, an event belonging (according to Schenker) to a middle voice, not a true bass.31 Beneath the “sacred triangle” of the Bassbrechung, the ultimate fundamental—the tonic note—sounds in conceptual perpetuity, linking human time to God’s time. Schenker’s Ursatz joins Rameau’s fundamental bass as a vehicle of mystic contemplation. At the end of his life, despite all differences and all protestations, Schenker came more than ever to resemble Rameau.
Works Cited Aldwell, Edward and Carl Schachter. 1978. Harmony and Voice Leading. 1st edition. 2 vols. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.
Alpern, Wayne. 1999. “Music Theory as a Mode of Law: The Case of Heinrich Schenker, Esq.” Cardozo Law Review 20: 1459–511.
Arndt, Matthew. 2018. The Musical Thought and Spiritual Lives of Heinrich Schenker and Arnold Schoenberg. New York: Routledge. Brown, Matthew. 1986. “The Diatonic and the Chromatic in Schenker’s Theory of Harmonic Relations.” Journal of Music Theory 30: 1–33.
Burstein, L. Poundie. 2005. “Unraveling Schenker’s Concept of the Auxiliary Cadence.” Music Theory Spectrum 27: 159–86.
Cadwallader, Allen and David Gagné. 1998. Analysis of Tonal Music: A Schenkerian Approach. 1st edition. New York: Oxford University Press.
_______. 2016. “The Evolution of the Quintteiler Concept in Schenker’s Published Writings.” Music Theory Spectrum 38: 109–17. Caplin, William. 1980. “Harmony and Meter in the Theories of Simon Sechter.” Music Theory Spectrum 2: 74–89. _______. 2008. “Schoenberg’s ‘Second Melody’, or ‘Meyer-ed’ in the Bass.” In Communication in Eighteenth-Century Music, edited by Danuta Mirka and Kofi Agawu, 160–86. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
30 See the epilogue to the early Der freie Satz, “Von der musikalischen Kausalität—Rückblick und Epilog,” dated 31 August 1917 (the birthday of Schenker’s future wife Jeanette). 31 On the leaping passing tone see Schenker ([1922] 1987), 182, 186 (ex. 283, bar 4), and 235–36.
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Christensen, Thomas. 1993. Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clark, Suzannah. 2011. Analyzing Schubert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Damschroder, David. 2008. Thinking about Harmony: Historical Perspectives on Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. _______. 2010. Harmony in Schubert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. _______. 2016. Harmony in Beethoven. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Förster, Emanuel Aloys. 1804. Anleitung zum General-Bass. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel. Forte, Allen. (1961) 1979. Tonal Harmony in Concept and Practice. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Holtmeier, Ludwig. 2010. “Vom Triebleben der Stufen. Gedanken zum Tonalitätsbegriff Arnold Schönbergs.” In Musik und ihre Theorien. Clemens Kühn zum 65. Geburtstag, edited by Felix Diergarten et al., 84–108. Dresden: Sandstein. Jonas, Oswald. (1934) 1982. Introduction to the Theory of Heinrich Schenker: The Nature of the Musical Work of Art. Translated and edited by John Rothgeb. New York: Longman. Keiler, Allan. 1977. “The Syntax of Prolongation.” In Theory Only 3, no. 5: 3–27. Kirnberger, Johann Philipp. 1773. Die wahren Grundsätze zum Gebrauch der Harmonie. Berlin: Decker & Hartung. Translated by David Beach and Jürgen Thym as “The True Principles for the Use of Harmony.” Journal of Music Theory 23: 163–225. Krebs, Harald. 1988. “Schenker’s Changing View of Rameau: A Comparison of Remarks in Harmony, Counterpoint, and ‘Rameau or Beethoven?’” Theoria 3: 59–72. Lester, Joel. 1992. Compositional Theory in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Louis, Rudolf and Ludwig Thuille. n.d. [1907]. Harmonielehre. Stuttgart: Carl Grüninger [Klett & Hartmann]. Mayrberger, Carl. (1881) 1994. “Die Harmonik Richard Wagner’s an den Leit motiven aus Tristan und Isolde.” In Music Analysis in the Nineteenth Century, Volume 1: Fugue, Form and Style, translated and edited by Ian Bent, 221–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mokrejs, John. 1913. Lessons in Harmony. New York: Odowan.
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Morgan, Robert P. 1978. “Schenker and the Theoretical Tradition: The Concept of Musical Reduction.” College Music Symposium 18: 72–96. Neuwirth, Markus. 2015. “Fuggir la Cadenza, or The Art of Avoiding Cadential Closure.” In What Is a Cadence? Theoretical and Analytical Perspectives on Cadences in the Classical Repertoire, edited by Markus Neuwirth and Pieter Bergé, 117–55. Leuven (Belgium): Leuven University Press. Purcell, Henry. 1694. “A Brief Introduction to the Art of Descant, or Composing Musick in Parts.” In John Playford, An Introduction to the Skill of Musick, 12th edition, 85–144. London: E. Jones. Rameau, Jean-Philippe. (1722) 1971. Treatise on Harmony. Translated by Philip Gossett. New York: Dover. _______. 1760. Code de musique pratique. Paris: Imprimerie royale. Rothfarb, Lee. 2018. “Henryk Szenker, Galitzianer: The Making of a Man and a Nation.” Journal of Schenkerian Studies 11: 1–50. Rothgeb, John. 1981. “Schenkerian Theory: Its Implications for the Undergraduate Curriculum.” Music Theory Spectrum 3: 142–49. Rothstein, William. 1992. “The True Principles for the Use of Harmony; or, Schulz, Schenker, and the Stufe.” Paper delivered to the Second International Schenker Symposium, Mannes College of Music, New York City. Salzer, Felix. 1937. “Heinrich Schenkers historische Sendung.” Der Dreiklang 1: 2–12. _______. (1952) 1962. Structural Hearing: Tonal Coherence in Music. New York: Dover Publications. Schenker, Heinrich. 1906. Harmonielehre. Vol. 1 of Neue musikalische Theorien und Phantasien. Stuttgart: Cotta. Translated by Elisabeth Mann Borgese as Harmony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1954] 1980). Citations refer to the 1906 edition except where otherwise indicated. _______. (1910) 1987a. Counterpoint (Kontrapunkt). Vol. 1. Translated by John Rothgeb and Jürgen Thym. Edited by John Rothgeb. New York: Schirmer Books. _______. (1921–24) 2004–05. Der Tonwille: Pamphlets /Quarterly Publication in W itness of the Immutable Laws of Music. Translated by Ian Bent et al. Edited by William Drabkin. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. _______. (1922) 1987b. Counterpoint (Kontrapunkt). Vol. 2. Translated by John Rothgeb and Jürgen Thym. Edited by John Rothgeb. New York: Schirmer Books.
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_______. (1925) 1994. The Masterwork in Music: A Yearbook (Das Meisterwerk in der Musik. Ein Jahrbuch). Vol. 1. Translated by Ian Bent et al. Edited by William Drabkin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. _______. (1926) 1996. The Masterwork in Music: A Yearbook (Das Meisterwerk in der Musik. Ein Jahrbuch). Vol. 2. Translated by Ian Bent et al. Edited by William Drabkin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. _______. (1930) 1997. The Masterwork in Music: A Yearbook (Das Meisterwerk in der Musik. Ein Jahrbuch). Vol. 3. Translated by Ian Bent et al. Edited by William Drabkin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. _______. (1932) 1969. Five Graphic Music Analyses. Edited by Felix Salzer. New York: Dover. Edited reprint of Schenker, Fünf Urlinie-Tafeln, published simultaneously in Vienna (Universal-Edition) and New York (David Mannes Music School). _______. 1933. “Diary entry by Schenker May 21, 1933.” Translated by William Drabkin. Schenker Documents Online. Accessed August 14, 2019. https://schenkerdocumentsonline.org/documents/diaries/OJ-04-06_1933-05/r0021.html. _______. (1935) 1979. Free Composition (Der freie Satz). Edited and translated by Ernst Oster. New York: Longman. Schoenberg, Arnold. (1922) 1978. Theory of Harmony. 3rd edition. Translated by Roy E. Carter. Berkeley: University of California Press. _______. (1948) 1969. Structural Functions of Harmony. Revised edition, edited by Leonard Stein. New York: Norton. Sechter, Simon. 1853. Die Grundsätze der musikalischen Komposition. Erste Abtheilung: Die richtige Folge von Grundharmonien, oder vom Fundamentalbass und dessen Umkehrungen und Stellvertretern. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel. English adaptation by Carl Christian Müller as The Correct Order of Fundamental Harmonies (New York: Pond, 1871). Citations refer to the 1853 edition unless otherwise indicated. Siegel, Hedi. 2015. “Schenker at the Piano.” Music Analysis 34: 265–79. Vogler, Georg Joseph. 1802. Handbuch zur Harmonielehre und für den Generalbaß. Prague: Barth. Wason, Robert. 1983. “Schenker’s Notion of Scale-Step in Historical Perspective: Non-Essential Harmonies in Viennese Fundamental Bass Theory.” Journal of Music Theory 27: 49–73. _______. 1984. Viennese Harmonic Theory from Albrechtsberger to Schenker and Schoenberg. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press.
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Weber, Gottfried. (1817–21) 1830–32. Versuch einer geordneten Theorie der Tonsetzkunst. 3rd edition. Mainz: Schott. Translated by James F. Warner as Theory of Musical Composition. 2 vols. Boston: Wilkins, Carter & Co., 1846. Citations refer to the 1846 edition, which was reprinted in London in 1851. Zarlino, Gioseffo. (1558) 1983. On the Modes. Translated by Vered Cohen from Book IV of Le istitutioni harmoniche. New Haven: Yale University Press.
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2 Schenker and Sechter: A Discontinuous History M A RT IN EY BL
Introduction In the past thirty years, numerous studies and scholarly projects have dealt with the historical contextualization of Heinrich Schenker, i.e., the question of the social, political and ideological contexts in which his music-theoretical thinking and his world view originated and developed. These studies have different focuses. Schenker Documents Online, the website developed by Ian Bent and William Drabkin in 2003 to publish Schenker’s correspondence, diaries and lesson books, provides primary biographical insights into Schenker’s life circumstances and the social spheres in which he moved.1 Various studies have been devoted to Schenker’s political and social environment in Vienna and in his native Galicia, 2 to the development of his theory over the course of his life, 3 and to the diverse reception of his theory.4 In recent years, comparatively little attention has been paid to how other music-theoretical approaches influenced Schenker and the technical and conceptional problems he tried to solve with his ground-breaking theory. Robert Wason contributed significantly to these questions in his dissertation on the Viennese tradition of fundamental bass theory ([1985] 1995) and in an essay describing the influence of Simon Sechter and fundamental bass theory on Schenker’s Harmony (Wason 1983). 1 For an important resource of these materials, see Schenker Documents Online, http://www. schenkerdocumentsonline.org/index.html. 2 Botstein (1997); Cook (2007); Karnes (2008, 79–132, Part II: “Heinrich Schenker and the Challenge of Criticism”); Eybl (2018); Rothfarb (2018). For a study on Schenker’s ideological background (without special reference to local traditions) see Snarrenberg (1997). 3 Pastille (1990a and 1990b); Eybl (1995); Duerksen (2008); Morgan (2014). 4 Rothstein (1990); Berry (2002, 2005a, 2005b, 2011, and 2016); Eybl and Fink-Mennel (2006); Wozonig (2018).
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The author argued that this influence extended to the first volume of Neue musikalische Theorien und Phantasien, but not further, since Schenker underwent “a radical departure from nineteenth-century harmonic thinking” in his subsequent development (1983, 67). The assumption of a fundamental reorientation is in line with Schenker’s own narrative. For example, Schenker insisted on the originality of his new concept of scale step, which is quickly recognizable in his own comparison with Sechter’s theory: [I]t is interest in complete clarity of the discipline rather than vanity that compels me to say here that my theory is the first that points to the scale degree as the generator of [musical] content. One need only compare Sechter’s work, for instance, with my own to recognize that the practical artistic purpose of generating and increasing content is better served by the psychology of scale degree progression as I present it. (Schenker [1910] 1987, xxx-xxxi)
The proud consciousness of doing something for the first time in history is part of the foundation of modern thought; the historical priority of one’s own knowledge and actions shapes the self-confidence of modernity. Even if Heinrich Schenker had not associated himself with his era in any other way, the optimism of a new beginning was inscribed in his work—no less so that for Freud, Loos, or Schönberg. The pioneering spirit that drove Schenker was the sign of that epoch, whose decadence he so fiercely fought against. Nevertheless, the statement must not be understood as a radical departure from Sechter. Schenker stresses the new significance of traditional thought in his teachings, but there are also signs of continuity of development. If one follows the path that Schenker lays out in 1910 in the first volume of his Counterpoint and compares his notion of scale step with the approaches of his predecessors, one discovers elements of Sechter’s doctrine that continued to influence Schenker’s theory. The context has changed, but the influence has not evaporated. This article argues that Schenker mediated between German and Austrian music theory, between Leipzig and Vienna, in the concept of composing-out (Auskomponierung). The Austrian music theorist combined the tradition in which he had been taught by Anton Bruckner at the Vienna Conservatory with the idea of a Hegelianoriented system, that is, the fundamental bass theory, which Simon Sechter had firmly anchored in the Viennese teaching tradition, with the musical dialectic of Moritz Hauptmann, a dialectic which decisively influenced Hugo Riemann. Schenker strove to combine Riemann’s starting point with Sechter’s teaching: A concept of tonality, which produces coherence through a process involving the listener, was integrated into an analytical practice dedicated to the interplay of voice leading and chord progression.
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A Problemgeschichte of music theory provides the historiographical model, proposing that the novelty of a theory is defined by the answers it gives to inherited questions. Even if Schenker found completely new solutions, he at least shared the problems of his immediate predecessors. The originality of Schenker’s solutions is clearly visible against the background of the incorporation and transformation of traditional elements. When comparing Schenker’s approaches with those who came before him, it becomes especially clear, however, that Schenker’s intellectual career was by no means as straightforward and uninterrupted as a superficial examination would appear to suggest. Through occasional references to his older books, Schenker himself strives to emphasize the continuity of his efforts. One who follows these references without noticing the shift in meaning in the technical terms, runs the risk of interpreting Schenker’s interim goals from the perspective of the future, that is, of projecting later elements onto places where they do not yet exist. This discussion challenges Schenker’s assertion of the consistency and continuity of his concept over the many years he developed it, a narrative popular among Schenkerians even today.5
Schenker and Sechter: Fundamental Bass, Voice Leading, and Scale Step Heinrich Schenker and Simon Sechter share the view that melodic movement and harmony are closely linked in tonal music and together create musical coherence. Basedon the tradition of fundamental bass theory, Sechter underscores the close interaction of melody and harmony at the level of chord connection, that is, within the scope of voice leading in the traditional sense of the word. This concerns rules of chord connections such as the so-called “Gesetz des nächsten Weges” (the principle of least motion),6 and the rule to lead chord dissonances gradually downwards. In his textbook The Principles of Musical Composition (1853), Sechter describes the relationship between harmony and voice leading as interdependence. The author understands changes in harmony as movements of the chord’s fundamentals (fundamental bass progression) that have specific voice leading consequences. For example, the third, fifth or octave of the initial chord should be a component of the target chord, the dissonances of the initial chord should be gradually resolved downwards, and common notes should, in some cases, prepare the dissonances of the target chord. Fundamental 5 See for example Pastille (1990b) and Morgan (2014). Studies taking a Problemgeschichte approach with an emphasis on contradictions and reorientations in Schenker’s development as a theorist include Meeùs (2017), Cohn (1992), and Keiler (1989, 296), who writes: “Any comparison of this kind between earlier and later analyses of Schenker would reveal fundamental differences of analytic belief, beliefs that are very often quite contradictory in nature.” 6 For the historical derivation of this rule, see Meeùs (2017, 161).
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bass progression regulates the voice leading, and, vice versa, the correct course of the voices determines whether there is a change in harmony (Sechter 1853, 14–27).7 Sechter and Schenker both share with the older fundamental bass theory the conviction that melodic movement of individual voices can produce chords without a fundamental bass progression.8 Example 2.1 (16) presents a harmonic reduction of bars 19-21 from Bach’s Organ Prelude in E minor, BWV 548.9 The reduction illustrates a harmony between two triads that is outside the bounds of the traditional system of chords. On the basis of harmonic tonality, the chord can only be regarded as the result of a double diminution, as a passing chord. Sechter calls harmonies created by passing tones in the course of Vertauschung (the exchange of chord tones by at least two voices when a chord is repeated) zufällige Accorde (accidental or non-essential harmonies) (1853, 38).10 If the voices move outside the limited frame of a fundamental progression as suspensions or passing tones, harmonies can arise that carry the outer shape of triads or seventh chords without having their own fundamental. Sechter is, probably from an educational point of view, fundamentally prone to avoiding ambiguity. In rare cases, however, chords appear doubly determined in his examples—as the result of passing motion and as the result of fundamental bass progression. In Example 2.2 (16), Sechter presents non-essential harmonies as the result of passing motion. While the first “exchange” produces a chord in the shape of a dominant seventh chord, which can only be understood as a passing chord, because otherwise the chordal seventh would ascend irregularly, in the last “exchange” of Example 2.2 the passing chord on the third eighth can also be understood as a true dominant. Faced with the choice between declaring the passing motion or the fundamental progression to be the determining moment of the movement, Sechter prioritizes here the voice leading as an exception. But as in other places, the voice leading in this example creates small-scale coherence, since the fundamental bass theory aims at explaining direct connections between the chords. 7 Carl Dahlhaus referred to the fact, surprising within harmonic theory, that Sechter makes the selection of possible fundamental steps dependent on the regular voice leading, so that the concept of the fundamental step does not appear as “a primary, substantiating, but a secondary, substantiated category” (1989, 88; translation mine). 8 See Wason (1983). Wason ([1985] 1995) offers an informative and detailed study on figured bass and harmony in Vienna of the nineteenth century and its theoretical foundations. However, one of its premises, the strict juxtaposition of conservative Viennese teaching tradition and progressive German music theory ([1985] 1995, XIII), and the emphasis on local continuity lead descriptions of both traditions to underestimate the shared moments. Wason considers Riemann’s influence on Schenker’s notion of scale-step doubtful (142). 9 Example 2.1 reproduces Example 149 from Harmonielehre (1906). 10 See also Wason (1983, 53–56) and Wason ([1985] 1995).
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While Sechter only resorts to explaining chords as the products of voice leading when the chord cannot be identified using the rules of fundamental bass theory, Schenker makes a positive principle out of it in his novel concept of scale step. Sechter refers to the small-scale, Schenker to the large-scale, formal dimension.11 Instead of focusing on local chord progression, Schenker analyzes step progression (Stufengang) based on fifth relations. The step progression represents the harmonic basis of the form and encompasses the whole piece or at least larger sections of it. Schenker’s innovation is to view the scale step as an element of the step progression that can comprise more than just one triad or one Sechterian fundamental, such that voices can move contrapuntally between chord tones without the fundamental changing. Schenker’s earlier quotation and his comparison with Sechter refers to the content, in terms of melodic movement, that these voices thus generate. Schenker’s concept of step progression sketches a model of formal accentuation and proportioning by means of harmony. As with Sechter and Riemann, each in their own way, the elements of the step progression are determined by the relationship of the fundamentals. However, Schenker also considers their duration, the “rhythm of scalesteps” ([1906] 1954, 147), and thus introduces a completely new aspect into harmony theory. In this view, the extent of the scale steps can, in principle, be arbitrarily large or small (151–52), as long as a meaningful relationship to the whole exists. Thus, there is primarily a “mutual organic influence” between the step progression and the use of themes and motives (212n2). In a prelude or in a modulation the composer has “to give varied duration to each scale-step as may be required by the motif – in other words, to create a free rhythm” (337). Regardless of the different perspectives, Schenker’s scale steps are perfectly compatible with Sechter’s fundamentals. If the corresponding examples in Harmony are analyzed according to Sechterian fundamentals, it is apparent that Schenker dispenses with intermediate fundamentals (Zwischenfundamente) and subsumes harmonic pendulum movement under one scale step (Schenker [1906] 1954, 141–51).12 His scalestep designations lie on a higher level of abstraction, without fundamentally coming 11 In this article the terms “form” and “formal” are used in a general sense meaning any kind of temporal organization of a composition, based on harmonic progression and relations. They do not refer to specific formal models, such as binary form, rondo, sonata form, etc. 12 Cf. Wason ([1985] 1995, 38–43) and Eybl (1995, 50 and 54). Sechter needed intermediate fundamentals in order to transform stepwise motion in the fundamental bass into leaps of a third, fourth or fifth. Even Schenker still reserves seconds a special position in the step progression, as “in the series of the first five partials . . . the second has no place” ([1906] 1954, 236). The view that the lower part of the partial series determines not only the construction of chords (26–29) but also the chord progression is one of Rameau’s legacies. The structural similarity between chords and basse fondamentale, manifest in the restriction to fifth and third in both areas, belongs to the fundamental premises of Rameau’s theory. See Dahlhaus (1989, 78).
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into conflict with Sechter. This results in the idea that harmonic movement takes place on different levels, which Schenker confirms, going in two directions. First, he proposes that it is the analyst’s choice to understand a triad either as its own harmony or to group it together with other harmonies to form a scale step, thus describing simultaneous harmonic movement on the level of simple chords as well as on the level of scale steps: “The scale-step is a higher and more abstract unit. At times it may even comprise several harmonies, each of which could be considered individually as an independent triad or seventh-chord” ([1906] 1954, 139). Second, what Schenker initially presents in the middle dimension, also applies on a higher level: “In the form of established keys we have the same step progression, albeit at a superior level. For the sake of the construction of content in a larger sense, the natural element of step progression is elevated correspondingly” (Schenker [1906] 1954, 246).13
The Fractal Structure of Tonality and the Harmonic Foundation of Form Sechter’s Principles of Musical Composition offers another starting point for Schenker’s teaching. Sechter explains chromatic steps as “subordinate fundamentals” enriching the “main fundamentals” (Sechter 1853, 157–61 and 194–200).14 Each scale step can temporarily act as a tonic, justifying chords lacking a relationship to the scale. Sechter sketches a stratification of the musical structure in which each stratum is structured according to the same principles. In their sequence, the main fundamentals obey the rules of fundamental bass progression as do the secondary harmonies. The same laws apply on both levels. In his Harmony, Schenker also introduces a fractal structure that reproduces the same principles on several levels. However, there are two differences: First, Schenker’s generative principle, the step progression, is merely harmonic, whereas Sechter maintains the close connection between harmony and voice leading at all levels. In Sechter, as mentioned above, the voice leading emerges from the fundamental bass progression, and a change in harmony only takes place where the voices progress according to the rules. When Schenker wrote Harmony, however, he did not yet know about a mutual dependence of voice leading and harmony. Secondly, Schenker’s step progression is based on a premise that is distant from Sechter: that musical form is founded on harmony. Nothing in his Principles of Musical Composition reveals a way of thinking that deviated from the formal concepts of the early nineteenth century. Koch or Reicha,15 for example, do not regard the main 13 Elevation (“Steigerung”) is a core term in Goethe’s notion of archetype. 14 Cf. Wason ([1985] 1995, 48–49) and Morgan (1978, 89–91). 15 Koch (1802, 749–51) (Hauptton, Grundton); Reicha ([1814] 1832).
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key of a movement as its central reference value, but as a determinant among other equivalent values: it is a general rule that a movement should begin and end in a main key. Departing from it does not happen out of inner necessity, not because the main harmony would have to be challenged by others, but simply to avoid monotony. The tonal progression is determined by an external, aesthetic principle—the formula of unity and diversity—rather than an internal harmonic one. Schenker’s theory of form establishes a link between harmony and form, a concept first developed in a book published in Leipzig in 1853 by Moritz Hauptmann (as was the first volume of Sechter’s Principles). Although the analogy between large form and harmonic detail structure is only briefly explained in The Nature of Harmony and Metre: On the Theory of Music, one of the direct consequences of Hauptmann’s central thesis is that musical phenomena can be traced back to a single generative law (Hauptmann [1853] 1888, xxxiv):16 That something leaves unity and enters into opposition with itself, and then that this opposition is done away with and linked into union, is the notion and explanation of all real coming-to-be and of all reasonable formation. [/] The harmonic succession of the triads C . . . G . . . C, or the three first notes of the melodic scale, C . . . D . . . e, which are based upon that succession, contain in the narrowest compass everything that normally lies at the bottom even of the broadest formation. What is here given within the key as chord-succession can but be repeated in the same sense, when the key itself is taken as the concrete element of unity, and the advance of construction made from it. (Hauptmann [1853] 1888, 170)17
While Sechter sketches a fractal structure of tonality at the periphery of his system without deriving consequences for the understanding of form, Hauptmann puts the idea of form grounded in harmony, whose generative principle works at all levels, at the center of his theoretical considerations. He left it others to implement these theo 16 The “shaping principle must in every element of its operation always be, and remain, the same in itself ” (Hauptmann [1853] 1888, xxxiv). Robert O. Gjerdingen explains the fascination of “structural recursion” from the tension between the simplicity of the basic principle and the complexity of the structures arising from the recursive application of the principle. “Structural recursion is attractive because it is conceptually economical” (Gjerdingen 1988, 18). 17 “Dass Etwas aus der Einheit in Gegensatz mit sich selbst trete und dieser Gegensatz wieder aufgehoben und in die Einigkeit vermittelt werde, das ist der Begriff alles wirklichen Werdens und aller vernünftigen Formation und eben auch der Begriff zu ihrem Verständniss. Die harmonische Folge der Dreiklänge C . . . G . . . C, oder die drei ersten Töne der melodischen Leiter C . . . D . . . e, die auf dieser Folge basirt sind, enthalten im engsten Umfange, was normal auch der weitesten Formation zu Grunde liegt. Was hier innerhalb der Tonart als Accordfolge gegeben ist, kann sich nur in demselben Sinne wiederholen, wenn die Tonart selbst als concretes Einheitsmoment ergriffen wird, und von diesem aus die Fortbildung geschieht.” (Hauptmann 1853, 201–02).
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retical considerations in practical teaching of harmony and composition. Riemann’s Musikalische Syntaxis (1877) is an attempt to bring together harmony and form with the help of Hegelian dialectic (Hauptmann’s own means). Schenker pursues the same goal—but with Sechter’s instruments. At this point, Schenker was not able to integrate the idea that voice leading also represents an essential element of wide-ranging musical coherence into his concept of musical form. For the time being he had to substitute it by a network of motivic coherence.
The Juxtaposition of Melody and Harmony In his Harmony (1906) Schenker used the term Auskomponierung in a different sense than he later would, that is, referring to melodic elaboration, without the idea that the melody represents a harmony. In an analysis of a passage from the opening movement of Bach’s Italian Concerto, BWV 971, (Example 2.3, 17) and in the context of tonicalization, Schenker illustrates “the advantage of elaborating a scale-step more fully rather than jotting it down merely as a triad or seventh-chord; for such elaboration with a greater number of tones provides the author with the opportunity to create the aspect of a different diatonic system, i.e., to yield to the scale-step’s yearning for the tonic” (Schenker [1906] 1954, 256 [translation altered]).18 Essential components of what Schenker later called Auskomponierung are lacking here. Although the self-will of the tones is addressed (“the scale step’s yearning for the tonic”), the idea is absent that a harmony develops in the process of composing-out and sprouts that which is germinated in the harmony itself. The agent of elaboration is named clearly; it is not the chord itself, but the composer. There is not a word about the tonal space in which the mature Schenker sees composing-out occurring through melodic exploration and filling of that space. Schenker’s notion that embellishing a single tone in a chord merits calling it Auskomponierung differs from the later conviction that different harmonies are necessarily involved in the composing-out process. The way that Schenker demands harmonies, above all the initial tonic of a movement, to be prolonged by motivic “content” suggests a clear distinction of harmonic
18 For a similar example, see Schenker ([1906] 1954, 322–23, Examples 292 and 293). Borgese translates auskomponieren with “unfolding” instead of “elaborating” and “elaboration.” Unfolding is a technical term of the 1920s that covers the sense of the passage with an idea of harmonic composing-out, foreign to the extant passage. The original reads: wie “gut es ist, eine Stufe, statt sie bloß drei- oder vierklanglich hinzustellen, voller auszukomponieren, da doch der Autor durch das Auskomponieren einer größeren Reihe von Tönen nur desto leichter Gelegenheit findet, den Schein einer fremden Diatonie zu erzielen, d. h. dem Tonikadrang der Stufen Vorschub zu leisten” (Schenker 1906, 338).
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and melodic elements (Schenker 1906, 283, footnote).19 The scale step is the form that takes up the motif and the melody as its content. Apart from motivic relationships, farreaching through motivic repetition, Schenker does not address melodic coherence, in terms of voice leading, beyond the boundaries of the scale steps: every scale step has its own melodic content. Even in Schenker’s monograph on Beethoven’s Piano Sonata, Op. 101, (1921), the dichotomy of form and content is still preserved in the use of the term Auskomponierung. In the few cases where he uses the term, the emphasis is again on melodic material that creates content, such as the Auskomponierung of a fermata, a fifth-progression (through a diminution motif in eighth notes) or the space of a fourth between 5 and 8 (Schenker [1921] 1972, 57, 48, and 40).20 The monograph does not even mention the Auskomponierung of a chord. It is well known that Schenker introduces terms such as fourthand fifth-progression, as well as fundamental line, for the first time here. In contrast to his later concept of a linear progression (Zug), however, what Schenker identifies as linear progressions in the two middle movements is not related to a chord, that is, it remains harmonically indeterminate. Fourth- and fifth-progressions have primarily motivic meaning here and are open to different harmonic interpretations. Schenker’s expression already makes the loose connection between melody and harmony clear: a fourth-progression “is to be interpreted as the scale-degree succession I–IV–V” and places itself “in the service of the cadence,” immediately thereafter “coinciding with the tonic” ([1921] 2015, 48 and 56). It sounds as if it were a matter of coincidental meetings of linear progressions and harmonies, not a composing-out of harmonies by means of linear progressions. Between 1922 and 1925, Schenker’s theoretical thinking underwent a profound shift. Schenker had already introduced the Urlinie as an archetype of tonal music in the spirit of Goethe’s Urpflanze. Although he used the same word before and after this threshold, the related concepts are so fundamentally different that in order to be able to clearly distinguish the contents, it is preferable to speak of Urlinie I and Urlinie II.21 Some terms such as Auskomponierung, linear progression or Urlinie have fundamentally different meanings before and after this threshold. Until the early 1920s, melodic and harmonic coherence existed side by side in Schenker’s thinking, two aspects with
19 “[Klänge werden] durch motivischen Inhalt auskomponiert und durch den Stufengang erläutert.” Borgese’s translation goes in a different direction: “unfolding [chords] in motivic substance and thereby clarifying the step progression” (Schenker [1906] 1954, 212n2). The English translation implies that chords explain or clarify the step progression, but for Schenker the opposite is true: the step progression explains or defines the chords. 20 Compare Schenker ([1921] 2015, 75, 64, and 53; “composing out”). 21 See in detail Eybl (1995, 78–95).
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very different natures: melodic coherence was based on the principle of repetition and harmonic coherence on the principle of fifth relationships. In the first volume of the Counterpoint (1910), we see early hints of Schenker’s concept of the Urlinie. The term was not introduced, but the idea that hidden melodic lines have “the most concealed result, the ultimate product of ascending and descending figurations” ([1910] 1987, 96), corresponds closely to Schenker’s understanding of an Urlinie in his monograph on Op. 101. Although he does not present a definition of the term here, its meaning is clear in context. Urlinie I denotes a latent melodic framework, which can consist of a single diatonic line or a polyphonic structure comprising several melody lines. Probably in order to emphasize the unifying function of the Urlinie, Schenker does not use the expression in the plural, even where the identification of the term with a single melody line is impossible (Example 2.4, 17). Urlinie I creates formal coherence generally through its continuous diatonic “rise and fall” ([1921] 2015, 9) and especially through the motivic relationships that are expressed in it. In 1921 Schenker does not present the Urlinie I as a means of composing-out. Instead, it represents a melodic framework that Schenker once synonymously calls “Ton-Urreihe” (primordial tone row) ([1921] 1972, 53), 22 thus underscoring how it differs from Urlinie II. Urlinie I is a sequence of pitches, a row like those in twelve-tone compositions of the second Viennese School, whereas Urlinie II represents a harmony, the tonic triad.
The Interaction between Melody and Harmony When Schenker’s position gradually changed, the Urlinie increasingly took on harmonic significance and its motivic function diminished and finally disappeared. In 1922, Schenker describes the Urlinie in a new way, namely as “horizontal formulation of tonality” and as “unfurling of a basic triad,” presenting “tonality on horizontal paths” ([1921–24] 2004, I, 53). His analysis of Mozart’s Sonata in A minor, K. 310, reveals that tonality here means a local tonic. In the first movement, Schenker identifies the Urlinie of the second group with an octave progression “as an elaboration [Auskomponierung] of the fundamental harmony of the C major diatonicism” (1922a, 8; [1921–24] 2004, I, 57). The reference value is not the tonic of the entire movement, but the key of the formal section. In the next issue of Tonwille, Schenker makes the 22 Cf. Schenker ([1921] 2015, 71): “primordial tonal succession”. Schenker refers to the deepest level in the graph of the third movement, see Example 2.5, level a. Although focusing on motivic coherence, Brien Weiner assumes harmonic implications even in the early idea of Urlinie. Among the “precepts of Urlinie” he includes “the two-dimensional interaction of harmony and counterpoint” (1994, 8).
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reference of the Urlinie to the tonal space of the prolonged chord clear for the first time by numbers under a caret (such as 5, 4, 3) ([1921–24] 2004, I, 99). The analysis of short pieces such as some of Bach’s so-called Little Preludes, pieces whose harmonic progression often consists of nothing but a cadenza, led Schenker to extend his new idea of Auskomponierung to entire movements. In 1921 he had been already on the cusp of this. In the analytic graph of the third movement of Beethoven’s Sonata, Op. 101 (Example 2.5, 18), the deepest layer (a) shows a kind of Ursatz in which the Urlinie prolongs a single chord. In his commentary Schenker, however, ignored the corresponding idea that the movement ultimately consists of the composingout of only one chord, because he wanted to demonstrate motivic coherence as well as the fact that the main motif of the first movement, now “made minor” ([1921] 2015, 71), forms the melodic core for the third movement. Two years later, in order to illustrate the multi-layered effectiveness of Auskomponierung in the analytical graphs (Example 2.6, 19), he resorted to the technique used for the first time in the quoted example of splitting the harmonic-linear content of the piece into several layers, which were intended to demonstrate the gradual expansion of the individual elements. The step progression I–IV–VII–I is developed from a melodic unfolding of the tonic. Unlike in the past, the type of presentation is not aimed at motif relationships, but at the connection between form and harmony. Auskompo nierung combines both areas with melody; musical form is thus based on harmony and voice leading. Schenker’s satisfaction with his analytical progress is unmistakable. “That the prelude [BWV 924], with its Urlinie, voice leading, and harmony [Stufe] still develops only the triad, the C-major chord—after this demonstration, who would still doubt it?” (1923, 5; [1921–24] 2004, I, 143). The names of the lowest layers were still unclear. The “ground-plan of the prelude,” the “nucleus of the content” or a “primordial plan” (Urplan) is mentioned ([1921–24] 2004, I, 141, 145, and 175). In a subsequent commentary on Prelude No. 5 in D minor, BWV 926, the term Ursatz appeared for the first time intermittently ([1921–24] 2004, I, 212). But in his analysis of Beethoven’s “Appassionata” (1924), Schenker still alternates between Ursatz and Urlinie-Satz ([1921–24] 2004, II, 41 “Urlinie-Satz”; 42–44 and 48 “Ursatz”). Until then, the idea that musical form arises through composingout of a tonic harmony was not presented as universally valid. Schenker’s analyses of the year 1923 are very often limited to graphs of the Urlinie (Urlinie-Tafeln) without setting up an Ursatz. Therefore, it is unclear whether he believed that an Urlinie must necessarily prolong a tonic harmony. Apparently, the idea only gradually gained importance to him. The thesis of the fractal structure of a composition based on the interaction between melody and harmony was a theoretical option that Schenker had for several years; he took this way, but late and only hesitantly.
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With the concepts of Urlinie II and Ursatz, Schenker raised the idea of a fractal structure of tonal music to a new dimension. In Harmony, as mentioned above, harmony and melody created coherence in their own fields. But it was only harmony that did so through different means, such as chord progression, step progression, and sequence of keys. The principle that Schenker developed in the mid-1920s not only linked the two dimensions as inseparable, but was also suitable as a universal principle of a fractal structure that encompassed both the vertical and the horizontal. Auskomponierung is equally effective at all levels of the musical hierarchy; every detail resembles the whole in structure, the structure is “self-similar” like that of a snowflake. “The principles of voice-leading, organically anchored, remain the same in background, middleground, and foreground,” thus the forms of the fundamental structure can generally be “transferred to individual harmonies” ([1935] 1979, 5 and 11). When Urlinie II was first introduced, the new generative principle was given different names: “unfurling” (Auswicklung) ([1921–24] 2004, I, 53; 1922b, 4), “unfolding” (Ausfaltung) ([1921–24] 2004, II, 117; 1924, 49), 23 and also Auskomponierung, the name common in Schenker scholarship. Curiously enough, in Free Composition the term Auskomponierung is not very prominent, and it is unclear whether Schenker ever considered it a technical term. In his last work, he uses various metaphors and descriptions along with it, such as “unfolding a chord horizontally” (horizontale Aufrollung) ([1935] 1979, 4; [1935] 1956, 28 and 44), “filling-in” and “horizontal fulfillment” (horizontale Erfüllung) ([1935] 1979, 8 and 14; [1935] 1956, 35 and 43), “horizontalization” (Horizontalisierung) ([1935] 1979, 44; [1935] 1956, 81), and “development” (Entwicklung) ([1935] 1979, 18; [1935] 1956, 50). Although he appears eager to define technical terms for the patterns of Auskomponierung that he called the “prolongations,” he does not designate a single term for this core principle of his theory. While the English translation of Free Composition is sometimes inadequate for investigating all these metaphors, Ernst Oster consistently used the term “composingout” where the German original has “Auskomponierung.”24 Today, when the main corpus of Schenker’s writings is available in English, there are two translations of Auskomponierung, the technical term “composing-out” and the more general term “elaboration.” These terms could be used to distinguish between the later strong harmonic implication of the word (composing-out) and the earlier lack of harmonic implication (elabo23 Schenker uses the term here in a more general sense, and not as the technical term he later developed. For a study of the term, its meanings and its history in the development of Schenker’s analytical approach, see Garrison (2012–13). I disagree with the author’s thesis that the word “Ausfaltung (‘unfolding’) was to become a technical term” in the article quoted here (113). The sentence where Schenker uses the word introduces a series of examples that illustrate what Schenker had explained in the three preceding sentences, namely “all these transformations and unfoldings.” The examples do not refer to any kind of unfolding in the technical sense. 24 E.g., Schenker ([1935] 1979, 11, 19, 20, 27); Schenker ([1935] 1956, 41, 51, 52, 59).
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ration). In his translation of the elucidation editions, John Rothgeb chooses “composing out,” although Schenker’s notion of Auskomponierung at that point did not necessarily imply harmonic aspects, so “elaboration” may have been more appropriate. The trans lators of Der Tonwille, on the other hand, opted for “elaboration,” a term that fits well to passages where Schenker describes the development of melodic details but sounds weak as soon as Auskomponierung is applied to chords (e.g., [1921–24] 2004, I, 52).
Sechter’s Legacy Dialectically speaking, Schenker’s theory united two conflicting perspectives: one focuses on the harmonic foundation of form with little attention paid to voice leading with regard to chord progression; the other understands harmonic coherence only as a chain of interconnected chords, but includes melodic elements in the description of this connection. In his Musikalische Syntaxis (1877) Hugo Riemann met Moritz Hauptmann’s demand to explain musical form from one single generating principle by founding form harmonically. The book develops “guiding aspects for the further development of musical works, . . . at least as far as harmonic structure is concerned” (Riemann 1877, 65); it thus creates a link between the theory of harmony and the theory of form. Riemann’s concept of “musical logic” is based on a dynamic model. The formation of a tonic takes place in a dialectical process in which a chord is set up as a tonal center (thesis), temporarily abandoned (antithesis), and finally regained (synthesis) (1877, 38–39). He shows that these are formed according to the same dialectical principles that regulate their concatenation. Thus, his explanation also aims at a fractal structure of the tonality. Schenker takes on the same task, but solves it with the generative principle of Auskomponierung, thus linking harmony and melody. Just as Sechter had connected both areas to explain chord progression, Schenker connected them to establish musical coherence at the level of form. To see the differences, consider that the melodic movement Sechter focuses on normally comprises just two tones, while Schenker combines any number of tones in the Auskomponierung of a harmony. Nevertheless, the two theorists are connected on the one hand by the principle of insertion, which Sechter uses to derive chromaticism, and on the other by the fact that they both refer to an abstractum, a constructive phenomenon that does not necessarily have to be audible in order to play a role. With Sechter, it is the fundamental of a chord that determines the harmonic function of the tones and their melodic options, whereas with Schenker, it is the tonal space that a harmony spans and to which all melodic movement refers.25 25 As late as 1925, Schenker still clings to the idea of a basse fondamentale when explaining the character of the treble and bass as two voices “above a conceptual lower voice, which carries the
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It is unlikely that Simon Sechter, of all people, would have remained an intellectual benchmark for Schenker over the long period of development of his theory. It would hardly have been possible for the mature Schenker to regard his teacher’s teacher as a predecessor of his theory. However, it is remarkable that he used Sechter in 1910 for comparison, as can be seen in the earlier quotation. After all, Schenker had come into contact with fundamental bass theory not only through Bruckner, but possessed his own copy of Sechter’s textbook in a complete edition.26 While Schenker was able to link into Sechter’s ideas with the concept of step progression and the idea of a fractal structure of tonality, a surprisingly long time passed before he tapped into the intertwining of voice leading and harmony, a core idea of Sechter’s theory. Schenker was unable to recognize an inner connection between the vertical and the horizontal until the early 1920s. He understood them as elements of tonality of very different quality; he regarded harmony as form and melody as corresponding content. The notions of tonal space and composing-out (forming the premise of the technical terms linear progression, unfolding, Urlinie and Ursatz) first enabled him to merge both areas. It was only then that he was able to expand the interlocking of melody and harmony, which Sechter had applied to the small dimension of chord progression, to the large dimension of entire movements. Whether or not Schenker consciously remembered Sechter in this new conception of his theory can hardly be determined, but it is also irrelevant. In either case, Schenker’s thinking was influenced by the school of fundamental bass theory, whose principles made a lasting impression on him and nurtured all the new ideas that emerged with him. Any comparison of Sechter and Schenker must certainly recognize the independent merits of the latter, and yet their common foundations and the context of their shared tradition also cannot be denied.
Works Cited Berry, David Carson. 2002. “The Role of Adele T. Katz in the Early Expansion of the New York ‘Schenker School.’” Current Musicology, no. 74 (Fall): 103–51.
_______. 2005a. “Schenkerian Theory in the United States: A Review of Its Establishment and a Survey of Current Research Topics.” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie 2, no. 2–3: 101–37. _______. 2005b. “Victor Vaughn Lytle and the Early Proselytism of Schenkerian Ideas in the U.S.” Journal of Schenkerian Studies 1 (Fall): 92–117. fundamental, or scale-degree notes” ([1925] 1994, 104); cf. on the same topic ([1921–24] 2004, I, 53): “the roots of the harmonic degrees operate in the depth of the mind” (1922). 26 Katalog Hinterberger (1936).
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_______. 2011. “Schenker’s First ‘Americanization’: George Wedge, the Institute of Musical Art, and the ‘Appreciation Racket.’” Gamut 4, no. 1: 143–230. _______. 2016. “Schenkerian Analysis and Anglo-American Music Criticism in the 1930s: A Quest for ‘Objectivity’ and a Path toward Disciplinary Music Theory.” Theory and Practice 41: 141–206. Botstein, Leon. 1997. “Music and the Critique of Culture: Arnold Schoenberg, Heinrich Schenker, and the Emergence of Modernism in Fin de Siècle Vienna.” In Constructive Dissonance: Arnold Schoenberg and the Transformations of TwentiethCentury Culture, edited by Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey, 3–22. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cohn, Richard. 1992. “The Autonomy of Motives in Schenkerian Accounts of Tonal Music.” Music Theory Spectrum 14: 150–70. Cook, Nicholas. 2007. The Schenker Project: Culture, Race, and Music Theory in Fin-desiècle Vienna. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dahlhaus, Carl. 1989. Die Musiktheorie im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. Zweiter Teil: Deutschland. Edited by Ruth E. Müller. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Duerksen, Marva. 2008. “Schenker’s Organicism Revisited.” Intégral: The Journal of Applied Musical Thought 22: 1–58. Eybl, Martin. 1995. Ideologie und Methode. Zum ideengeschichtlichen Kontext von Schenkers Musiktheorie. Tutzing: Hans Schneider. _______. 2018. “Heinrich Schenker’s Identities as a German and a Jew.” Musicologica Austriaca Online. September 21, 2018. http://musau.org/parts/neue-article-page/ view/54. Eybl, Martin, and Evelyn Fink-Mennel, eds. 2006. Schenker-Traditionen. Eine Wiener Schule der Musiktheorie und ihre internationale Verbreitung; A Viennese School of Music Theory and Its International Dissemination. Vienna: Böhlau. Garrison, Rodney. 2012–13. “Unrolling Schenker’s Ideas of Musical ‘Unfolding.’” Theory and Practice 37–38: 111–38. Gjerdingen, Robert O. 1988. A Classic Turn of Phrase: Music and the Psychology of Convention. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hauptmann, Moritz. 1853. Die Natur der Harmonik und der Metrik. Zur Theorie der Musik. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel.
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_______. (1853) 1888. The Nature of Harmony and Metre. Translated and edited by W. E. Heathcote. London: Swan Sonnenschein. Karnes, Kevin C. 2008. Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History: Shaping Modern Musical Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Katalog Hinterberger. 1936. Katalog XII. Musik und Theater enthaltend die Bibliothek des Herrn Dr. Heinrich Schenker, Wien. Vienna: Antiquariat Heinrich Hinterberger. Reprint in Eybl 1995, 161–92. Keiler, Allan. 1989. “The Origins of Schenker’s Thought: How Man is Musical.” Journal of Music Theory 33: 273–98. Koch, Heinrich Christoph. 1802. Musikalisches Lexikon. Frankfurt/Main: Hermann. Meeùs, Nicolas. 2017. “Schenker’s fließender Gesang and the Concept of Melodic Fluency.” Orfeu: Teoria e análise musical 2, no. 1: 160–70. Morgan, Robert P. 1978. “Schenker and the Theoretical Tradition. The Concept of Musical Reduction.” College Music Symposium 18: 72–96. _______. 2014. Becoming Heinrich Schenker: Music Theory and Ideology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pastille, William. 1990a. “Music and Morphology: Goethe’s Influence on Schenker’s Thought.” In Schenker Studies, edited by Hedi Siegel, 29–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. _______. 1990b. “The Development of the Ursatz in Schenker’s Published Works.” In Trends in Schenkerian Research, edited by Allen Cadwallader, 71–86. New York: Schirmer. Reicha, Anton. (1814) 1832. Vollständiges Lehrbuch der musikalischen Composition. Zweiter Band enthaltend den 4ten Theil oder die Abhandlung von der Melodie. Vienna: Diabelli. Original title Traité de mélodie. Riemann, Hugo. 1877. Musikalische Syntaxis. Grundriß einer harmonischen Satzbildungslehre. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel. Rothfarb, Lee. 2018. “Henryk Szenker, Galitzianer: The Making of a Man and a Nation.” Journal of Schenkerian Studies 11: 1–50. Rothstein, William. 1990. “The Americanization of Heinrich Schenker.” In Schenker Studies, edited by Hedi Siegel, 193–203. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schenker, Heinrich. (1906) 1954. Harmony. Translated by Elizabeth Mann Borgese. Edited and annotated by Oswald Jonas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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_______. (1910) 1987a. Counterpoint (Kontrapunkt). Vol. 1. Translated by John Rothgeb and Jürgen Thym. Edited by John Rothgeb. New York: Schirmer Books. _______. 1921. Die letzten Sonaten von Beethoven. Kritische Einführung und Erläu terung: Sonate A dur Op. 101. Vienna: Universal Edition. _______. (1921) 1972. Beethoven, Die letzten Sonaten, Sonate A dur Op. 101: Kritische Einführung und Erläuterung. Edited by Oswald Jonas. Vienna: Universal Edition. _______. (1921) 2015. Piano Sonata in A major, Op. 101. Vol. 4 of Beethoven’s Last Piano Sonatas: An Edition with Elucidation. Translated, edited and annotated by John Rothgeb. New York: Oxford University Press. _______. (1921–24) 2004–05. Der Tonwille: Pamphlets /Quarterly Publication in Witness of the Immutable Laws of Music. Translated by Ian Bent et al. Edited by William Drabkin. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. _______. 1922a. “Mozart: Sonate A-Moll (Köchel-Verzeichnis Nr. 310).” Der Tonwille 2: 7–24. _______. 1922b. “Noch ein Wort zur Urlinie.” Der Tonwille 2: 4–6. _______. 1923. “J. S. Bach: Zwölf kleine Präludien, Nr. 1.” Der Tonwille 4: 3–6. _______. 1924. “Erläuterungen.” Der Tonwille 8/9: 49–51. _______. (1926) 1996. The Masterwork in Music: A Yearbook (Das Meisterwerk in der Musik. Ein Jahrbuch). Vol. 2. Translated by Ian Bent et al. Edited by William Drabkin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. _______. 1935. Der freie Satz. Vol. 3 of Neue musikalische Theorien und Phantasien. Vienna: Universal Edition. _______. (1935) 1956. Der freie Satz. Vol. 3 of Neue musikalische Theorien und Phantasien. 2nd edition. Edited by Oswald Jonas. Wien: Universal Edition. _______. (1935) 1979. Free Composition (Der freie Satz). Translated and edited by Ernst Oster. New York: Longman. Sechter, Simon. 1853. Die Grundsätze der musikalischen Komposition. Erste Abtheilung. Die richtige Folge der Grundharmonien, oder vom Fundamentalbass und dessen Umkehrungen und Stellvertretern. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel. Snarrenberg, Robert. 1997. Schenker’s Interpretive Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Wason, Robert W. 1983. “Schenker’s Notion of Scale-Step in Historical Perspective: Non-Essential Harmonies in Viennese Fundamental Bass Theory.” Journal of Music Theory 27: 49–73. _______. (1985) 1995. Viennese Harmonic Theory from Albrechtsberger to Schenker and Schoenberg. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. Reprint Rochester: University of Rochester Press.
Weiner, Brien. 1994. “Notes from the Middleground: The Convergence of UrIdee and Urlinie in Schenker’s Erläuterungsausgabe of Beethovens’s Op. 101.” PhD diss., Yale University. Wozonig, Thomas. 2018. “Die frühe Schenker-Rezeption Hellmut Federhofers.” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie 15, no. 1: 121–58.
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3 Schenker’s “Free Forms of Interruption” and the Strict: Toward a General Theory of Interruption FR A NK SA M A ROT TO
Introducing the Problem Schenker’s concept of interruption was one of the last to be added to the central body of theory as represented in Der freie Satz.1 Since then it has come to be considered indispensable to understanding the relationship of voice-leading structure and formal design. Underlying this utility is the ability of interruption to bridge a divide inherent in Schenkerian analysis: voice leading, with its contrapuntal basis, is essentially continuous and resistant to segmentation, while form is all about segmentation, as actualized by surface articulation, repetition, cadential closure, and so on. Notwithstanding the invaluable role interruption plays in accounts of tonal structure, it fits less comfortably into the logic of hierarchy, as it seems to raise a serious contradiction. Peter H. Smith has cogently formulated this issue as a conflict between what he terms Type-1 and Type-2 derivations; his schematic presentation is reproduced in Example 3.1 (22; Smith 1994, esp. 80–85).2 To state the problem succinctly, which of the two upper-voice 3–2 belongs to the deepest level and the other contained within it; is it the later statement as in the Type-1 derivation, or the earlier as in Type-2? Comparing these two derivations we see the time-spans prolonging tonic and dominant differ, and therefore conflict, presumably unable to coexist. It would seem that the concept 1 Unterbrechung first appeared as an explicitly stated concept in 1930 in the third volume of The Masterwork in Music (Schenker [1930] 1997) and was then fully developed in Free Composition (Schenker [1935] 1979). See also Marston 2013. 2 My Examples 3.1a and b correspond to Smith’s Examples 1 and 2.
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Frank Samarotto
of interruption is incompatible with Schenkerian hierarchical models—at least as they are commonly conceived. Toward the goal of a possible solution, I propose that the apparent contradiction can be made intelligible by being placed within a spectrum of freer interruption types, possibilities explicitly advanced by Schenker but little recognized in current practice.3 In addition, this paper will argue that what Schenker called the freest form of interruption may have served as the conceptual origin of the strict sense of interruption, that free interruption is not a special case but is rather the overriding concept super ordinate to the narrowly defined interruption familiar to Schenkerian analysts. I will proceed in three stages: First, I will consider Schenker’s treatment in Free Composition, concentrating on the freest form of interruption as well as suggesting a possible origin. Second, I will propose an abstract model through which interruption in any form can be justified and a rhetorical figure that describes its expressive effect. Third, and perhaps most important, I will present readings that argue for the utility of free interruption in revealing a closer rapport between voice leading and form.
Schenker’s Freest Form of Interruption The primacy of the familiar sense of strict interruption certainly comes from its invaluable role in many important formal types. This impression may also derive from the order of presentation in Schenker’s final treatise, Free Composition (the only place where it is articulated as an explicit technique [1935, 36–40]). Free Composition is, of course, organized from background to foreground, such that we first encounter interruption at the deepest level in which it occurs, the first level of middleground, and in the form in which it is most strictly delimited (with no hint that it may take other forms). Much later in Free Composition, within the section on the foreground, Schenker notes that strict interruption may be transferred to more foreground levels (as is well-known in current practice), but Schenker is also careful to distinguish these from other sorts of divisions (Gliederungen) that “must be considered diminutions in concept” (die zum Begriff der Diminution gehören) (1935, §192, Fig. 72). Still later in the foreground section, within an extended treatment of linear progressions, we finally encounter a paragraph devoted to “the freest forms of interruption.” ([1935] 1979, §217).4 It is worth quoting in full in Oster’s translation and in the original: In addition to the interruption forms 3–2 || 3–1, 5–2 || 5–1, 8–5 || 8–1 and the freer divisions [!], as in Fig. 72, 1 and 2, and in Figs 88–90, there is a type of interruption 3 I am indebted here to Carl Schachter for introducing this concept in his teaching. 4 The title is Oster’s addition.
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that is probably the freest. Its distinguishing feature is that the setting again takes up its initial position. (1979, Fig. 91, 77, emphasis added). Außer den Unterbrechungsformen 3–2 || 3–1, 5–2 || 5–1, 8–5 || 8–1 und den f reieren Gliederungen —Fig. 72, 1, 2; 88–90 — gibt es noch eine Art von Unter brechung, die wohl als die freieste zu werten ist; sie unterscheidet sich inbesondere dadurch, daß der Kontrapunkt seine erste Aufstellung wieder aufnimmt. (1935, §217, 124, emphasis added by Jonas in the 1956 edition).
Noteworthy here is the reference to the previous discussion as “freer” interruption, given orthographic emphasis in the original, and implying a gradation within the possibilities for interruption. Pursuing my premise, I will focus on the freest form of interruption as the model for all other types. However, a perusal of Figure 91, which is reproduced as Example 3.2 (23), does not immediately reveal what these analyses have in common, nor why they are placed within larger disquisition on linear progressions. (There is no text discussion of this figure.) Some involve linear progressions: Fig. 91,1 traverses an octave progression which is “interrupted” by a return to its opening before proceeding on its course; Fig. 91, 3 is bound by a third progression again with a return to opening material, this time inserted between 3 and 2.5 The remaining examples are more equivocal—Fig. 91, 2 shows no linear progression at all—but all share the characteristics of a return to prior material and followed by continued progress to the goal. It may turn out that the simplest example, Fig. 91, 2 holds a clue to the conceptual origin of free interruption. In the Oster Collection are found two pages of largely verbal analytical notes on J. S. Bach’s two-voice Fugue in E minor, BWV 855, (from Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier); the mode of presentation indicates that these substantially predate Free Composition.6 Transcribed in Example 3.3a (24) is a bit of marginalia written sideways down the page.7 Schenker takes note of the “beautiful passing tone in the episode” indicating the motion from G# to G§ both graphically and verbally. Now these pitches are not directly consecutive: The G# is separated from the G§ by a return to the start of the sixteenth-note run.8 Nor does the G# literally persist through the prolonged A-major triad; Bach’s bass, shown in Example 3.3b (24), might incline one to regard the G# as a neighbor to A. Yet the connection Schenker makes is easily heard: A passes to G#, which, after a momentary interruption, passes through G§ to F#. This is a straightforward, even trivial observation, but its role in Schenker’s later thought is clearly significant; we have already seen that Figure 91, 2 recasts this observation as an instance of the freest form of interruption. This clarifies that “taking up the initial 5 6 7 8
Note that neither of these examples necessarily involves structural contradictions. There also exist detailed sketches of this fugue in Schenker’s later method. I am grateful to Hedi Siegel for assistance in reading Schenker’s handwriting. Schenker inadvertently writes eighth notes.
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position” means that the passage backtracks to the high E and repeats the sixteenthnote run before proceeding with the passing motion. (Note that these interrupting sixteenth-note runs are a persistent element in the episode, culminating in the striking and unusual unisono passage in bar 19.) The passing motion (not a neighbor note!) is momentarily suspended by a design repetition that interrupts but does not negate the continuity of the voice leading. Returning to Example 3.2, we see the same principle underlying Fig. 91, 4 in a more subtle way: Schenker interprets the two parallel statements as amounting to a single third progression prefixed by a neighbor note, such that the third progression that prolongs the tonic is interrupted by a return to the initial dominant seventh— albeit with an altered upper voice.9 In other words, Schenker explicitly shows that the two stages map onto each other and are to be understood as a single entity. Schenker is not just summarizing the latter part of the second half of the phrase; he means that all of it sums to the given reduction. Equally important is the formal design that causes the split into two stages. (All of these remarks apply equally to Fig. 91, 3.) Figure 91, 5 provides a more accessible example from Brahms’s Intermezzo, Op. 76, No. 7; this single phrase serves as an outer frame to the work’s main body. It is not hard to perceive an interrupted design for the phrase; the opening idea halts, hesitates, and restarts before proceeding to a reluctant conclusion. However, this time it is not the top line that is interrupted; despite the repetition of the opening descending fourth, the upper voice composes out an undivided fifth-progression indicated by the careted numerals in Schenker’s example.10 Rather than the top voice, it is the harmonic progression that is interrupted. This is evident in the Stufengang Schenker provides: I–(=III)–II–V–I, and is even more salient in Brahms’s bass line, which steps up A–B–C, pausing to prolong C major (hence Schenker’s “=III”), and restarting the phrase so that both bass and upper voice reach their expected conclusion. (One might note that the bit of hesitation in the final descent of the top line continues the interrupted quality.11) This example, as well others to be reviewed presently, suggests that the principle of free interruption can be extended beyond linear motion to include interrupted harmonic progressions, especially if one can infer a normative Stufengang taken in two (or more) stages. The fact that this example occurs within the section on linear progressions makes its presence that much more significant. 9 The upper voice in bar 18, 3rd beat through bar 20 is transferred into the tenor voice in the manner of double counterpoint, reinforcing the sense of parallel repetition. 10 I take the parentheses around these numerals to suggest that the progress of the upper voice is not the central point of the example. Compare the lack of parentheses in Fig. 91, 1 and 3. 11 The interrupted gestures of this framing passage take on structural weight when the phrase recurs to close the piece as they follow a rather weakly inconclusive cadence in mm. 36–37bis.
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Analyses found elsewhere in Free Composition may bolster the idea of freely interrupted harmonic progressions. Example 3.4a (24) reproduces Schenker’s Fig. 131, illustrating the use of third dividers. In the analysis of Chopin’s Op. 10, No. 5, the third divider III§ is not merely prolonging the initial tonic. Schenker’s slurs, both above and below the bass, imply a continuous harmonic progression I–III§ –V, with the intervening return to I interpreted as a reset to the initial position.12 (This not unlike the Brahms example above.) The meaning of the two vertical lines, usually used to mark strict interruption, is not clear, but may be suggestive of the interruption in a general sense. A similarly non-standard use of vertical lines is shown in Example 3.4b (24; Fig. 40, 7); the top-voice arpeggiation is twice interrupted—but as a free interruption, in spite of the vertical lines—and the harmonic interpretation suggests that the whole passage is to be understood as a single Stufengang I–IV–V–I. Another harmonic interruption, not identified as such, is shown in Fig. 152, 3; see Example 3.4c (25). Ostensibly because of its parallel design, Schenker reads the second reprise as a single II–V–I progression; in spite of two apparent resolutions to tonic (three in the score). It is not that the II Stufe is prolonged through those tonics, but rather the parallel passages map onto a single hypothetical statement. It is, on some level, the same thing happening again.
Toward a Generalized Theory In the examples examined thus far there is a unifying thread: the inference of a complete tonal unit that is interrupted by a repetition of the design. The claim here is that what Schenker calls “the freest form of interruption” is the source of the interruption concept in general and that it originated in observations of the sort found in Example 3.3. As already mentioned, this broadly generalized view of interruption is obscured by its late appearance in Free Composition, but in this, his final work, it is often the ideas Schenker arrived at last are presented first, and vice versa. At some point Schenker added another increment that links strict interruption to its freest form. This is the possibility that a linear progression might not simply be interrupted and restarted, but that it might be interrupted, return to some earlier point other than its beginning, and continue to conclusion. This is exemplified in Figure 72, 2 and 3, shown in Example 3.5a (25), where fifth-progressions undergo division. (Figure 72, 1 is similarly subdivided, but also shows a strict interruption.) The schematic Figure 72, 2 is particularly noteworthy in that it might seem more straightforward to read the initial G as prolonged by an entirely subordinate third-progression, not at all at 12 I am grateful to Carl Schachter for suggesting this interpretation. Compare this with the similar reading in Schenker ([1925] 1994, 90).
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the same level as the overarching fifth-progression. This does not seem to be what this figure illustrates; in the very similar Figure 87,5, given in Example 3.5b (26), Schenker takes pains to emphasize that the two partial statements of the descending fourth are branches of equal standing. As he states, “the counterpoint emphasizes the parallelism of the subordinate linear progression. The parallelism subdivides the fourthprogression, but does not represent an interruption in the strict sense.” ([1935], 1979, 76).13 Indeed, the section on linear progressions includes many instances where unified lines a fourth or larger are subdivided through partial motions that backtrack and complete themselves. As noted, Schenker calls these “divisions” (Gliederungen), though he refers to them side-by-side with Unterbrechungen.14 One of the most elaborate of these is found in the massive essay on Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony; the excerpt reproduced in Example 3.5c (26) shows a highly elaborated fifth-progression with equally elaborated subdivisions: 5–4; 5–4; 3–2; 3–2–1. (1930, Figure 6).15 Schenker even labels these “tone-pairs”; both are repeated and the latter pair greatly expanded. In this context there is no question that he regards this as a unified fifth-progression. The final steps in this conceptual development result in what Schenker calls interruption “in the strict sense.” The notion that a linear progression may be interrupted and return to its beginning to make a complete presentation corresponds well with period construction; indeed, Schenker describes this sort of interruption in these types of phrases well before he explicitly invokes the term.16 Since these phrases typically begin on the tonic, they will usually compose out third- or fifth-progressions departing from 3 or 5, respectively. The first branch of the interruption can stop at its most “dissonant” point if it is temporarily stabilized by a dividing dominant (Teiler).17 That 13 The original reads as follows: “…der Kontrapunkt unterstreicht den Parallelismus beider Teilzüge, und damit ist der Gliederung des Quartzuges gegeben, die aber von der Unterbrechung verschieden ist.” (1935, 123). 14 A related use of divisions (Gliederungen) occurs when an Urlinie from 8 is divided at 5, a usage Schenker classes with strict interruption. At this more foreground level one finds examples of fifth progression from 5 that are subdivided at 3 (see Fig. 72, 3 in my Example 3.5a as well as Figure 88, 3 in Schenker 1935). This latter possibility is examined in Baker (2010, 1–24). 15 I am grateful to Michael Baker for pointing out this example to me. 16 Graphic indications of strict interruption appear as early as the last issue of Tonwille (1924) in the essays on Schubert’s Impromptu, Op. 90, No. 3, and Mendelssohn’s Song without Words, Op. 67, No. 6 (Schenker, 1921–24, Vol. II, 137–42, 150–53 respectively); in Masterwork I, Chopin, Etude, Op. 10, No. 5 (Schenker [1925] 1994, 90–98); Chopin, Nocturne, Masterwork II, Op. 15, No. 2 (Schenker [1926] 1996, 19–22). All of these analyses identify 3 as the main melodic tone. I believe this to be the catalyzing element in the development of strict interruption, in that 5 can be maintained as the prolonged upper voice over a motion to a structural dominant, while 3 cannot. 17 See Cadwallader 2016.
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stabilizing triad allows this sort of interruption to be composed out on the larger scales—but only in this form: interruption “in the strictest sense.”18 All of these forms of interruption or division bring together two groups of characteristics: 1. A syntactically complete and directed tonal unit is broken into two statements or branches, the first of which is incomplete in some way, the second of which supplies either the complete statement or whatever is needed for its completion; everything within this tonal unit is construed as passing no matter where it is interrupted or divided. 2. There is some sort of design repetition that involves a return to some earlier point, frequently, but not necessarily, the beginning. The return may be a literal repetition, or it may recall a voice-leading element, a linear progression, a bass motion, etc. I will now suggest two underlying principles that may provide a foundation for these phenomena; the first is abstract and hypothetical, the second involves rhetoric in actual use. For the former, see Example 3.6a (27), which uses the familiar strict interruption to demonstrate the concept. The top rank displays a single unified entity; this must be assumed for any interruption or division to take place. The second rank introduces the technique of bifurcation,19 a duplication that results in two (or conceivably more) structurally equivalent branches, meaning that both represent the original statement. At this point any element of the branches can be deleted, the missing element being supplied by the other branch. Clearly the form given is the most common and useful possibility, though I believe others are possible. This hypothetical model allows for a wide variety of interruptions, far beyond the strict, to be structurally justified. This does not, however, account for their rhetorical effect. In figurative speech there is recognized a device known as zeugma, literally, “a yoking together,” in which one part of speech, often the verb, governs two separate clauses, with one instance suppressed in apparent grammatical violation (Burton 2020). Thus, one might say, “The C goes to D, and the D to E”; omitting the second verb makes the sentence seem more connected and fluent. A more complex example: “As Virgil guided Dante through Inferno, the Sybil Aeneas Avernus,”20 which surely has a more elevated affect than the plodding “As Virgil guided Dante through Inferno, the Sybil guided Aeneas through 18 Prior to his explicit recognition of strict interruption Schenker would frequently identify the first branch of interrupted fifth progressions as fourth-progressions; see Schenker ([1926] 1996, “Further Consideration of the Urlinie: II,” Fig. 1, p. 1.) I believe these would be better understood as interrupted fifth-progressions. (Again, this misleading possibility does not arise in the case of a third-progression—there is no possible “second progression”; cf. fn. 16.) 19 A term first used in Komar (1971, 62 and 66–7). Instances of bifurcation can be inferred in Schenker’s analytical writings; see, for instance Schenker ([1921] 2015, Fig. 38-1, 69). 20 Cited in Burton 2020.
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Avernus.” The intelligibility of zeugmatic statements speaks for the analogous comprehensibility of interruption, which also creates structurally dependent phrases that are “yoked” together, with a comparable rhetorical effect. To sample how this might work, Example 3.6b (27) imagines some types of zeugma applied to a descending fifth-progression; only the first exhibits strict interruption, but all contain the necessary components of a fifth-progression distributed in various ways.21 Clearly the forgoing explanations are more intuitive at the smaller scales typical of free and freest interruptions. It is beyond the scope of this study to fully examine the implications of this generalized concept of interruption for form at the largest of scales. I believe, however, that free interruption (as I will now refer to it) may play a role greater than occasional and fleeting foreground appearances, perhaps quite frequently.
Analytical Applications This final section has the purpose of suggesting some possible situations in which free interruption might be fruitfully invoked. This is in no way meant to be exhaustive; the techniques I adduce here are likely only a small sample of the forms free interruption might take, not to mention the music to which it might be applied. It is not uncommon to find parallel phrases whose tonal content suggests that they be mapped together into a single progression. The familiar Example 3.7a (28) can be compared to Schenker’s Figure 91, 3 (shown in Example 3.2) and to the third example of prozeugma in Example 3.6b. Examples 3.7b (28) and 3.7c (29) divide a chromatic step between two parallel phrases, recalling Schenker’s seminal observation repro duced in Example 3.3. Examples 3.7d (29) and 3.7e (30) involve harmonic motions, the first diatonic, the second chromatic, that each return to their starting harmony before continuing their progression; compare Fig. 91, 5 (see Example 3.2). 1. The Free Interruption 5–4 ( ) \\ 5–4–3–2–1 We have seen that Schenker admits the possibility of interrupting a fifth-progression at 4. However much this technique seems quite unlike strict interruption at 2, both share a fundamental characteristic: neither is a neighbor note returning to 5 or 3, both are passing tones within their larger entities. To paraphrase Schenker, “the first 2 [read “4”] remains true to the principle of the passing tone within the space of a third [read “fifth”]; it never takes on the character of a lower neighboring note.22 (1979, 37, 21 To distinguish from strict interruption, I indicate free interruption with slanted lines. 22 “The first 2 is not a neighboring note” (Oster’s title).
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§91). To invoke a freely interrupted fifth-progression, 4 must be heard as conceptually passing rather than simply neighboring, nor merely passing to an inner-voice 3, but instead as part of a larger span of a fifth. In Example 3.8a (30) a striking musical gesture enacts a free interruption: a precipitous leap to 4 initiates a descending fifth that is abruptly cut off by a return to bar 2 (suggesting a metrical reinterpretation); the fifth-progression is completed but not through a reset to the initial 5, but instead stepping back to 4; thus 5–4–3–2 \\ 4–3–2–1. In Example 3.8b (31) the percussive repetitions of 4 in bars 9–16 argue that this seventh above V is too forcefully stated to merely disappear into an inner voice (the default explanation). The sketch proposes a free interruption 5–4 \\ 4–3–2–1 that binds together this rondo theme.23 The familiarity of the Scherzo from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony belies the strangeness and originality of its construction, most notably the weirdly foreign turn to B! minor (after a feint toward E! minor), made all the more contingent and accidental by its omission in the re-orchestrated return of the Scherzo (upbeat to bars 236ff.). Example 3.8c (32) proposes that the anomalous minor VII supports an initial attempt to lead 4 through a descending fifth-progression; this VII unfolds into a dominant seventh as its upper third (note how the D! becomes a C# appoggiatura).24 Again I argue that 4 should not be assumed to resolve into an inner voice 3;25 the forceful reassertion of 5 (bar 67, anticipating the tonic return), together with the “corrected” repetition, of the opening material, seems to me to speak the rhetoric of interruption, in keeping with the movement’s characteristic stops and starts. I say “corrected” because the remainder of the Scherzo proceeds unremarkably through a subdominant tonicization (replacing the startling minor III), culminating in a straightforward descent from 5 to 1 (bar 132; a summarizing restatement of the cadence follows in bars 133–140). 2. The Free Interruption I–III \\ I–III (I6)–IV (II6) –V–I The following group of examples investigates the possibility of free interruption based on a hypothetically complete harmonic progression, specifically, the case of interruption at III, already noted in Schenker’s Figure 91, 5 (See Example 3.2). This is a 23 In both these examples the interruptive gesture is developed later in the movement; in K. 279, II, see bars 46–47; in Op. 14, No. 2, III, see bars 165–85. 24 Compare Schenker’s reading in Tonwille 6 ([1923] 2005, 8–18), which gives more weight to an implied bass 6 than I believe is warranted. 25 As Schenker himself does; the essay cited above offers a somewhat convoluted reaching-over scheme. Compare Schenker ([1935] 1979, Fig. 41, 1).
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particularly effective possibility because an upward bass motion leading from I to III (in whatever form) already implies a continuation in the same direction leading to V. The linear thrust of the bass line allows a variety of harmonies that could satisfactorily complete the progression.26 The sense of upward striving in the bass is well-suited to the affect of Mignon’s longing as expressed in the first of Beethoven’s four settings of the familiar Sehnsucht text (WoO 134, No. 1). The upper voice twice rises to 5; the second time it achieves a tonicization of III—but only weakly, with its dominant seventh taking the strong beat and the III abruptly cut off (see score bars 1–7 and Example 3.9a [33]).27 The design resets directly to the opening music—leaving III unaccounted for—and this time the bass is rewritten to ascend 3–4–5 to cadence on tonic (bars 8–11). I understand this bass ascent to complete the harmonic progression left hanging in bar 7, as shown in Example 3.9a; note that I6 takes the place of III in order to proceed from the harmony of bar 9.28 This reading asserts that the III in bar 7 is not simply subsumed within a prolongation of tonic; rather it is a harmony seeking completion in a fuller harmonic progression; the rising bass of bar 10 supplies that completion.29 Free interruption of a harmonic progression may be inferred at larger scales as well. Chopin’s Etude Op. 10 No. 1 is, on the face of it, laid out in a clearly delineated three-part form, a C-major frame surrounding a harmonically mobile middle section in A minor.30 In A minor, but perhaps not prolonging an A Stufe.31 The B section neither begins nor ends with a literal A-minor triad. Instead the focal goal would seem to be its dominant, an E-major harmony, approached by its own leading tone in bars 22–23 and 46–47.32 This goal is foreshadowed in the A section, in the accented D# in bar 8 and the expressively dissonant A! in bar 7, recalled later as G#, the third of the E-major triad. The most emphatic assertion of the E-major is marked by the only 26 Free interruptions could occur on other harmonies, see Example 3.12a, Part I (39) for a foreground interruption on II 65 . Note that it would also be possible to have a harmonic interruption at V w ithout a melodic interruption on 2, arguably a frequent occurrence. 27 The abruptness is exacerbated by the sudden acceleration of harmonic rhythm, from one harmony per measure in bars 5–6 to two harmonies in bar 7, resulting in a three-bar group framed by fourbar groups. 28 The connection between these branches is strengthened by the motivic repetition of E!–D in bar 7 as D–E! in bar 10. 29 Another possibility would be to read bars 8–9 as parenthetical between III and I6; I find this unsatisfactory because bars 8–9 exactly restate 1–2, with its clear assertion of tonic harmony. 30 Ostensibly the A section includes bars 1–16, the B section bars 17–48, the final A section bars 49–69, and the coda bars 70–79. 31 As Schenker reads it; See Schenker ([1935] 1979, Figures 130, 4b and 153, 2 and commentary in §279, 113). 32 Schenker makes an emphatic point that this E major is a dividing dominant prolonging the overarching A-minor Stufe.
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moments of respite from continuous arpeggios, the last beats of bars 45 and 46; this arrival effectively concludes the B section, clinching III# as the goal.33 Example 3.9b (34) provides a middleground view of this reading. It is a conclusion but not a resolution. As a III# harmony, our goal chord could simply be absorbed back into the tonic C major as a prolonging upper third. How ever, the varied return of the A section suggests a deeper connection. Bar 63 begins a significant diversion that leads, like the B section, to an augmented sixth resolving to III# – again D# to E! This time III# is followed by II7–V7–I, a persuasive harmonic continuation. The interrupted motion I– III#3, in the A and B sections, finds its recollection and completion in the final A section.34 (See again Example 3.9b.) A similar situation could be inferred in Mendelssohn’s Song without Words, Op. 53, No. 4, that of free interruption binding formal boundaries. An A–B!–A neighbor note unobtrusive in the opening accompaniment abruptly demands attention as a ninth above a dominant of D minor, asserting a middle section highly contrasting in affect (bars 10–17). And not just in affect: the harmony is fixated on A as an activated dominant—of D minor, a goal never realized.35 Instead, the bass now wanders oddly away from A to come to rest on E; this bass E reveals itself as supporting a 64 of A, arguing for III, as both dominant seventh and triad, as the prolonged Stufe of this middle section. Even more than our previous example, this prolonged III seems to be left hanging, emerging from the opening but not syntactically connected to its return.36 Unsatisfied with that situation, the middle section returns as forcefully as before, threatening to upend the restatement of the lyric landscape that could reasonably round off this ternary form.37 This time resolution is found: The bass pedal on A gives way to a B§, supporting a diminished seventh that leads succinctly to V, ushering in the cadential tag that closed the lyrical section. The tranquillo marking signals that new sense of resolution has been infused into this cadence. Example 3.9c (35) proposes a free harmonic interruption analogous to the prior example; in this case the coda supplies the second branch of the interruption. Again, the move to III is understood as pointing forward to a possible completion, allowing a rapport between voice-leading structure and special aspects of design.
33 I take the V 43 on the last quarter note of bar 48 to be a fleeting connective between sections; compare Schenker’s quite different reading cited in the previous footnote. 34 As I interpret this piece, another special treatment of the form is that the coda contains the structural descent, in contrast to its usual function. 35 Literal D-minor chords appear but none of them seem to me to have the stability of tonic arrivals. 36 The brief connective V 65 in bar 17 appears more fortuitous than logically derived. 37 That is, bars 17–25 are a slightly more restless restatement of bars 1–9.
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3. Reprise as Sign of Free Interruption These examples explore the possibility that free interruption may be profitably invoked in situations where there is a reprise of prior material, raising the possibility of strict interruption, but where strict interruption does not seem to be viable. Harmonic interruption, among other free interruptions, may supply another way of coordinating tonal structure with formal outlines. Handel’s little Gigue (from the Suite in D minor, HWV 437) provides a simple example: The first pair of bars rhyme with the last pair, the former modulating to III, the latter closing on tonic. This standard scheme might lead, after the double bar, to a structural dominant. A cadence in minor V is in fact achieved (bar 7), but a sequence quickly steps back down to the relative major. I take this III to be a continued prolongation of the III of bars 3–5 (a considerable portion of the piece), in sum a motion simply from I to III. The final two bars reprise the opening, a return to an initial tonic, and carry the harmonic progression to its completion, thus: I–III \\ I—I6 –IV–V–I (I6 replacing III). Example 3.10a (36) summarizes the middleground. A similar structure can be discerned in Bach’s two-part Invention in D minor, BWV 775. As before a modulation to III proceeds to cadence in V, a cadence abruptly revoked by sequential steps back to F major. Bars 41–43 execute an unexpected formal turn: the solid bass of bar 41 seems to affirm F major, but that is immediately dissolved by elements of D minor, and, fortuitously, a reprise of opening material re-assembles itself, coming to fruition in bar 44. The prolonged III does not so much resolve to tonic as it is replaced by it. Example 3.10b (36) hypothesizes two branches that zeugmatically merge into the progression I–III–V–I. Conceiving the whole piece as a free interruption captures the gestural design more cogently than a standard reading. The third example in this group extends this sort of thinking to the familiar Cminor Fugue from the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier. The design repetition here involves not the opening but rather the episode in bars 9, beat 3 to 11, beat 3, which is restated—unusually simply—in bars 22–24. The first episode leads to the subject in III, but quite deceptively: the episode dovetails the subject so it is recognized only retrospectively, in middle of bar 11. The later episode takes us back but now with a different outcome. Before, a fleeting D! signals the turn to III (bar 11); now, the figuration hews to C minor, and, most significantly, G is suspended over the bass A! (bar 24), impelling the cycle of fifths forcefully to V, what I take to be the structural dominant of the work. Thus, the first episode moves I toward III as a temporary goal; the second episode pushes past III to a structural arrival on V. Example 3.10c (37) highlights the two branches that are yoked together shaping this continuous texture into a bipartite gesture.38 38 Compare Schenker’s analysis, which employs a somewhat earlier sense of the Urlinie to divide the fugue into two parts, albeit at bar 20 rather than bar 22. In Schenker ([1926] 1996, 31–54,
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4. Free Interruption as Substitute for Half Cadence Strict interruption provides an elegant explanation for the half cadence, in which the pause on V does not resolve cadentially to the immediately following tonic but rather awaits completion in a V-I cadence attained later. Though clearly ubiquitous, the standard half cadence may not be the only way of realizing interrupted phrase rhetoric. My final two examples explore this possibility. Example 3.11 (38) considers the middle section of Brahms’s Op. 117. No. 3; it is self-contained in A major, VI of the global key. (Bar numbers apply to this section only.) The phrase rhythm is reassuring regular—once the premise of five-bar groups has been established.39 Thus, the outer form is easily perceived, but its inner contents are more enigmatic.40 Bars 4–5 dwell languidly on a diminished-seventh harmony, ostensibly intending to resolve to tonic as a common-tone diminished seventh. However, its placement at phrase ending, analogous to a half cadence, negates the possibility of that resolution. The diminished seventh is left hanging, freely interrupted. Hearing the notated C§ as B# captures this possibility, a raised 2 that hovers ambivalently between descent as passing tone or ascent as a lower neighbor. A fall will eventuate, but through deft harmonic evasion this is delayed until the very end of this section. Example 3.11 shows how 3 is subtly sustained, first through the interrupted B# in the first phrase, then through a neighbor note at the end of the second phrase (to tonicize the dominant); it persists by alternating with B# through the digression section (implying but not stating F#minor) such that it is sustained into the return of the opening material (overlapping harmonically with this return by suspending it over the dominant in bars 21–22).41 At last the final two bars allow linear resolution, albeit nestled within cover tones; the foreground details in Example 3.11 supply context for this complex texture. My final example is the third movement, Poco Allegretto, of Brahms’s Third Symphony. It exhibits interruption on many levels, including, I will argue, the entire movement, fusing the Intermezzo with its Trio. The halting first phrase pauses twice on a II 65 before allowing the progression to continue; Example 3.12a (39) interprets this as a small-scale harmonic interruption. Interruption rhetoric also inheres in the phrase’s expansion: bars 9–12 backtrack to repeat the IV–V progression. This interruption at the twelve-bar level is completed by a consequent, a standard strict interruption. especially Fig. 1, 32). 39 The first five-bar phrase derives from a hypothetical four by elongating the harmony in bar 4 to bars 4–5. 40 A formal reading might go as follows: antecedent and modulating consequent (5+5); two-phrase digression (5+5) reprise of opening period concluding on tonic (5+5). 41 Note that this reading takes the 64 chord in bar 21 to be transitory, on its way to the interrupting diminished seventh in bars 24–25, itself overlapping with the arrival of the tonic pedal in bar 23.
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The trajectory of the contrasting B section, which is much less standard, comes to rest on an E major chord, functioning as V of an absent A minor, and distantly related to the home key of C minor. The transition back to opening tonic is curiously openended: somewhat lost, a diminished seventh seeks to define itself—searching out the opening C–D–E! motive, suggesting F# as a root—and a quick shift to an augmented sixth makes a tenuous syntactic connection to a resumption of C minor.42 (See Example 3.12a and bars 37–41.) The Intermezzo’s main cadence leads abruptly into the Trio—the cadence is almost cut off (bar 52). The Trio seems to fluctuate between A! minor and major; the curious notation, B§ rather than C!, recalls the E-major goal of the Intermezzo, a connection made cogent by the transition back to the Intermezzo (bars 91–98; see Example 3.12b [40]) that more elaborately recreates the transition in bars (37–41). Thus, the entire Trio, which never actually cadences in A!, is left open, awaiting resolution. A deeper relationship among sections may be proposed. Example 3.12c (41) summarizes the free interruptions structuring the overall shape of the movement; these are located the open-ended harmonic motions to III# and to VI, as well as the inner voice alternation between C and B§. The salience of these motions as harmonic interruptions is foregrounded only at the very end: Again the cadence of the Intermezzo is cut off and a coda ensues. As seen in Example 3.12d (41) the coda recalls these unresolved harmonies and incorporates them into a more persuasive progression, at last supplying an element of closure to the movement’s restless Sehnsucht.
Tentative Conclusions With these analyses, I have tried to argue for the advantages of expanding the concept of interruption to include freer interruptions, while still retaining the core concept of interruption. I intend these to be only a few of the possibilities for free interruption, both as linear and harmonic interruptions. Indeed, I would venture to suggest that design and voice-leading interruptions are ubiquitous in tonal music, and that there may be significant advantages to recognizing them in structural analysis, bringing inner and outer form into closer alignment. As I have shown, this proposed expansion of Schenkerian techniques is not with out basis: Schenker explicitly discusses it in Free Composition, the definitive statement of his theory. As well, I have shown that some early notes about Bach’s E-minor Fugue are the spark that links an intuitive observation about an interrupted passing tone to 42 This harmony of bars 37–40 could be termed a common-tone diminished seventh/augmented sixth; the first movement of this symphony provides many examples of the former usage. In the present case the resumption of the opening material argues against a cadential resolution into bar 41.
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an explicit classification of the passage as a free interruption. I would go so far as to assert that Schenker could not have explicitly articulated a concept of strict interruption without some prior recognition of free interruption. I went further to propose a mechanism that can inform a general theory of interruption. This shows that the forms of strict interruption, as well as free interruption, are essentially the same phenomenon, and that the underlying rhetorical figure of zeugma is as intelligible in music as it is in language. Analytical demonstration seems to support this. That said, it will be noted that if the argument here is stipulated, that is, the generalized concept of interruption is taken as valid, then the problem of hierarchical contradiction with which this paper began is deflected but not entirely resolved. Implicit in the branching divisions of interruption is a hierarchical overlap—one that must be confronted directly, and, perhaps, eventually embraced. This is a task clearly beyond the scope of this chapter, but I believe it should be undertaken.43 Schenkerian theory must evolve, but with careful foundation and analysis responsive to musical expression.
Works Cited Arndt, Matthew. 2012. “Interruption and the Problem of Unity and Repetition.” Journal of Schenkerian Studies 6: 1–31. Baker, Michael. 2010. “A Case for Interruption at Scale Degree 3.” Theory and Practice 35: 1–24. Burton, Gideon O. 2020. “Zeugma.” Silva Rhetoricae. Accessed January 12, 2020. http://rhetoric.byu.edu/Figures/Z/zeugma.htm. Cadwallader, Allen and David Gagné. 2016. “The Evolution of the Quintteiler Concept in Schenker’s Published Writings.” Music Theory Spectrum 38, no. 1: 109–17. Komar, Arthur. 1971. Theory of Suspensions: A Study of Metrical and Pitch Relations in Tonal Music. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Marston, Nicholas. 2013. “The Development of Schenker’s Concept of Interruption.” Music Analysis 32, no. 3: 332–62 Schenker, Heinrich. (1921–24) 2004–05. Der Tonwille: Pamphlets /Quarterly Publication in W itness of the Immutable Laws of Music. Translated by Ian Bent et al. Edited by William Drabkin. 2 vols. (1–5, 6–10). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
43 Compare Arndt 2012.
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_______. (1921) 2015. Piano Sonata in A major, Op. 101. Vol. 4 of Beethoven’s Last P iano Sonatas: An Edition with Elucidation. Translated, edited and annotated by John Rothgeb. New York: Oxford University Press.
_______. (1925) 1994. The Masterwork in Music: A Yearbook (Das Meisterwerk in der Musik. Ein Jahrbuch). Vol. 1. Translated by Ian Bent et al. Edited by William Drabkin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. _______. (1926) 1996. The Masterwork in Music: A Yearbook (Das Meisterwerk in der Musik. Ein Jahrbuch). Vol. 2. Translated by Ian Bent et al. Edited by William Drabkin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
_______. (1930) 1997. The Masterwork in Music: A Yearbook (Das Meisterwerk in der Musik. Ein Jahrbuch). Vol. 3. Translated by Ian Bent et al. Edited by William Drabkin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. _______. (1935) 1979. Free Composition (Der freie Satz). Edited and translated by Ernst Oster. New York: Longman.
Smith, Peter H. 1994. “Brahms and Schenker: A Mutual Response to Sonata Form.” Music Theory Spectrum 16, no. 1: 77–103.
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4 The “ heilige Trapezoid” and the Galant Recapitulation L. POU NDIE BUR STEIN
The Sacred Triangle The notion that a trajectory from tonic to dominant and back can serve as a crucial governing force in music is fundamental to Schenkerian theory and analysis. Heinrich Schenker waxed ecstatic about the resulting tonal structure, which he described as das heilige Dreieck, the “sacred triangle”: All musical content arises from the confrontation and adjustment of the indivisible fundamental line with the two-part bass arpeggiation. The paths to prolongation, and ultimately to form, open here. May the musician always carry in his heart the image of the bass arpeggiation (Fig. 7 [shown here as Example 4.1, 44])! Let this triangle be sacred to him! Creating, interpreting—may he always bear it in ear and eye! (Schenker ([1979] 1935, [15] 37)
This underlying I–V–I layout often is referred to as a “polar” framework, in which tonic and dominant harmonies establish an overarching dialectic that subsumes all other harmonies within their purview. In support of the claim that it serves as a basis for tonal music, Schenker appeals to scientific criteria by citing the sacred triangle’s origins in the overtone series. Schenker also puts forth spiritual rationales for the sacred triangle, noting how it derives from artistic instinct. Yet one could invoke similar justifications for other tonal layouts, ones that Schenker did not mention, including those that suggest different geometric underpinnings. These alternate layouts include those that involve motions from the tonic to the mediant and submediant and back, or from the tonic to the dominant and then the submediant and back, and other such
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layouts (Example 4.2, 44). Much like the sacred triangle, each of these alternate layouts—many of which are shaped in a manner reminiscent of trapezoids or other types of non-triangular figures—could be shown to arise from a manipulation of the overtone series, and they each could likewise be inspired by artistic intuition.1 With these alternative structures, which are often referred to as “solar” tonal frameworks, the non-tonic Stufen are set in opposition to the governing tonic without necessarily being subordinated to an underlying dominant–tonic axis.2 The sense of resolution embodied by a solar framework admittedly tends to be less sharp than within a polar framework. For instance, a VI–I motion, such as seen at the ends of the first two solar frameworks depicted in Example 4.2, usually provides a more subdued impression of tonal arrival than does the V–I motion at the end of the polar layout depicted in Example 4.1. Nevertheless, a solar framework can provide a noticeable sense of tension and resolution, especially if the return to tonic at its conclusion is delineated by features of design, such as being accompanied by a strongly marked return of the main theme. To be sure, it may be argued that musical practice favors the sacred triangle hailed by Schenker. For instance, an underlying I–V–I background structure seems epitomized by the major-key sonata-form layout typical of the high Classical era. In such a layout, a powerfully stated dominant chord at the end of the retransition to the recapitulation often can be effectively characterized as marking the conclusion of a prolongation that spans the entire development. This lengthily prolonged dominant in turn seems to drive in a commanding manner to the double return of the main theme and key that appears at the onset of the recapitulation. With this standard strategy, the three large parts of the form—the exposition, development, and recapitulation— strongly demarcate the three tonal junctures of the sacred triangle. Since the tonal system by its very nature seems to highlight dominant-to-tonic motions, sonata-form movements may seem to assert such a dominant–tonic framework even when another Stufe is strongly emphasized within the middle of the development. For instance, consider a movement in which a powerful cadence to the key of the submediant in mid-development is followed by a relatively brief statement of the dominant, as depicted in Example 4.3 (44–45). Despite the strong modulation to VI, many such movements nonetheless may be fairly analyzed in relation to a large I–V–I structure, in the manner shown in Example 4.3a (44). This is especially so if the dominant at the end of development is underscored through other features of the music, such as orchestration or texture. 1 A compelling exploration of this matter may be found in the discussion of “geometries of tonal space” in Clark (2011). 2 The concept of solar vs. polar tonality is explored in Ratner (1980, 48–51); see also Rothstein (1989, 112; and 2001, 213) .
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But what of situations in which the dominant at the end of the development not only is extremely brief but also is underplayed by other features of the music? For instance, what if a robust cadence in VI is followed by a retransition in which a very short statement of the dominant appears in the middle of a sequence, or in inversion? At what point does a solar analysis along the lines of either Example 4.3b (44) or Example 4.3c (45) seem a more viable option for such a scenario?3
Developments that Conclude on Non-Dominants Or, for that matter, how should one interpret the large structure of a movement in which a dominant at the end of a development is entirely absent? This is hardly a hypothetical question. In the music of Galant era—the style that flourished from around 1720 through 1780—it was practically clichéd for a cadence or other strong arrival on a submediant or mediant harmony to directly precede the recapitulation, with no intervening V, as in the excepts shown in Example 4.4 (45–46). This commonplace strategy of preceding a reprise immediately with a non-dominant harmony was cited—either explicitly or via example—by a number of eighteenthcentury theorists.4 Example 4.5 (46) presents two such instances from examples by Joseph Riepel. In each of these, a cadence on either III or VI is immediately followed by a reprise of the main theme in the tonic key. Riepel noted that it was typical for a retransition to lead from a cadence in a non-tonic key to the reprise in the home key. However, he did not insist that the retransition conclude with a home-key dominant. On the contrary, some of Riepel’s examples show retransitions that end on the tonic, rather than on V (Example 4.6a, 47). Similar examples are not uncommon in music from the Galant era; for instance, see the excerpt by Haydn cited in Example 4.6b (47), whose tonal structure matches that of Riepel’s example cited in Example 4.6a.5 In addition to examples of Galant recapitulations immediately preceded by III, VI, or V of VI (=III#), all of which are very common, there are also occasional instances where the recapitulation is directly preceded by other harmonies, such as II or IV. Sometimes these non-dominant harmonies are demarcated by a cadence; other times they appear at the end of a retransition. Granted, there are also numerous Galant 3 Stoia (2018) considered various analyses along the lines of Ex. 3b, providing theoretical and aesthetic justification for such readings; see also Burstein (2011, 24–28). 4 See discussions and/or examples in Riepel (1755, 92 and 97–99); Marpurg (1756, Tab. XV); Koch ([1793, 309] 1983, 200); Galeazzi (1796, 253–60), and Daube (1797, Vol. 1, 46). Riepel and Koch both remark that retransitions leading back to the home key could be helpful, but nonetheless they clearly regard such retransitions as optional—see discussion regarding Example 4.6. 5 See also discussion regarding retransitions in Budday (1983, 164–67).
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works in which the retransition concludes with a sturdy arrival on the home-key dominant, much as would become stereotypical of pieces composed during the high Classical era. Yet the appearance of a dominant at the end of a development was by no means a foregone conclusion in Galant compositions. Table 1 (XXX) lists a small sampling of the many Galant pieces in which the home-key reprise is directly preceded by a non-dominant chord.6
Reconciling a Non-Dominant Approach to the Reprise with the “Sacred Triangle” Whether it is a dominant chord or otherwise, the last harmony of a development does not necessarily function on the deepest levels of the tonal structure. As a result, movements where the chord directly prior to the recapitulation is something other than V might nonetheless be appropriately analyzed as embraced by large I–V–I motion. There are three basic strategies that may be used for reconciling such situations to a deep-level I–V–I framework: 1. Though not literally present, a V nevertheless might be implied at the end of the development, so that the non-dominant-to-tonic motion at the point of recapitulation is understood as merely apparent. 2. The non-dominant harmony at the end of the development might be interpreted as lying within a larger V–I motion, so that the appearance of this non-dominant harmony is understood as a relatively surface event. 3. The start of the recapitulation could be interpreted as lying in the middle of a larger motion to a deep-level dominant, so that the tonic at the onset of the recapitulation is regarded as a relatively foreground harmony.
Implied V at the End of the Development Let’s begin by examining the first of these scenarios, in which a V at the end of the development is implied. Consider the except cited in Example 4.4a above. Although the final harmony on the downbeat that precedes the recapitulation is VI (bar 68), perhaps one might argue that a V of B! major is suggested by the figuration that appears on the last two beats of this measure. In this case, however, the implied V would be so weakly enunciated that it would probably still best be read as subordinate to the 6 See also discussions regarding non-dominant approaches to the recapitulation in Webster (1991, 138–45) and Edwards (1998). I discuss movements in which the development concludes on VII# in Burstein (1998) and the Jommelli Triosonata No. 6 in D cited in Table 1 in Burstein (2020).
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VI that appears on the downbeat. In other situations, however, an implied V at the end of a retransition might indeed be fairly regarded to serve as a deep-level harmony. On the other hand, it would be less convincing to argue that a V is implied during a rest that follows the final chord of the retransition. For instance, it would be problematic to suggest the implied presence of a dominant harmony as arising during the eighth rest at the end of the second bar in Example 4.4b, or during the quarter rests at the end of the second bars of Examples 4.5a and 4.5b. Why imply a V during the rest, instead of implying another chord? The notion that a V chord would be expected at such a juncture is inaccurate, since it was utterly normal within this style for a non-dominant harmony to directly precede a recapitulation, as is amply evinced by the repertoire and theoretical publications of the time. On the other hand, to have a structural harmony that ends a section on a weak beat—as would be the case if V were implied during the rests in Example 4.4b or Examples 4.5a and 4.5b—would be extremely odd and unstylistic. Incidentally, in his discussion of the second movement of C. P. E. Bach’s Sonata No. 3 in F minor, Wq. 57, Schenker ([1908] 1976) suggests the presence of an imaginary dominant harmony during the pause that precedes the recapitulation. This movement’s point of recapitulation, in the home key of F major, is immediately pre ceded by a C-minor triad that is followed by a break (Example 4.7a, 49). Schenker rationalizes the jarring nature of the harmonic succession from C minor to F major by suggesting that a C-major chord is understood a posteriori to have appeared during the intervening rest: Bach would surely have known that C–E–G leads more directly to F major than does C–E!–G; he must have also have known that every musical person feels the same harmonic impulse and has the same diatonic instinct . . . When the F-major triad occurs, it is easy for the listener to realize what is expected of him, namely that his own instincts must supply the necessary change from C–E!–G to C–E–G. (Schenker [1908] 1976, [18–19] 41)7
The pause following the C-minor chord of this passage is a substantial one, far more substantial than the analogous rests in the passages cited in Example 4.4b or Example 4.5. As such, the moment of silence in this Bach excerpt might more readily allow time for the listener to conjure an implied harmony at this point, as Schenker pro7 Schenker’s attitude here may be contrasted with the literal-minded treatment of this passage in separate editions of this work by Hugo Riemann and Hans von Bülow. Riemann simply “corrects” the E-flat of m. 27 to an E-natural. Von Bülow, on the other hand, actually composes an entirely new passage of his own devising that leads from the C minor triad of m. 27 to a C major chord that immediately precedes the recapitulation. This passage by Bach and the various editions of this sonata are sensitively discussed at length in Kramer (2016, 42–59).
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poses. Furthermore, the unmistakable suggestion of a G-major harmony following the cadence in G minor at the end of the previous phrase (bar 24) offers a precedent for supposing an analogous C-major chord at the end of this C-minor phrase (bar 27). On the other hand, that a C-major chord “leads more directly to F major” does not necessarily indicate that it should be implied. Besides, if a C-major chord were implied here, the motion to F major would still sound abrupt, since the phrase in C minor of bars 25–27—which is metrically curtailed and lacks a convincing final cadence—seems cut short in a surprisingly sudden manner. Pace Schenker, I feel that one could more convincingly reflect the narrative and tonal structure of this movement by analyzing a large-scale harmonic motion as coming to an abrupt halt in bar 27. Thus, it is not that the listener senses that a C-major chord is implied at the end of bar 27. Rather, the listener senses that a C-major triad is noticeably absent, much like the cadence in C at the end of the phrase in bars 25–27 is noticeably absent (Example 4.7b, 49). As such, the return to F major in bar 28 is best understood not as prepared by an implied lead-in, but simply as asserted by the forte return of the main theme.
Harmony Inserted in the Middle of a V–I motion In some cases, a non-dominant harmony that precedes a reprise in the home key may be interpreted as lying within a deep-level motion from dominant to tonic. An example of such a reading may be witnessed in Schenker’s celebrated analysis of Robert Schumann’s “Aus meinen Tränen spriessen” ([1935] 1979, Fig. 21). In this analysis, Schenker reads a V–(III#)–I motion as extending from the song’s middle section through the double return of the main theme and key. The brevity of the song, along with the motivic parallelisms Schenker highlights, help the listener perceive the largescale connection between V and I, despite the intervening III#. Schenker suggests that an analogous structure could frame an entire sonata-form movement, citing as an example the first movement of Beethoven’s Sonata for Cello and Piano in A major, Op. 69 ([1935] 1975, [113] 69). A number of Schenker’s followers have followed Schenker’s lead in this regard, proposing similar layouts for majorkey sonata-form movements whose development sections conclude with a half cadence in the relative minor.8 Such movements frequently are analyzed in the manner depicted in Example 4.8a (50), yielding a structure similar to Schenker’s “Aus meinen 8 See Beach (1983), Schachter (1987), and Willner (1988), each of whom discuss such large V–III#– I motions in relation to motivic parallelisms; see also Webster (1991, 141); Rothstein (1989, 113); and Cadwallader/Gagné (2007, 338–40). The standard nature of the harmonic succession of III# to I at a reprise or other pivotal juncture of the design was noted by eighteenth-century theorists: see, for instance, Gasparini (1722, 28) and Riepel (1755, 92–93).
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Tränen spriessen” analysis, albeit set on a broader canvas. For movements where the large V–(III#)–I motion is supported by textural and motivic elements, such a largescale interpretation can be quite convincing. On the other hand, it would be questionable to apply such a reading willy-nilly to any movement whose development has a similar key layout. To automatically apply the analytic model of Example 4.8a to such a movement—even where not supported by other factors—would turn the model into a tautology, a fancy way of simply saying that the exposition ends in the key of V and the development with a V of VI. In those cases where the connection between the dominant at the end of the exposition and the tonic of the recapitulation is extremely difficult to perceive, it arguably would be more honest to read the underlying structure in a solar tonal fashion, as depicted in Example 4.8b (50). With this reading, the large structure is interpreted as framed by a motion from I to V to III# and then back to I, without implying the presence of an underlying sacred triangle. The structure proposed in Example 4.8b initially might strike some readers as surprisingly unorthodox. However, consider the following: 1. The descending third motions at the end of this structure have a logical basis in the overtone series.9 2. The harmonic successions portrayed in this layout—including the III#–I motion— are not merely deep-level constructs but are ones that frequently may be found on the musical surface of compositions, particularly at crucial junctures of the form. 3. In many movements, it is easy to perceive this deep-level harmonic framework, especially when it is strongly supported by thematic and textural devices (as it often is). In contrast, for some movements where the development ends with a half cadence in the relative minor, the connection between the V at the end of the exposition and the tonic of the recapitulation is so difficult to perceive as to be a mere abstraction.
Onset of Reprise Embedded within a Larger Motion Another possibility for explaining the presence of a non-dominant harmony directly before a recapitulation is to read the tonic Stufe that appears at the head of the recapitulation as functioning on a relatively local level. With such an interpretation, the recapitulation’s opening tonic is understood as couched between the last chord of the development and a subsequent dominant harmony. A classic instance of such 9 Incidentally, on at least one occasion Schenker proposed a deep-level descending-third motion as the framework for a composition: see Schenker ([1935] 1979), Fig. 100, 6b.
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an analysis arises in Schenker’s reading of the approach to the recapitulation in the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6. At this point in the movement, a IV triad immediately precedes the thematic return at the onset of the reprise. Schenker interprets the IV as leading to the V that does not appear until the fourth bar of the recapitulation. Schenker’s analysis here is extremely convincing, since it is strongly supported by various motivic, rhythmic, and textural features that link the IV to the V (Example 4.9, 50). There are a number of other movements for which one can convincingly posit a similar conflict between structure and design. Yet here, too, it would be simplistic and tautological to automatically assume that every point of recapitulation that directly follows a non-dominant harmony must be understood as lying within an encompassing tonal motion. Consider the finale of Beethoven’s Sonata for Piano in E!, Op. 81a. The inter-movement transition that leads from this sonata’s middle movement to the opening of its finale concludes with a greatly expanded V7 of E!. This dominant seventh chord in turn drives powerfully toward the main theme in the home key found at the start of the finale. The finale’s development section likewise could have concluded with a strongly stated dominant, now leading toward the main theme in the home key found at the start of the recapitulation. Instead, however, the approach to the recapitulation is considerably more muted. As seen in Example 4.10 (51), at the end of this development (bar 109) a IV chord of the home key of E! moves directly to a I6 (or is it a V6 of IV?). This is followed precipitously by the onset of the recapitulation, starting with the tonic E!, so that dominant preparation for the recapitulation is entirely lacking. Unlike at the analogous moment of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, there seem to be few if any features that connect the IV at the end of the development to a V that appears in mid-recapitulation. As such, it would be contrived to argue that the opening tonic harmony of the recapitulation lies in the midst of a deeper tonal motion. Instead, the tonal motions of the development seem suddenly broken off in bar 109, as a deep-level tonic Stufe is asserted via the dynamics and the thematic return in the next bar. The unusual approach to the recapitulation here perhaps relates to the underlying program of this movement as suggested by the subtitle given it by Beethoven, “Wiedersehen” (“Reunion”), since this recapitulatory approach problematizes the main theme’s Wiedersehen at this point in the movement.10
10 Contrary to what is often wrongly claimed, Beethoven used the subtitle Das Lebewohl (or its French translation, Les Adieux, “The Farewell”) to refer to only the first movement of Op. 81a, not the entire sonata: he subtitled the last two movements Abwesenheit (“Absence”) and Wiedersehen, respectively. I discuss the genesis and subtitles of this sonata at length in Burstein (2010).
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Solar Tonal Interpretations of Non-Dominant Approaches to the Reprise To summarize thus far: there are numerous movements where the recapitulation is preceded by a non-dominant chord; such a scenario is particularly common in works from the Galant era. In a number of these cases, the movement nonetheless may be understood as framed by a polar I–V–I layout. For some other movements, however, positing a polar framework would distort the tonal and narrative structure, and in such cases the movements may be better understood in relation to a solar model. Example 4.11 (51) proposes an abstract depiction of a possible tonal framework for a movement whose development section concludes with a cadence on VI, followed immediately by a double return of the main theme and home key at the start of the recapitulation. This layout begins with an increasing degree of tonal tension, featuring a large-scale motion from I to V and then to VI, after which there is a type of interruption. The second branch of this interruption structure commences with the start of recapitulation, which in turn embraces a large I–V–I that wraps up the movement in a conclusive fashion. Though a structure such as depicted in Example 4.11 is less common in music of high Classical era, several movements from the Galant era can be convincingly analyzed in relation to such a framework. Schenker did not address the layout as depicted in Example 4.11; quite possibly, he would have turned up his nose at it.11 Then again, considering that Schenker’s interest in Galant composers such as Rutini or Wagenseil was limited at best, he might not have been familiar with the commonplace nature of the layouts that invite such a structural interpretation. Accordingly, upon coming across a movement by Haydn in which the recapitulation is immediately preceded by a non-dominant harmony, Schenker might have supposed the situation to be an anomalous one, indicative of Haydn’s daring creativity, without realizing the standard nature of this strategy. His followers need not be limited by Schenker’s music preferences, however, and those that do analyze music from the Galant style should be prepared to possibly invoke structural models that Schenker did not mention.
Hasse’s Overture I to Alcide al Bivio For an instance of a movement that could be best understood as structured in a manner similar to Example 4.11—albeit in which the interruption is preceded by a supertonic rather than a submediant harmony—let’s turn to the opening overture movement of Johann Adolphe Hasse’s opera Alcide al Bivio (“Hercules at the Crossroads”). In the 11 On the other hand, Schenker does arguably hint at the possibility of a free form of interruption following VI in Schenker ([1935] 1979), Fig. 7, 2.
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plot of this opera, the hero Hercules arrives at a crossroads, where he must decide between continuing along a path towards Pleasure or continuing along a path towards Virtue. There are intriguing crossroads within the opera’s overture as well, with an unusual twist arising at each important formal juncture within its opening movement. At the divide between the development and recapitulation, for instance, a dominant harmony is completely avoided. Instead, a supertonic chord appears at the end of the development, moving directly to the tonic at the start of the recapitulation (Example 4.12, 51). This movement begins with two modulations up by fifth: from D to A through the end of the exposition, and then on to the key of E minor during the development. Immediately after presenting the main theme in E minor, the large harmonic motion shifts gears. At this point, the ascending fifth motion is interrupted, as the music suddenly plunges back to D major to start the recapitulation. Owing to the thematic return and sudden change in dynamics, the deep-level sense of return to tonic at the onset of the recapitulation is readily apparent and easy to perceive. The tonic harmony at the point of recapitulation initiates what may be regarded as the second branch of an interruption structure, during which the harmonies convincingly lead from I to a large-scale V and back (Example 4.13, 51). As with Beethoven’s Op. 81a finale, there is little evidence here to suggest that the final harmony of the development connects to a deep-level V that appears somewhere in mid-recapitulation. Thus, it would be forced to read the tonic at the start of the recapitulation as subordinated to a larger harmonic motion in the manner of the Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 analysis seen above in Example 4.9. The swift harmonic disruption at the point of recapitulation in Hasse’s overture perhaps could be understood as foreshadowing the plot of the ensuing opera. That is, much as Hercules abandons one path of the crossroads in favor of the other, so the tonal motion within this movement abandons the path of ascending fifths in order to move along a more fruitful path toward tonal resolution accorded by the deep-level I–V–I of the recapitulation. As to whether Hercules himself chooses the path toward Pleasure or toward Virtue, you’ll need to see the opera for yourself to find out!
Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 56, Finale The finale of Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 56 in C major presents another instance of a development section that concludes with a supertonic chord. In a typical Haydn manner, this movement is filled with clever twists and turns, of which the approach to the recapitulation is one. The fun begins right at the movement’s very opening. The superficially flatfooted impression yielded by the main theme’s initial gesture is belied by its delightfully
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o ff-kilter framing within the finale’s first two phrases. Example 4.14 (52) highlights the hypermetric manipulations here by comparing the opening phrases (Example 4.14b) to a hypothetical, normalized prototype (Example 4.14a). The exposition’s third phrase (bars 11–24; Example 4.15a, 53) is greatly expanded, leading to grand half-cadential caesura on V of V (bar 24). This is followed by a soft, buffa-like theme in the secondary key of G major (starting in bar 25), which soon gives way to a bravura passage. At first, it seems as though this bravura passage will lead to another half-cadence on V of V (bar 35; Example 4.15b, 53). In eighteenth-century terms, this would create an appearance of two successive contrasting Absätze (internal phrases) that conclude with similar ending formulas, something that was expressly forbidden as redundant by eighteenth-century theorists.12 The potential redundancy is averted, however, as the apparent half cadence turns out to be a false one, a gesture that appears in the middle of a large phrase that ultimately concludes in bar 44 with a perfect authentic cadence.13 The formal shenanigans are temporarily put on hold at the start of the ensuing development, where matters initially take a more serious turn. Following a feint toward D minor, the development moves toward the key of E and then A. After the key of A is confirmed by a series of dramatic cadences, the retransition enters in a recitative-like manner, leading to a gentle statement of the main theme in the key of D minor (Example 4.16, 54). But something has gone astray here: the retransition should have led back to the home key of C major, not to D minor! As though suddenly realizing the “error,” the music swiftly jumps to the key of C major, at which point the main theme enters in a stalwart manner to begin the recapitulation proper. It would be forced to analyze the presence of an implied V during the rest at the end of bar 85, especially since surely no chord is implied during the many other times that analogous gestures appear within the movement. Likewise, it would be too contrived to read the firmly stated tonic of bars 86–89 as subordinated to a larger motion from the gently stated II that precedes it in bars 84–85 to the IV that appears midphrase in bar 90 or to the II6 that appears in bar 94. As proposed in the voice-leading sketch of Example 4.17 (54), the final harmony of the development could more persuasively be understood as inserted within a deeper-level tonal motion, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Example 4.8a above. However, I would argue that it is too difficult to perceive this motion as stemming directly from the dominant Stufe at the end of the exposition. Rather, it is more convincing to maintain that the supertonic harmony of 12 The prohibition against having the same ending formula conclude two successive, contrasting Absätze is underlined in Riepel (1755) and Koch ([1793] 1983, esp. [111–12] 110). 13 The terms Grundabsatz, Quintabsatz, and Schlußsatz referenced in Example 4.15b stem from Koch ([1787] 1983). I discuss these terms—along with their correlation with modern sonata-form concepts and Schenkerian analysis—in Burstein (2015, 2016a, 2016b, and 2020).
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bars 84–85 appears within a motion from the strongly asserted, deep-level submediant of bars 62–81, part of an interrupted I–V–VI || I–V–I layout.14
Triangles and Trapezoids As the eighteenth century wore on, it became increasingly common for a sturdily stated dominant harmony to immediately precede the recapitulation. With such a strategy, the tonic and dominant harmonies tended to be firmly underlined at the movement’s pivotal formal junctures. For such instances, it usually makes much sense to interpret the large voice-leading structure in reference to an underlying I–V–I framework, along the lines of the sacred triangle advocated by Schenker. However, we should be careful not to backdate stylistic norms of the high Classical era—along with structural assumptions that flow from them—onto music composed during earlier decades. As noted above, in Galant music it was not so unusual for a non-dominant harmony to directly precede a recapitulation. That a non-dominantto-tonic succession could appear prominently on the musical surface at such a crucial juncture in turn encourages us to at least consider incorporating such successions within our voice-leading models. For those accustomed to polar I–V–I background layouts, the solar frameworks suggested throughout this essay at first might seem somewhat strange. As I have argued here, however, such non-triangular structures are logical and stylistically compatible with Galant practice. Furthermore, in the many movements where they are strongly supported on the surface of the music, these deep-level solar structures are extremely audible, including in several movements for which a polar framework would be quite difficult to perceive. To be sure, as was noted above, a number of movements where the recapitulation is directly preceded by a non-dominant harmony might nonetheless be effectively analyzed in reference to a polar I–V–I model.15 However, the reverse is true as well: that is, a number of movements where the recapitulation is directly preceded by a dominant harmony might nonetheless be most effectively analyzed in reference to a solar model, 14 Incidentally, notice that this movement involves a “tour of keys” that touches on all the diatonic keys associated with C major: C (I), G (V), E minor (III), A minor (VI), D minor (II), and— during bars 89–91 of the recapitulation—F (IV). The “tour of keys” concept is discussed in Ratner (1980, 217); its application to Schenkerian models was explored in Stoia (2018). 15 An exemplary study in this regard is Petty (1999): in a series of penetrating analyses, Petty examines various movements by C. P. E. Bach in which the recapitulation is preceded directly by VI, interpreting some of them along a large-scale tonic-dominant axis and others in a type of solar fashion (where the VI is read as part of a large neighbor motion), in each case responding sensitively to the specifics of the piece being analyzed.
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such as depicted in Examples 4.3b and 4.3c above. In many such instances, considering solar layouts as possible viable tonal frameworks might well allow for the analysis to better reflect the tonal and narrative shape of the movement at hand.
The sacred and the profane By offering an alternative to structures based on tonic-dominant polarity, the trapezoidal layout discussed above touches on deeper issues regarding Schenkerian analysis in general. Naturally, the reference in this essay’s title to such a framework as “sacred” is facetious. The trapezoidal structure is not blessed by eternal principles; rather, it derives from the practices of a specific style. But the same can be said of Schenker’s “sacred triangle”—or for that matter, any of Schenker’s tonal archetypes. Schenker’s writings make it clear that he never intended his voice-leading concepts to elucidate all types of music, or even all types of tonal music. Granted, facets of the techniques developed by Schenker might profitably be (and indeed have been) applied to styles other than those he envisioned. Nevertheless, it remains that Schenker’s tonal models do not present universal truths, but instead are tied to specific stylistic and culturally inscribed assumptions. That his tonal concepts are not geared toward music of all styles and cultures unlikely would have bothered Schenker. After all, he disliked most of the world’s musical styles—much as he looked down upon most of the peoples and cultures that gave birth to them. Unsurprisingly, almost all of Schenker’s followers have resisted adopting his overtly xenophobic viewpoints. But for those who seek to distance themselves from the distasteful aspects of Schenker’s ideology, it won’t suffice to simply renounce his bigoted social, political, and racial pronouncements: it also is important to consider the possible troublesome ways that Schenker’s worldview might have influenced current analytic practice. I argue that chief among these are the notions that Schenker’s theories reveal features that are actually embedded within the music; that they highlight universal musical truths based on immutable laws; or that they can be used to prove the logic, coherence, and worth of musical compositions. Rather, his concepts should be understood to provide a vehicle for conveying analytic interpretations, with the aid of voice-leading models whose premises derive from the practices of a specific style. Its lack of universality notwithstanding, that the Schenkerian approach can help keenly illuminate a musical style that includes so many powerful and inspirational works nonetheless speaks strongly on behalf of its utility and value.
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Works Cited Beach, David. 1983. “A Recurring Pattern in Mozart’s Music.” Journal of Music T heory 27, no. 1: 1–29.
Budday, Wolfgang. 1983. Grundlagen musikalischer Formen der Wiener Klassik: an Hand der zeitgenössischen Theorie von Joseph Riepel und Heinrich Christoph Koch dargestellt an Menuetten und Sonatensätzen (1750–1790). Kassel: Bärenreiter. Burstein, L. Poundie. 1998. “Surprising Returns: The VII# in Beethoven’s Op. 18, No. 3, and its Antecedents in Haydn.” Music Analysis 17, no. 3: 295–312.
_______. 2010. “‘Lebe wohl tönt überall!’ and a ‘Reunion after so much Sorrow’: Beethoven’s Op. 81a and the Journeys of 1809.” Musical Quarterly 93, no. 3–4: 366–413. _______. 2011. “True or False? Reassessing the Voice-leading Role of Haydn’s So-called ‘False Recapitulations.’” Journal of Schenkerian Studies 5: 1–37. _______. 2015. “Strolling through a Haydn Divertimento with Two Heinrichs.” In Bach to Brahms: Essays on Musical Design and Structure, edited by David Beach and Yosef Goldenberg, 9–22. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. _______. 2016a. “Voice-Leading Procedures in Galant-Era Expositions. In Explorations in Schenkerian Analysis: Essays in Honor of Edward Laufer, edited by David Beach and Su Yin Mak, 42–60. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. _______. 2016b. “Expositional Journeys and Resting Points.” Composition as a Problem 7: 5–16.
_______. 2020. Journey through Galant Expositions. New York: Oxford University Press.
Cadwallader, Allen and David Gagné. 2007. Analysis of Tonal Music: A Schenkerian Approach, 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Clark, Suzannah. 2011. Analyzing Schubert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Daube, Johann Friedrich. 1797–98. Anleitung zur Erfindung der Melodie und ihrer Fortsetzung. Wien: Taubel. Edwards, George. 1998. “Papa Doc’s Recap Caper: Haydn and Temporal Dyslexia.” In Haydn Studies, edited by W. Dean Sutcliffe, 291–320. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Galeazzi, Francesco. 1796. Elementi teorico-practici de musica II. Rome: Michele Puccinelli. Gasparini, Francesco. 1722. L’Armonico Practico al Cembalo. Bologna: Silvani.
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Koch, Heinrich. (1787) 1983. Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition, II. Leipzig: Adam Friedrich Böhme. Translated in part in Nancy Kovaleff Baker as Intro ductory Essay on Composition. New Haven: Yale University Press. _______. (1793) 1983. Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition, III. Leipzig: Adam Friedrich Böhme. Translated in part in Nancy Kovaleff Baker as Introductory Essay on Composition. New Haven: Yale University Press. Kramer, Richard. 2016. Cherubino’s Leap. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Marpurg, Friedrich Wilhelm. 1756. Principes du Clavecin. Berlin: Haude and S penser. Petty, Wayne. 1999. “Koch, Schenker, and the Development Section of Sonata Forms by C. P. E. Bach.” Music Theory Spectrum 21, no. 2: 151–73. Ratner, Leonard. 1980. Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style. New York: Schirmer. Riepel, Joseph. 1755. Anfangsgründe zur musicalischen Setzkunst II: Grundregeln zur Tonordnung. Ulm: Christian Ulrich Wagner. Rothstein, William. 1989. Phrase Rhythm in Tonal Music. New York: Schirmer. _______. 2001. “Review of Articles on Schenker and Schenkerian Theory in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd Edition.” Journal of Music Theory 4, no. 1: 204–27 Schachter, Carl. 1987. “Analysis by Key: Another Look at Modulation.” Music Analysis 6, no. 3: 289–318. Schenker, Heinrich. (1908) 1976. “A Contribution to the Study of Ornamentation (Ein Beitrag zur Ornamentik).” Translated and edited by Hedi Siegel. In Music Forum 4, edited by Felix Salzer, 1–139. New York: Columbia University Press. _______. (1935) 1979. Free Composition (Der freie Satz). Edited and translated by Ernst Oster. New York: Longman. Stoia, Nicholas. 2018. “The Tour-of-Keys Model and the Prolongational Structure in Sonata-Form Movements by Haydn and Mozart.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Music Theory, San Antonio TX, November 3. Webster, James. 1991. Haydn’s ‘Farewell’ Symphony and the Idea of Classical Style: Through-Composition and Cyclic Integration in his Instrumental Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Willner, Channan. 1988. “Chromaticism and the Mediant in Four Late Haydn Works.” Theory and Practice 13: 79–114.
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Part II: Analysis
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5 Chopin’s Mazurka, Op. 59, No. 2: A Tribute to Mendelssohn? CA R L SCH ACHTER
I’ll begin with a bit of autobiography. Many years ago, I noticed a curious similarity of harmony, phrase rhythm, and form in the opening sections of two beautiful and very different piano pieces: Mendelssohn’s G-major Song without Words, Op. 62, No. 1 and Chopin’s Mazurka in A! major, Op. 59, No. 2. Both pieces manifest the ternary (ABA) form typical of short nineteenth-century dances, character pieces, and many songs. In both, the opening section consists of an antecedent phrase cadencing on the dominant and a consequent that, surprisingly, does not close with a tonic but instead moves briefly to the key of the mediant. Mendelssohn’s G-major “Song” tonicizes B minor and Chopin’s A! Mazurka tonicizes C minor—exactly the same progression allowing for the difference between the two home keys. In both pieces, the unusual harmonic motion is intensified by a rhythmic expansion that points to the mediant as a significant goal. Such a turn to the mediant occurs not infrequently in major-mode pieces of the nineteenth century and occasionally in eighteenth-century music as well, but it is still very much an exception rather than the rule. When I first recognized that it was a common feature of the Mendelssohn and Chopin, I was sure that the similarity was coincidental. In most other respects, the two pieces are not at all similar. The Mazurka, for all its lyricism, is clearly a dance piece, while the Mendelssohn Song displays a freedom in the use of rhythm and meter that would never occur in dances of the mid-nineteenth century. My curiosity was piqued a bit some years later, when I read, in the Henle edition’s notes for the Mazurkas, that Chopin had written out a copy of Op. 59, No. 2, and had presented it to Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny. Could this point to a Mendelssohn–Chopin connection that somehow involved the two pieces? No, I thought. Fanny Mendelssohn was known as a great musician in her own right, and Chopin’s giving her an autograph copy could well have been for reasons that had nothing to do with her brother Felix. It
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turns out, however, that the Henle editors had got it wrong. In a later printing of the Henle edition, a corrected note informed me that the copy had not at all been for Fanny, but rather for Cécile Mendelssohn, Felix’s wife, who was not a noted musician. I began to think that the resemblance just might be more than a curious coincidence, and that I should investigate it further. My first try was to look at Krystyna Kobylańska’s catalog of Chopin’s works, in which all autograph sources are described. There I discovered that Chopin’s gift to Cécile was occasioned by a written request from Felix, which definitely pointed to a personal connection, if not a musical one. My next move was to look through the published letters of the two composers to see if a paper trail still exists. It does. Here is what I found. On November 3rd, 1844, Mendelssohn wrote a brief letter to Chopin. The letter does indeed contain a request for a sample of Chopin’s musical handwriting to present to Cécile, who greatly admired his music. Mendelssohn was putting together a Stammbuch, or album of musical inscriptions, for his wife. The album, by the way, still exists; it is in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Here is my translation of Mendelssohn’s letter (the original is in French)1: My Dear Chopin, With these lines I’m asking a favor of you. Would you be kind enough, for the sake of our old friendship, to jot down a few measures of music, then write underneath that you have written them for my wife (Cécile M. B.) and send them to me? The last time we met was in Frankfort, and I was engaged to be married. Since then, if I wish to give my wife a really great pleasure, I have to play music for her, and all the pieces coming from you are her favorites. That is therefore an additional reason for me (although I’ve had plenty of others since knowing you) to stay informed about what you are writing and to occupy myself with you and your works, perhaps more than you do yourself. It is also for that reason that I hope that you will grant me the favor that I am asking and pardon me if I am adding to the importunities with which you must be burdened. Always your very devoted Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. Berlin, 3 November 1844.
Chopin certainly took his time about responding. Indeed, it was not until almost a year later that he wrote the following reply (also in French)2: Paris, 8 October 1845 Imagine, very dear friend, with a bit of good will, that I am writing to you by return mail following the letter that brought me your good news. Since my feelings had nothing to do with this delay, greet these lines as if they were getting to you on time. 1 See Mendelssohn’s letter in French in Sydow et al. ([1953] 1981, 177–78). 2 Chopin’s response in French can be found in Sydow et al. ([1953] 1981, 218–19).
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If the enclosed bit of paper is not too tattered, and if there is still room for it, please deliver it on my behalf to Madame Mendelssohn. Permit me also to remind you that though you may have friends and admirers closer and worthier, you have none more sincerely devoted. Yours always from the heart, Chopin
We can safely assume that the leaf of paper that Chopin enclosed was not “tattered.” And we can be sure that room was made for it in Cécile’s album, even though it demanded far more room than the “few measures” of Mendelssohn’s request would have done. It was in fact a holograph copy of the entire Mazurka, all 111 bars. Chopin signed it “Hommage à Madame F. Mendelsson-Bartholdy de la part de F. Chopin Paris 8 Oct. 1845.” An idiomatic English version would be: Compliments (or perhaps Best Regards) to Madame F. Mendelssohn-Bartholdy from F. Chopin. Now let’s take a look at the chronology. Mendelssohn’s request was dated November 3rd, 1844, and the publication of his Op. 62 had been probably earlier in that same year. The G-major piece, therefore, was among Mendelssohn’s recent publications at the time Chopin penned his response on October 8th, 1845. The three Mazurkas of Chopin’s Op. 59 were all composed in 1845, shortly after the Mendelssohn Song was published. These Mazurkas were not published until the following year in 1846. Chopin was sending Cécile one of his most recent pieces—indeed, one that was yet unpublished.3 I believe that it is only recently that music historians have given serious scholarly attention to musical albums such as Cécile Mendelssohn’s. I have learned from Halina Goldberg that these albums were very popular at the time and were not owned solely by music-loving amateurs; in fact, many musicians including Chopin himself owned them. It also seems that the selections chosen for inclusion were more highly valued if they appeared to be particularly appropriate ones for that album. For instance, in 1840, Chopin wrote out his C-minor Prelude in the album of J. A. A. DuBois. I don’t know what, if anything, was especially appropriate about that choice. Some twenty years later, however, the composer Ferdinand Hiller contributed a short piece of his own to the same album. He chose to place it on the same page as Chopin’s Prelude. Furthermore, Hiller used the bass of the Chopin as a kind of cantus firmus on which he wrote his own piece. Chopin and Hiller became good friends when both moved to Paris as young men—Hiller a few years before Chopin—so Hiller’s contribution was 3 The years 1845 and 1846 show relatively few publications, but those are among Chopin’s greatest works. In addition to the Op. 59 Mazurkas, the list of compositions includes the Piano Sonata in B minor, Op. 58, No. 3, the Barcarolle in F major, Op. 60, and the Polonaise-Fantaisie in A! major, Op. 61. There were four publications in 1846; by contrast, in 1840 there had been only one.
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testimony to their friendship. According to Goldberg, Chopin’s own album contained an entry by Mendelssohn. The piece is a canon, and Mendelssohn indicated that its bass was by Chopin. (As far as I know, the location of that bass in Chopin’s output has not yet been identified.) Hence my conjecture that Cécile’s Mazurka is based in part on a recent piece by Mendelssohn is given some support by this preference for pieces with a personal connection to the album. You will recall that Felix Mendelssohn had claimed that, because he played so much of Chopin’s music for Cécile, he was perhaps occupying himself with Chopin and his works more than Chopin was himself. Nowhere does Chopin’s letter mention Mendelssohn’s music or his own involvement with it. But one can imagine him intimating with the Mazurka he sent: You say you know what I am up to in my recent work. I make no such claim about your work. But if you play through my Mazurka—one of my most recent works— you just might possibly recognize a suspicious family resemblance to your “Song without Words.” So, there’s at least one of your recent pieces that I know. Doesn’t that make it an appropriate contribution to your wife’s Stammbuch?
Do I have any evidence to back up this hunch? I’m afraid I have circumstantial evidence but no proof. The evidence is the resemblance itself; the exchange of letters involving the Mazurka; the intriguing chronology involving letters and dates of composition; and what I have learned about nineteenth-century musical autograph albums. But, of course, it’s also possible that Chopin had not encountered the Mendelssohn piece before writing his Mazurka. And even if he had, the resemblance might have resulted from a recollection of which Chopin was unconscious. It is nice, however, to think that we have stumbled on a hitherto unsuspected biographical and compositional link between these two beautiful pieces by two of the greatest composers of their time. If my guess is correct, it would follow as a necessary consequence that Chopin composed the first part of the Mazurka with Cécile’s album specifically in mind. That might explain why Chopin took such a long time in answering Mendelssohn’s letter; perhaps he was waiting until he had composed an appropriate contribution for the album.
Similarities Let’s first take a look at the way the two composers manage the phrase structure and proportions of their pieces’ opening sections. In Example 5.1 (56), I show simple reductions of the two initial A sections, aligned so that the phrase organization and durational proportions of the two pieces can be compared easily.
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Note that the Chopin (Example 5.1b) contains 20 bars of 3/4 time, while the Mendelssohn (Example 5.1a) contains 10 bars of 4/4. The Chopin’s 20 bars divide into two large phrases of 8 and 12 bars; and the Mendelssohn divides into 4 and 6. Thus the larger proportions are identical. The two antecedent phrases subdivide into 4+4 for the Chopin and 2+2 for the Mendelssohn. In both pieces, the first subdivision ends with the tonic and the second with the dominant. And in both, the two subdivisions of the antecedent phrase have a kind of statement/response format. The two consequent phrases both begin with a repetition of the statement part of their antecedents and then go on to new material. We could express the common pattern in symbolic form, thus: x1 x 2, x1 y. Both consequent phrases attain their greater length through metric expansions of the new material that I have called “y,” expansions that add nothing to the larger harmonic structure but that enhance the effectiveness of the tonicizing cadences that follow. The expansions occur at slightly different points in their phrases and emphasize different harmonies, but the rhythmic effect is similar. And both cadences, as mentioned earlier, lead to the closure of the A sections on the tonicized mediant. Although most of the features shared by the two pieces could be found in numerous other pieces, the ensemble of common features is rather remarkable. There is an old exercise that many composition teachers used to give their pupils—perhaps some still do. It consists in paraphrasing a piece by a great composer, duplicating every move but using the pupil’s own—and different—melodic and harmonic materials. If we were informed that the opening section of Chopin’s Mazurka was the product of such an exercise, we could believe it, as long as we were also informed that the “pupil” was a fantastically original composer of genius.
The Move to the Mediant In both pieces, the modulation is prepared psychologically by melodic features and effected by using the home tonic as a springboard. These features are quite different in the two pieces. In the Mendelssohn, the psychological preparation involves the prominent A#–B in the top voice of bars 1–2 and 5–6. In listening prospectively, one would have no idea at the beginning that B minor is impending, but in retrospect, a perceptive listener will sense how those pitches have subtly influenced the direction the music takes. The prominence of F# in the bass (in juxtaposition with the A# of the upper voice) has also contributed to this perception. It is possible to read the arrival on B minor as accomplished by the B-minor 63 chord of bar 8, but the bass comes back to the tonic note G. This G supports an augmented sixth chord (of the “French” variety) that leads into a much stronger V–I of B minor. I take this second B-minor chord as the definitive arrival.
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In the Chopin, the seeds of the modulation are planted in bar 5, with the chromatic line E!–E§–F in an inner voice (shown in Example 5.1b). This progression is based on the familiar 5–6 motion above a sustained bass. In bars 12–14, an expanded E!–E§–F (also shown in the Example 5.1b) occurs above a descending bass that leads down to F. The F-minor chord that results functions as a IV of C minor, ushering in the V and I. In Schenkerian theory, the motion from the A!-chord to the F minor is regarded as an outgrowth of a 5–6 motion like the one in bars 6 and 7.4 In this piece, the earlier and simpler version helps to prepare the later one. Note that the V–I of C minor occurs three times. It would be possible to read the definitive arrival on C at the first of these occurrences. With that reading, the following bars would count as the extension of a goal already reached. This reading is in fact suggested by Charles Burkhart (2005) in an excellent article. I prefer to hear the first two of the three arrivals on C minor as anticipatory, and for me only the third C-minor chord sounds like a convincing goal. Thus, in both pieces, at least as I read them, we enter the territory of the new key fairly quickly, but anchor it with a strong tonic only at the very end of the section. I have now completed my preliminary detective work. For the remainder of the discussion, I’ll concentrate on the two pieces individually and not on their possible connection. I will not offer a comprehensive analysis of either piece, partly because a fair amount has been published about both of them, including a discussion of the Mendelssohn in one of my articles (Schachter 1995, 155–58).5 My discussion here of the Mendelssohn will focus on its rhythmic organization; my much briefer remarks on the Chopin will point to a beautiful motivic connection.
Rhythmic Idiosyncrasies in Mendelssohn’s Op. 62, No. 1 This Song without Words is an outstanding example of a typically Mendelssohnian technique—the use of what William Rothstein has called conflicting downbeats. Rothstein explains it as: a technique … in which two different patterns of the same meter are placed in conflict with each other. For example, one 4/4 metrical pattern may begin on the first beat of every 4/4 measure (thus in agreement with the notated meter), while another, conflicting 4/4 pattern begins on the third beat of each measure. The latter pattern is obviously at odds with the notated meter, but it is perceived nonetheless; indeed, 4 This technique is known as the “addition of a root.” The 5–6 motion above the A!-major triad produces an F-minor 63 chord; the root of the F-minor chord is then placed in the bass. 5 In addition to the Burkhart article cited earlier, John Rothgeb (1975) has written cogently about the Mazurka. See also Cadwallader 1990, 5–10. A comprehensive voice-leading graph of the Mendelssohn is presented in Cadwallader, Gagné, and Samarotto 2020, 277–87.
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it is often more strongly perceived than the pattern conforming to the notated meter. (Rothstein 1989, 199)
At the beginning of Op. 62, No. 1, the accent and sforzando signs on third beats do indeed make these beats “more strongly perceived” than the first beats; thus, they are in conflict with the notated meter. However, the first beat of bar 2 and the corresponding one of bar 4 are the locations of important structural events: the opening tonic harmony and the dominant that ends the first phrase. Borrowing the terminology of Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff (1983, 17), we might say that the emphasized third beats represent phenomenal accents, while the emphasized first beats represent structural accents. Because these accents are spaced irregularly—groups of six beats and two beats rather than evenly spaced 4+4—no clear metric pattern emerges in the opening bars; for the perception of meter requires clearly articulated equal spans of time. Is it too fanciful to suggest that both the third beats and the first beats are trying to become metrical accents, but that neither succeeds completely? The odds so far certainly seem to favor the third-beat accents over their conformist rivals, and Mendelssohn’s accent and sforzando signs tell the pianist to give priority to the third beats. Most listeners would tend to hear the downbeats on beat 3 rather than beat 1. In Example 5.2 (57), I present a diagram that concentrates on the metric uncertainties, conflicts, and resolutions. It would be best to consult the diagram together with the score. Notice how the accents (indicated by the arrows) occur at the beginnings of 6+2+6+2+6 groupings until bar 6. In that bar we would expect another accent on beat three; but this does not occur. Mendelssohn forsakes the two-note sighing figures that have provided a place for the mid-bar accents, and he delays the next accent until the notated downbeat of bar 7. And from bar 7 until the end of the A section in bar 10, the accents come regularly on the notated downbeats, and a clear 4/4 meter is established. If Example 5.2 were the printout of an electrocardiogram, we would see a heartbeat—irregular through the first half of the section—suddenly restored to full sinus rhythm. The metric irregularity can be understood as resulting from an inevitable disagreement between meter and the specific rhythmic character of the passage. That rhythmic character involves segments of music—we can call them subphrases or perhaps very short phrases—that contain four half-bars in which an accent falls on the first and fourth of these units. Thus, at the beginning, the accents fall on the opening halfbar and then on the downbeat of bar 2, where the fourth half-bar is located. There is something quite natural sounding in a musical idea that starts with an accent, drops down in intensity and then finishes with an accent. It’s natural and not at all rare, but this particular sequence of beginning accents and ending accents will never generate a metrical pattern. That is because of the inevitably irregular spacing that occurs if the
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accents fall on 1 and 4 rather than on 1 and 3; the perception of meter depends on the articulation of equal spans of time between strong beats. Mendelssohn’s suppressing a third-beat accent in bar 6 makes a group of five half-bars instead of four. This new grouping shifts the next accent over to the next first beat and temporarily ends the metric conflict with the unexpected triumph of the notated downbeats. The middle part (or B section) continues to follow the notated meter. In listening to it, we sense that the music is strongly directed to a goal, and the uniform procession of half-bar units contributes to the forward drive. Although we don’t know it at first, our goal is the subdominant, C major, and Mendelssohn brings us to it through a rising sequence of chromatically enriched fifths and sixths—the well-known 5–6 technique. The last sixth in this series falls on B, and Mendelssohn interprets it as a V 65 chord applied to our goal, the C-major chord. And this provides the opportunity for a kind of false reprise of the opening idea, but now in the subdominant key of C major. Notice that this reprise starts on the first beat rather than the third; it accommodates itself to the metric pattern begun in bar 6 and sustained all through the B section. The struggle of the conflicting downbeats seems to have been won by the notated meter. But is the rhythmic conflict really resolved? Looking at the score, at bar 22, where the reprise starts, the main accent is back on the third beat, just as at the beginning. How does Mendelssohn accomplish this switch? In bar 19, the top voice initiates a brief but beautiful linear progression down a fifth: E–D–C–B–A. In bar 20, the bass answers this progression with its own descent of a fifth: C–B–A–G–F#. Mendelssohn begins this line on the third beat, and his slur indicates to the knowledgeable pianist that the line begins with a third-beat accent. Thus, it is the left-hand part of bars 20–22 that brings the main accents out of phase with the notated meter. The reprise starts with the antecedent phrase, pianissimo instead of piano, but otherwise the same as at the beginning. The consequent phrase, however, is quite different. It starts on beat 3, and by analogy with the beginning, one might hear it at first as a downbeat. The following first beat, however, changes significantly. The harmony is not sustained but moves to a structurally significant IV. This at least opens up the possibility that the downbeat has moved there—hence the arrows and question marks in Example 5.2. In the next bar, Mendelssohn settles the question definitively. His slur, starting on beat 1, and the harmonic rhythm tell us that without any doubt, the victory belongs to the first beat. It is, however, not an easy victory. Following the deceptive cadence of bar 30, a varied repetition of the consequent phrase begins, again with the stress possibly either on beat 3 or the following beat 1. And, again, the first beat wins out. The music from the third beat of bar 26 to the arrival on the final tonic in bar 35 can all be understood as an expansion of a four-bar phrase. The opening figure returns in the coda, again
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emphasizing the third beat. By this time, however, the emphasis must be understood as giving stress to a weak beat but not displacing the true downbeat, which occurs with the tonic on the first beat.
The Mazurka: Phrase Overlap and Harmonic Expansion There’s much one could say about rhythm—especially phrase rhythm—in the Chopin, and Charles Burkhart has already said a lot of it in the article cited earlier. I’ll mention an additional small rhythmic feature: the smoothing over of the division between the antecedent and consequent phrases in the opening section. Whereas Mendelssohn has the antecedent cadencing on a dominant triad, Chopin leads his to a dominant seventh chord. Mendelssohn’s approach is the normal one. In the Classical period, almost all half cadences culminate on a V triad.6 In music of the Romantic period, ending on V7 is much more common; here it contributes to the phrase overlap. And I’ll point out just one beautiful motivic feature, visible in Example 5.3 (58), which charts the Mazurka’s bass line. It shows the notes of the opening theme appearing in harmonic expansion in the middle section, with the return of the theme occurring in the bass at bar 68. In closing, I’ll return to the connections between the two pieces. In both the Chopin and the Mendelssohn, the reprise of the opening idea comprises an antecedent equal in length to the original statement followed by a greatly expanded consequent. In both pieces, the expanded consequent contains the resolution of the Ursatz; at the same time, it forms a kind of long-distance reply on the foreground to the inconclusive cadence at the end of the opening period—a kind of musical exclamation point answering the earlier question mark. This powerful foreground effect brings the Ursatz directly to the ears and hearts of the listeners and constitutes an example of what Schenker called the Fühlungnahme (contact or rapport) among the structural levels. This article has presented the text of a public lecture given at Mannes College of Music in November 2009 as part of a yearlong festival directed by Pavlina Dokovska, “The Mendelssohn Salon,” celebrating the 200th anniversary of the composer’s birth. Because of the festival’s theme, the greater part of the talk was devoted to the Mendelssohn piece. More recently, Carl Schachter expressed further thoughts, mainly on the Chopin Mazurka, in discussions with Eric Wen; we offer the result of these discussions here.
6 An exception is Beethoven’s A-minor Bagatelle, Op. 119, No. 9, bar 4, but late Beethoven is not the composer to investigate as a source for stylistic norms.
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Further Considerations: Harmonic Expansion in Chopin’s Op. 59, No. 2 At the beginning of the final A section, the three phrases spanning bars 69–80 (with phrases 1 and 2 occurring in the bass) are analogous to bars 1–12. In the fourth phrase that starts at bar 81, however, instead of deflecting the tonal motion to III and recalling bars 13–22, Chopin does something most unexpected. Since the final section will ultimately end in the tonic, he foregoes the motion to the mediant and makes a bold detour to E major (bar 85). Furthermore, this E-major harmony is expanded over bars 85–88 to become F! major. E major and F! major are enharmonically equivalent; thus this passage represents the lowered submediant in the overall context of A! major. Example 5.4 (59) clarifies the meaning of the lowered submediant. Rather than understanding the F!-major (=E) harmony as a goal of motion, we can interpret it within an expansion of IV. As shown in the analytic graph, the !VI represents the upper third of subdominant harmony. The bass of the stable F!-chord subsequently descends to an active leading-tone (of V, see bar 88 in Example 5.4), as C! in the top voice is enharmonically transformed into B§. This sonority, consequently, represents the conclusion of the subdominant’s expansion, which resolves to the structural V–I (decorated by a cadential 64 ) that supports the final 3–2–1 descent of the fundamental line in bars 88–89. In the Mendelssohn Song without Words, the reprise of the A section resolves the rhythmic tension of the irregular groupings in the opening by normalizing the phrase rhythm. In the Mazurka, on the other hand, Chopin does the opposite by creating irregularity of phrase rhythm within a most imaginative harmonic diversion to the distant tonal realm of F! major before the final cadence.7
Works Cited Burkhart, Charles. 2005. “The Phrase Rhythm of Chopin’s A! Mazurka, Op. 59, No. 2.” In Engaging Music: Essays in Music Analysis, edited by Deborah Stein, 3–12. New York: Oxford University Press.
Cadwallader, Allen. 1990. “Form and Tonal Process: The Design of Different Structural Levels.” In Trends in Schenkerian Research, edited by Allen Cadwallader, 1–21. New York: Schirmer Books.
Cadwallader, Allen, David Gagné, and Frank Samarotto. 2020. Analysis of Tonal Music: A Schenkerian Approach. 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
7 The Editors would like to acknowledge Hedi Siegel, whose suggestions helped to bring this article to fruition.
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Lerdahl, Fred, and Ray Jackendoff. 1983. A Generative Theory of Tonal Music. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Rothgeb, John. 1975. “Strict Counterpoint and Tonal Theory.” Journal of Music Theory 19, no. 2: 260–84.
Rothstein, William. 1989. Phrase Rhythm in Tonal Music. New York: Schirmer Books.
Schachter, Carl. 1995. “The Triad as Place and Action.” Music Theory Spectrum 17, no. 2: 149–69. Reprinted in Schachter, Carl. 1999. Unfoldings: Essays in Schenkerian Theory and Analysis, edited by Joseph N. Straus, 161–83. New York: Oxford University Press.
Sydow, Bronislas Édouard, Suzanne Chainaye, Denise Chainaye, Irène Sydow, eds. (1953) 1981. Correspondance de Frédéric Chopin: III La Gloire 1840–1849. Recueillie, révisée, annotée et traduit. 3 vols. Paris: La Revue Musicale, Richard-Masse.
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6 J. S. Bach’s Fugue in B minor, BWV 869: Rameau oder Schenker? ER IC W EN
The B-minor Fugue from Book 1 of J. S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier is the only f ugue in the entire collection that Bach designated with a tempo marking. It is also the longest in the whole “48.” The subject of this four-voice Fugue begins in the alto voice, and, as shown in Example 6.1 (62), contains all twelve tones of the chromatic scale. Not surprisingly, Arnold Schoenberg was particularly attracted to this composition, and remarked on several occasions that it was the first twelve-note piece ever written (1975, 393). Unlike most fugues, the subject modulates.1 Although it begins in B minor, it cadences in the dominant key of F# minor. The subject also contains the enharmonically equivalent notes C§ and B#, neither of which belong to the keys of B minor nor F# minor. Characterized by dissonant leaps and six successive Seufzer (“sigh”) figures, the tortuous shape of the B-minor Fugue’s subject was aptly compared by the great nineteenth-century Bach scholar Philipp Spitta to “a crown of thorns” (1889, 176). Despite its status as one of the greatest monuments of Western art music, The WellTempered Clavier was not published until more than half a century after the composer’s death.2 Before then, however, the entire B-minor Fugue from Book 1 was printed in Johann Philipp Kirnberger’s Die wahren Grundsätze zum Gebrauch der Harmonie of 1 Only three other fugues in the entire Well-Tempered Clavier modulate: the Fugues in E! major, E minor, G# minor, all from Book 1. 2 The Bach scholar Yo Tomita has clarified in a private communication with the author that three editions of The Well-Tempered Clavier were brought out at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The first edition of the complete Book 1 was published by Hans Georg Nägeli in Zürich in August 1801. Hoffmeister & Kühnel’s publication, edited by Forkel, was issued in several installments beginning in April 1801, but not completed until May 1802. Finally, Simrock’s edition came out at the beginning of 1802.
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86 Eric Wen 1773. Kirnberger was a student of Bach’s, but was also influenced by the harmonic theories of Rameau. In his treatise, Kirnberger presents a compete harmonic analysis of the entire Fugue underneath the score. A facsimile of the opening bars of this initial publication of the B-minor Fugue is reproduced in Example 6.2 (62–63).
The Fugue Subject At the end of the first bar, following a descending arpeggiation of the tonic triad, Bach initiates the six consecutive sigh figures. The first of these, g#1–f#1, is the neighboring motion of 6 decorating 5. The second, b1–a#1, articulates an appoggiatura to the leading tone 7, suggesting a motion to V. The continuation of these sigh figures at the beginning of bar 2 implies a return to the tonic, but now altered to its major form, as shown in Example 6.3 (63). The two sigh figures on the first two beats of bar 2 are transposed up a whole step in the second half of the bar, and the resultant succession of four sigh figures articulates the sequential pattern presented in Example 6.4 (64). If the final harmony of this implied sequential motion in bar 2 were to be understood as F# major instead of F# minor, the first two measures could be interpreted as a motion from I to V. Example 6.5 (65) shows how bars 1–2 could be understood to support a melodic descent from 3 (d 2) to 2 (c#2). A motion to V at the end of bar 2 would imply a cadence on the tonic at the beginning of bar 3, and Example 6.6 (65) presents a hypothetical countersubject to this curtailed version of the fugue subject. Although this is a plausible fugue theme, it does not incorporate all twelve notes of the chromatic scale. As shown in Example 6.7 (65), if a cadence in B minor were to occur at the beginning of bar 3, the theme would employ only ten of the twelve notes. Since Bach chooses to incorporate all of the notes in the chromatic scale into his subject, he does something most unexpected. Instead of ending the subject on B at the beginning of bar 3, he writes a B#. This adds a whole new dimension to the already very chromatic theme. Not only does the B# avoid tonal closure, it also reverses the direction of the preceding sigh figures by continuing up to C#. A further consequence of this B# is that it enharmonically recalls the C§ on the second beat of the preceding bar. As one might expect, Bach’s remarkable fugue subject has fascinated many musicians, especially music theorists. With the dissemination of Schenkerian theory in the twentieth century, Bach’s subject has inspired voice-leading analyses by a number of theorists. In several published analyses (Beach 1974, 296; Gauldin 1988, 30; Lester 1992, 249; Renwick, 1995, 63 and 131), the second half of bar 2 is interpreted as a C#-major chord that serves as the dominant to the F#-minor harmony in bar 3.
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Furthermore, all regard the b#1 on the downbeat of bar 3 as an accented lower neighbor to the c#2 immediately following. This paper presents alternative readings of the fugue subject from the perspectives of Rameau and Schenker, as exemplified by two early advocates: Johann Philipp Kirn berger and Hans Weisse, respectively. Although espousing ideas that were new in their own times, we shall see that their analytical observations not only have validity, but also provide deep insights into the tonal implications of the fugue theme. We begin with Kirnberger’s eighteenth-century interpretation of the fugue subject, given in the form of a four-part harmonization over la basse fondamentale in Example 6.8 (65). In their discussions of Kirnberger’s analysis of the subject, both Beach and Lester find that he identifies more harmonies than are actually implied. They certainly have a point concerning the second half of the opening bar. While not incorrect, Kirnberger’s harmonization of every eighth note in the sigh figures on the third and fourth beats seems excessive. At the beginning of bar 2, these sigh figures reappear, but now they are supported by a single B in the fundamental bass. This represents an altered tonic chord with its third raised a chromatic semitone from D§ to D# on beat 1 and by the addition of the natural seventh, A§, on beat 2. In Kirnberger’s reading, this altered tonic harmony continues to a C# dominant seventh chord on the third beat. Unlike others who resolve this C# dominant seventh to an F#-minor chord at the beginning of bar 3, Kirnberger places the resolution on the final beat of bar 2. An even more significant difference with the contemporary analysts occurs at the beginning of bar 4, where Kirnberger’s fundamental bass designates the single eighth-note B# as part of a G#-seventh chord. Furthermore, this G#-seventh chord leads to another C#-major chord on the second eighth-note beat of the bar before continuing to an F#minor chord on the second beat. Kirnberger’s understanding of the beginning of bar 3 is completely at odds with all four of the interpretations cited earlier. So does the majority reading rule? Was Kirnberger—as Beach and Lester believe—simply unable to take a broad overview of the tonal structure? Although I don’t agree with everything in Kirnberger’s analysis, I believe he is actually correct to read the B# at the beginning of bar 4 as a bona fide harmony, and not merely an incomplete neighbor note. As noted at the outset, one of the idiosyncratic features of the Fugue is that the subject modulates from I to V. Bearing this in mind, let’s consider how one would modulate to the dominant key of F# minor in B minor. In order to establish the key of F# minor, it is necessary to bring in its leading tone E#, framed within a C#-major chord that functions as its dominant. As shown in Example 6.9 (66), the pivot chord in this modulation is the original B-minor tonic itself, which is re-interpreted as IV in F# minor. The successive structural levels show
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88 Eric Wen a chromatically inflected voice exchange that transforms the original B-minor tonic into a leading-tone chord that resolves to the V of F# minor. Having made a tonal connection between the opening B-minor tonic and the 43 chord over D# at the beginning of bar 3, how do we interpret the intervening events? Specifically, what is the meaning of the implied F# chord at the end of bar 2 that Kirnberger annotates in his chordal analysis? Example 6.10 (67) clarifies the meaning of the F#-minor chord. Ultimately, it serves as a non-structural 53 chord that supports the passing tone c#2 between d 2 and b#1 in the top voice. Level e presents a foreground analysis of the modulating fugue subject. Unlike Kirnberger’s chordal analysis, which designates three root-position F#-minor chords in bars 2, 3 and 4, the voice-leading analysis distinguishes between their different meanings. As noted earlier, the opening B-minor tonic serves as the pivot chord in the modulation from B minor to F# minor. Functioning as IV in the key of F# minor, it is transformed into a II 43 on the downbeat of bar 3. The implied F#-minor chord on the last beat of bar 2 does not yet represent a true arrival in the key of the minor dominant, but rather serves as a passing chord between the IV and the chromatically inflected II 43 that leads directly to the C#-major V chord. The F#-minor sonority on the second beat of bar 3 results from a 6 4 decoration of the dominant chord. Thus the true arrival in F# minor only occurs on the downbeat of bar 4. Example 6.11 (68) shows the motivic parallelisms between the beginning and ending of the fugue subject. In the modulation from I to V, the initial stable tonic note B becomes a dynamic element through its chromatic inflection to B# at the beginning of bar 3. This alteration of 1 is subtly prepared in the preceding measure, where it appears in its enharmonic form as C§. At the perfect authentic cadence in F# minor, the 2–1 descent in the key of the minor dominant (g#1–f#1) recalls the initial sigh figure 6–5 in the tonic key of B minor (g1–f#1) at the outset of the fugue subject. Appropriately, each is preceded by a descending apreggiation in its respective key.
The Answer in Combination with the Countersubject With the completion of the modulating subject on the downbeat of bar 4, the answer begins in the tenor part on the second eighth of the bar. Example 6.12 (68) presents various possibilities of answering the subject. A straightforward real answer transposes the original subject up a perfect fifth. In a standard tonal answer, the initial 5 in the subject is answered by 1 instead of 2, followed by a transposition of the rest of the fugue theme up a fifth. Bach’s answer is different from either of these. The first four notes articulate what one might expect from a tonal answer. On the fifth note, however, Bach writes a B, instead of C#. Although it is not unusual to substitute 1 for
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appearances of 5 at the outset of a tonal answer, the subsequent leap up to E instead of F# alters the transposition. Instead of continuing up a fifth, the entire answer is now transposed up a fourth (or down a fifth) from its original statement.3 Thereafter, from the sixth note onwards, the transposition of the fugue theme remains intact. Following its completion of the subject on the downbeat of bar 4, the alto part continues with the countersubject. Although it is standard procedure to have the tonal answer begin on 1, what’s unusual is that this opening note, despite articulating the consonant interval of a perfect fifth, sounds dissonant. As shown in Example 6.13 (68), having established the dominant key of F# minor in bar 4, b (the first note of the answer) is heard as scale degree 4 in this newly established key. Furthermore, e#1 (the first note of the countersubject) is heard as #7 in F# minor. The e#1 and b make up the key-defining tritone that resolves to f#1 (1) over a§ (3) on the second beat of the bar. The countersubject continues in even sixteenth notes on the second and third beats in bar 4 before arriving on a quarter note on the fourth and final beat. Throughout the Fugue, each time it occurs, the countersubject begins with a group of nine sixteenth notes, leading into a quarter note that initiates a descending scale. The melodic pattern of the sixteenth notes leading into the quarter note, however, varies over the course of the Fugue. Example 6.14 (69) presents all three statements of the Fugue theme in the exposition (bars 4–16). A comparison of the countersubjects, marked by the square brackets, shows how different these groups of nine sixteenth notes are from one another. The writhing motion of the countersubject’s opening sixteenth notes, leading into a descending scale of even quarter notes, is in marked contrast to the sigh figures of the subject in even eighth notes. Even more remarkable is the counterpoint between the two parts at its very first combination. In an article entitled “The Music Teacher’sDilemma” (1935), Hans Weisse, one of the most important early advocates of Schenkerian theory,4 notes that at the end of bar 4, the counterpoint between the fifth and sixth notes of the subject, against the countersubject’s last two sixteenths leading 3 Although subdominant answers are unusual, Bach does occasionally employ them. The most wellknown example is, of course, the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565, but there are several other keyboard works with subdominant answers: the Contrapunctus alla decima (No.10) from Die Kunst der Fugue, two organ fugues in C major, BWV 531 and BWV 547, and the organ fugue in D minor, BWV 539, which is a keyboard version of the fugue from the Solo Violin Sonata No.1 in G minor. Subdominant answers by Bach also occur in the fugues of the Sinfonia of the Partita No.2 in C minor, BWV 826, the Overture of the Orchestral Suite No.3 in D, BWV 1068, and the opening movement of the French Overture in B minor from Clavierübung III, BWV 831. In Book 2 of The Well-Tempered Clavier, the C#-major Fugue begins with a tonal answer, but continues the transposition of the fugue theme up a fourth. In the C#-minor Fugue that follows it, the answer of the second fugue subject occurs at the upper fourth instead of fifth. 4 Berry (2003) traces Hans Weisse’s influence in disseminating Schenker’s ideas in the United States in the 1930s.
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90 Eric Wen up to the high f#2, contains the daring intervallic succession of a seventh followed by two ninths. Example 6.15 (69) reproduces Weisse’s voice-leading analysis of this curious passage. Presented in three stages on the lower staff, the chordal motion on the far right presents the background motion leading from the F#-minor harmony that begins the answer in bar 4 to an E-major 63 chord at the outset of bar 5. At the middle ground level to its left, a B-minor chord precedes the E-major 63 , and becomes its applied V 42 by raising D to D# and adding the seventh A§ in the bass. At the foreground (far left), the two inner voices of this applied dominant are decorated by their upper neighbors, C§ and E. Example 6.16 (70) presents the motion from the F#-minor 53 chord to the E-major 63 chord shown in Weisse’s analysis. Essentially the F# minor harmony becomes activated through a 5 – #6 motion to become an applied chord that tonicizes E major. The root-position B-minor chord (introduced in level d) does not yet represent a return to the tonic, but serves to prepare the applied dominant of E major. Kirnberger’s fundamental-bass analysis of this passage, given in Example 6.17 (71), is quite similar to Weisse’s. Kirnberger essentially reads the first half of bar 4 as in F# minor and the latter half as a B-major dominant seventh chord that resolves to an Emajor harmony at the start of bar 5. What is peculiar, however, is Kirnberger’s fundamental bass designation of C# at the beginning of the third beat. Articulated as a diminished seventh chord in 42 position with D§ in the bass, this leads to a diminished seventh chord in root position over D#. The resultant fundamental-bass succession of C# to B on the third beat of bar 4 is nevertheless perplexing. Although Kirnberger’s chordal analysis doesn’t make sense as a harmonic progression, his hearing of a diminished-seventh sonority at the beginning of the third beat is significant and offers an insight into the tonal meaning of this bar. Taking Weisse’s analysis as a starting point, Example 6.18 (72) focuses upon the motion from his implied B-minor chord on the third beat of bar 4 to the E-major 63 chord on the downbeat of the following bar. In level a, the B-minor chord is altered into an applied VII 43 through the neighboring motion of b1 to c§2 in the inner voice. In level b, f#2 descends a third down to d#2 over the applied VII 43 . As shown in level c, this allows for the insertion of an intervening A-minor 53 chord between the B-minor and VII 43 chords. This A-minor chord serves a contrapuntal purpose: designated as “CS” (consonant support), it prepares both the A in the bass and the inner-voice C§ in the applied VII 43 . In order to mitigate the errant voice leading of parallel fifths in the outer voices, an applied diminished seventh chord over G# is inserted between the root-position B-minor and A-minor chords. This is the diminished seventh sonority that Kirnberger designates in his fundamental bass analysis. Rather than continuing
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to a B dominant seventh harmony as Kirnberger designates, this chordal sonority functions as an applied VII7 to an A-minor 53 chord. Example 6.19 (72) shows a further elaboration of the the B-minor chord into an applied VII 43 of the E-major 63 chord. Instead of articulating a descending third motion from f#2 to d#2, as shown in level c of Example 6.18, the top voice begins an octave lower on f#1, and is transferred up an octave to f#2. The intervening A-minor chord is no longer tonicized by a root-position applied VII7 over G#, but by a VII 43 with b carried over from the bass of the implied B-minor chord. Following the arrival of the A-minor chord, an arpeggiated skip from a1 to c§2 occurs in the top voice. The expressive skip up an augmented fourth from c§2 reaches the f#2 above the applied VII 43 of the E-major 63 chord. Example 6.20 (73) contextualizes the alteration of the B-minor harmony into the VII 43 that tonicizes E major from the start of the answer at the beginning of bar 4. As shown in level a, the f#1 that appears above the entrance of the answer in the minor dominant at the beginning of bar 4 is held over the B-minor chord on the third beat. In level b, rather than retaining the f#1 over both harmonies, an arpeggiation from f#1 to c#2 leads to b1 in the top voice over the B-minor chord. A skip down from b1 to g#1 transforms this harmony into the VII 43 of the root-position A-minor chord. Level c presents the foreground voice-leading of this remarkable passage. The graphic analysis distinguishes between the notes of the actual music in black with the implied tones shaded in grey and shows the implied suspensions. The b in the bass on the second half of beat 3 delays the arrival of a in the manner of a 9–10 suspension. The e1 postpones the inner-voice d#1 in the VII 43 on the fourth beat, and the a at the beginning of bar 5 carries over the bass of the A-minor chord before it resolves to the g# supporting the E-major 63 chord at the beginning of bar 5. But does this interpretation overly emphasize the third beat in bar 4? Are we reading too much into Kirnberger’s designation of a diminished seventh sonority and the fundamental bass notation of C# in the bass? Is not the g#1 preceding the a1 simply an incomplete neighbor note? Although the inference of an A-minor chord might seem to be an exaggerated claim, there is a clue to the meaning of this passage from Bach himself. In the autograph manuscript of the B-minor Fugue,5 Bach made a small change that actually validates this very intricate reading. The upper staff of Example 6.21 (73) presents the original version of bar 4 from Bach’s autograph manuscript. On the third beat, Bach initially wrote the bass as d1–c#1, before changing it to 1 d –b. Furthermore, the right-hand part of the last sixteenth of beat 3 was originally left as c#2, and not altered to c§2. The resultant harmony of the second half of the third 5 The holograph manuscript of Book 1 of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier is housed in the Staats bibliothek zu Berlin (Berlin State Library), where it is designated as manuscript P 415. It has been reproduced in facsimile several times, most recently in an edition published by Bärenreiter in 2015.
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92 Eric Wen beat is clearly A major. As shown in the analysis presented underneath Bach’s original notation, an A-major, rather than an A-minor chord, now prepares the dissonant a in the bass of the VII 43 that follows. The subsequent change Bach made in the final version alters the mode of the CS chord, and allows for an implied 9–10 suspension in the bass below c§2. Kirnberger’s designation of a diminished seventh chord at the beginning of the third beat of bar 4 is therefore correct. His subsequent continuation to a dominant seventh sonority over B, however, results from reading the interval of a seventh (a1 over b) that follows as part of a harmonic entity. The top-voice a1 is a chord tone, but the b beneath it is a suspension that delays the arrival of a, as shown in Example 6.20c. Upon the arrival of the E-major 63 chord at the start of bar 5, the countersubject continues in even quarter notes. This descending quarter-note motion not only occurs in tandem with the two subsequent entries in the exposition, as shown in Example 6.14, but in all subsequent appearances of the Fugue theme. Recalling the tonal implications of the second bar of the unaccompanied subject given in Example 6.4, it would seem that Bach’s original subject implies a rising sequential-like pattern. Bach’s countersubject in descending quarter notes, however, goes against the intrinsic meaning of the subject’s rising two-beat pattern of sigh figures. Example 6.22 (74) presents the countersubject in conjunction with the original forms of both the second measure of the subject in the tonic key of B minor (Example 6.22a) and the answer in the dominant key of F# minor (Example 6.22b). As shown in the chordal reductions, the first two beats in bar 2 and bar 5 do not articulate two separate chords, but represent an implied 8–7 descent over a single harmony. In fact, the last two beats only make sense if understood as two distinct chords. What is the meaning, therefore, of the E-major 63 chord that begins bar 5? Example 6.23 (74) shows its function within the overall context in the home key of B minor. Understanding F# minor as the minor dominant in B minor, the E-major 63 chord serves as a passing 63 chord between the root-position form of F# minor at the beginning of bar 4 and the F# major 63 on the third beat of bar 5. Essentially, two unequal linear progressions—a descending fourth in the top voice over a rising third in the bass—expand this harmony. Following its modal alteration from minor to major, the F#-major harmony becomes a true dominant and resolves to a root-position B-minor chord on the last beat of the bar. Example 6.24 (75) presents a foreground graph of bars 4–5, showing how the polyphonic melody of the fugue theme, with its expressive appoggiaturas and suspensions, delays the arrival of individual notes in the chords of the progression. With the arrival on a B-minor chord at the end of bar 5, it would appear that we are back in the home key. However, although the B-minor harmony is nominally I, it does not yet represent a return to the tonic. The true return to the B-minor tonic occurs at the start of bar
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7, at the completion of the answer. Like the F#-minor chord on the fourth beat of bar 2 in the subject, this B-minor chord in the parallel position serves a contrapuntal purpose. In order to understand its meaning, we need to consider the overall tonal meaning of the answer. Having tonicized the dominant key of F# minor in the initial statement of the subject, the answer ultimately returns back to the home key of B minor. To do so, the minor form of dominant harmony must be altered into a major chord that can function as V in B minor. Example 6.25 (76) presents the tonal motion from the answer’s entry in F# minor at the beginning of bar 4 to the return of the B-minor tonic at the third entry in bar 7. Note that the two unequal linear progressions moving in contrary motion in bars 4–5 presented in Example 6.23 are incorporated at the beginning of levels h and i. Example 6.26 (77) presents a foreground analysis of the V–I cadence in the tonic key of B minor at the conclusion of the answer. The foreground analysis of this final cadence given in level e shows an elaborate decoration of the top-voice suspension over the last two beats with the rising scale in sixteenth-notes. This ascending scale leads to an incomplete upper neighbor g2 of the transferred inner-voice chord tone f#2. At the arrival on the tonic on the downbeat of bar 7, the implied d1 in the inner voice is brought up an octave to the top-voice d 2. Here, at the answer’s cadence back in the tonic, the very opening of the original subject, with its descending arpeggio figure f#1–d1–b, is poignantly echoed. Example 6.27 (77) presents a foreground analysis of the answer in combination with the countersubject. (In order to highlight the notes in the fugue theme and the countersubject, all implied notes are notated in grey.) Having clarified the tonal structure of both the unaccompanied subject and the answer in combination with the countersubject, we can now understand the reason for Bach’s unusual decision to transpose the answer up by a fourth, rather than a fifth, from the tonic statement of the subject. The tonal motion from I to V in the modu lating subject is a rising fifth, but that from V back to I in the answer is a rising fourth. In order to accommodate this motion, Bach alters the transposition level of the answer to return to the tonic and maintain tonal unity.
Subsequent Appearances of the Fugue Theme Despite appearing in different voices throughout the Fugue, the many occurrences of the subject and answer generally follow the voice-leading structure presented in the preceding analyses. Bach does, however, sometimes make modifications in the presentation of the theme throughout the course of the Fugue, and the final portion of this paper considers some of these alterations.
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94 Eric Wen Of all the many appearances of the theme, there is only one statement where Bach foregoes the countersubject altogether. This occurs in bars 60–63, where the subject appears in the lowest voice and begins on the third instead of the first beat of the bar. Rather than bringing back the countersubject, Bach now writes free counterpoint in the upper two parts. Here he also chooses not to exploit the implied sequential pattern of the second bar of the subject. As shown in Example 6.28 (78), the last sigh figure on the second beat of bar 62 appears over a F#-minor harmony, maintaining the tonal implications of all the settings in combination with the countersubject. Although the countersubject occurs above every appearance of the subject and answer, there is one single instance where it appears beneath the fugue theme. This happens over bars 13–16, where the soprano voice presents the fourth and final entry of the fugal exposition. As shown back in Example 6.14c, the statement of the answer is now combined with the only appearance of the countersubject in the bass. Beginning on the last sixteenth note of the first beat in the tenor part, the countersubject is transferred into the bass voice at the arrival of the quarter-note f# on the fourth beat. As with the second entrance in the fugal exposition, when the fourth voice enters in bar 13, F# minor is the governing harmony. Following the third entry’s cadence in the key of the minor dominant at the beginning of bar 12, Bach writes a short onemeasure episode between the third and fourth entries. Example 6.29 (78) shows how this bar leads to B minor. This does not represent a return to the home key, however, but a motion to subdominant harmony in the key of F# minor. The fourth entry carries forth the key of the minor dominant established in bar 12, before ultimately transforming it into the V of B minor at bar 15. Example 6.30 (79) presents an analysis of the fugue theme supported by the countersubject in the bass.6 Essentially, the F#-minor harmony at the beginning of the answer becomes the V 65 of B minor through its modal alteration to major and the addition of the seventh, E§. 6 In the foreground graphic analysis presented in level f, the third beat in the right-hand part follows the version which has the interval succession d 2–c#2 over e#1–f#1, instead of d 2–b1 over e#1–d#1. This is the reading from the copy described by Spitta (1889) as the “Fischhoff ” manuscript, which is currently in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin where it is designated as manuscript P 401. The scribe of this source has been identified as Bernhard Christian Kayser, a pupil of J. S. Bach, and it is believed to be the version made just before the holograph manuscript. Although Bach’s autograph preserves the tonal answer as it first appears in bar 4, Donald Francis Tovey preferred the reading in P 401, with c#2 instead of b1 following d 2 on the third beat bar 13. He commented that “with the entry of the fourth part (soprano), [the] tonal answer is almost impossible to harmonise, and the autographs leave it doubtful whether Bach was really satisfied with his alteration there. Even according to scholastic rule it is no longer so necessary to make a strictly tonal answer when the fourth voice appears” (Tovey 1924, 175). Although Hans Bischoff follows the P 415 version of this bar in his 1883 performing edition, he remarks that P 401 “is decidedly more natural, whereas the [holograph] version can only be explained as a harmonic ellipsis” (1883, 160).
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The final modification of the Fugue theme to be examined is the alternative harmonization of the cadence in bar 23. In the analyses of the final cadence of both the initial statements of the subject and answer, the long half note in the Fugue theme at the end of bars 3 and 7 articulates the arrival on the dominant of F# and B minor, respectively. In bar 23, however, at the end of the appearance of the subject in the alto voice, Bach clearly supports the long g#1 in bar 23 with the harmonic progression II 65 –V. The return of the subject at bar 21 represents the Fugue theme’s first reappearance following the initial exposition. The countersubject begins on a#1 in the soprano on the last sixteenth note of the first beat in bar 21, and continues in the bass for the second and third beats before re-surfacing in the top voice c#2 at the appearance of the descending quarter notes on the fourth beat of the bar. Although it would appear that this statement of the subject begins in the tonic key of B minor, it actually articulates the subdominant in the key of F# minor. At the arrival of the third episode in bar 17, F# minor is established, and this key is extended through bar 24. The episode is made up of a pair of two-measure units, the second of which presents the upper two voices of the first in invertible counterpoint. Furthermore, the even eighth notes in the bass line recall the two-note sigh figures of the subject in inversion. Example 6.31 (80) shows the combined-species formulation that forms the basis of the voice leading of the episode over bars 19–20. Example 6.32 (80) contextualizes bars 19–20 of the episode within the key of F# minor. Essentially, the episode articulates a motion from I in F# minor to IV in B minor. The five levels of Example 6.33 (81) present the tonal structure of bars 19–24. These bars prolong F# minor, and embrace the return of the fugue subject following the third episode. The entrance of the fugue theme in bar 21 signals the arrival on IV, which becomes a II 65 at the beginning of bar 23, after which a perfect authentic cadence appears in the key of the minor dominant. As it turns out, this harmonization of the long half note matches Kirnberger’s fundamental bass analysis. As shown in Kirnberger’s analysis of bars 3 and 7 (see Examples 6.8 and 6.17), he reads the long half note in both the subject and the answer supported by two chords: II7 and V. Although Bach usually treats the long half note at the end of the subject as a single V harmony decorated by suspensions, in this instance, Kirnberger’s two-chord harmonization is validated.
***** Because the discipline of music theory developed substantially in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, there is a tendency to belittle the analytical attempts of
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96 Eric Wen early music theorists. Although Kirnberger did not himself have access to the more sophisticated analytical techniques that were developed later, he was a well-grounded musician with a keen ear. More importantly, he had a direct connection to Bach himself. In our examination of the initial two entries of Bach’s remarkable B-minor Fugue, we been fortunate to draw upon the insights of two exceptional musicians. Although often thought of as representing opposing analytical perspectives, Kirnberger’s use of Rameau’s fundamental bass and Weisse’s adoption of Schenkerian graphic analysis both help to illuminate one of J. S. Bach’s most daring and profound works.
Works Cited Beach, David. 1974. “The Origins of Harmonic Analysis.” Journal of Music Theory 18, no. 2: 274–306.
Berry, David Carson. 2003. “Hans Weisse and the Dawn of American Schenkerism.” Journal of Musicology 20, no. 1: 104–56. Bischoff, Hans, ed. 1883. Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier. Hanover: Steingräber Edition.
Gauldin, Robert. 1988. A Practical Approach to Eighteenth-Century Counterpoint. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Jones, Richard. 2013. The Creative Development of J. S. Bach. Volume 2: 1717–50. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Kirnberger, Johann. 1773. Die wahren Grundsätze zum Gebrauch der Harmonie. Berlin and Königsberg: Decker und Hartung; reprint, Hildesheim: Olms Verlag, 1970. Kirnberger’s entire harmonic analysis of J. S. Bach’s B-minor Fugue from Book 1 is reprinted and translated by David W. Beach and Jurgen Thym in “The True Principles for the Practice of Harmony by Johann Philipp Kirnberger.” Journal of Music Theory 23, no. 2 (Autumn 1979): 163–225. Lester, Joel. 1992. Compositional Theory in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Renwick, William. 1995. Analyzing Fugue: A Schenkerian Approach. New York: Pendragon Press.
Schoenberg, Arnold. 1975. Style and Idea. Edited by Leonard Stein. Translated by Leo Black. London: Faber and Faber.
Spitta, Philipp. 1889. Johann Sebastian Bach. Volume 2. English translation by Clara Bell and J. A. Fuller-Maitland. London: Novello. Reprint, New York: Dover, 1951.
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Tomita, Yo. 2007. “Most Ingenious, Most Learned, and Yet Practicable Work.” Newsletter of the American Bach Society 7: 1–12. Tovey, Donald Francis. 1924. “Commentary on Fugue in B minor.” In Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1, 174–75. London: The Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music.
Weisse, Hans. 1935. “The Music Teacher’s Dilemma.” Proceedings of the Music Teachers National Association: 122–37. Reprinted in Weisse, Hans. 1985. Theory and Practice 10, no. 1–2: 29–48.
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7 Schenker, Sonata Form, and the Schubert Symphonies DAV ID BEACH
Schubert’s treatment of sonata form—more specifically his innovations in dealing with this formal scheme—has received a fair amount of attention in recent years. Initially these innovations were described in reference to elements of musical design; that is, in terms of key relationships, number of themes, and formal design. The results of this research—the description of procedures such as the three theme/three key exposition and the subdominant recapitulation—are well documented, especially in reference to Schubert’s later chamber music.1 This study will differ from others in that it will examine Schubert’s treatment of sonata form across his adult life as evidenced in one genre, the symphony. The eight symphonies span the years 1813–1828, the latter half of his life. We will examine these fifteen movements first in terms of their formal design and then in terms of the effect any innovations may have on our interpretation of their voice-leading structures from a Schenkerian perspective.2 This will require a definition of the conventional model of classical sonata form and a brief review of Schenker’s conception of its structure. The fifteen movements will not be discussed in chronological order, but in five categories defined below. It could be argued convincingly that there are several models of sonata form exhibited in the classical repertoire, but I think we can agree on a basic formal model that serves as the fundamental plan for sonata form in the classical period (Table 1).3 This 1 See, for example, the following sources listed in the Selected Bibliography: Beach (1993; and 2017, chapter 4); Clark (2011, chapter 3); and Sly (2009). 2 The fact that I am proceeding from the perspective of formal design in a volume devoted to Schenkerian analysis/theory might seem odd to some, but it is from this perspective that we perceive and describe Schubert’s treatment of sonata form and then can evaluate these innovations in relation to Schenker’s conception of its structure. 3 The formal outline provided here is intentionally very basic. Detailed descriptions of classical sonata form can be found in the following sources: Caplin (1998); Hepokosky and Darcy (2006).
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is familiar territory, but worth describing briefly, since this is the norm against which we can describe variants in design. The first part of the form, the exposition, typically contains two themes/two tonal areas. In the major mode these themes are stated in the tonic and dominant keys, respectively. Wherever the following development may lead, it will eventually return to the dominant in preparation for the recapitulation and restatement of the two themes in the tonic key. In the minor mode the two themes are normally stated in the tonic and mediant keys, respectively, and the development then leads to the dominant. The two themes in the recapitulation are then stated in the tonic, the second frequently in the major mode. Table 1: Classical Model of Sonata Form
Exposition
Development
Themes
1 trans. 2
(
)
Recapitulation 1 trans. 2
Tonal area (major) ||: I
V :|| --------------------- 7
I
I
Tonal area (minor) ||: i
III :|| ------------------- V
i
i/I
From the perspective of formal design, sonata form has its origin in the rounded binary form, but once you remove the repeats, as we do in considering the voice leading across these boundaries, then the formal design is ternary: exposition–development–recapitulation. This is the view taken by Schenker.4 Furthermore, Schenker defines the structure as consisting of two parts defined by the interruption, as shown in Table 2. In the major mode, the interruption occurs in conjunction with a statement of the second theme in the exposition. The development section subsequently prolongs the dominant, transforming it from stable to unstable, often by the addition of the seventh, and, following the restatement of the primary tone in the recapitulation, the voice leading proceeds to closure, normally via a statement of the second theme in the tonic. In the minor mode, interruption is not achieved until arrival at the structural dominant in the retransition. As I have noted elsewhere (Beach 2019, 196–98), it is possible to break this down further into structural prototypes (four in major keys and four in minor keys) based on the combinations of 3-line and 5-line characteristics of the two themes.
4 See Schenker (1979, chapter 5, section 3).
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Table 2: Structural Prototypes
Exposition
Major
5/3 . . . . . 2 // 5/3 . . . . . 2 I V ------------------------------- 7 I V
1 I
Minor
(5 i
1 i
4)
Development
3 2 // III ---------------------------- V 7
Recapitulation
(5 4) 3 2 i i V
From a structural perspective, Schenker was quite clear in his pronouncement that “only the prolongation of a division (interruption) gives rise to sonata form” (Schenker 1979, 134). It is remarkable how many sonata movements do conform to this conception of the underlying structure, but we are beginning to recognize variants of Schenker’s model. Ernst Oster, for example, cites a variant in his often-cited footnote in Free Composition (1979, 139–41). In this variant the primary tone 5 is retained until its descent to closure in the recapitulation, while it is an inner voice that progresses from 3 to the interruption in the exposition. Oster is careful to retain the notion of an interruption, albeit in an inner voice, but in reality what he is describing (without saying so) is an undivided structure. Furthermore, since his time, research has uncovered several examples of sonata-form movements that are undivided without any interruption, even in an inner voice. Consider, for example, the interpretations of the two movements of Schubert’s Symphony No. 8 (“Unfinished”), D. 759 (Beach 2016) and of the first movement of the Octet, D. 803 (Mak 2016). These and other analyses present an important extension—one that will be reinforced in the following pages— of Schenker’s original conception of the form. More than half of the sonata movements in the Schubert symphonies conform (with only minor variants) to the classical formal model provided in Table 1 and to Schenker’s conception of its structure. The presentation of these fifteen movements has been divided into five categories, as follows: 1. One movement that conforms both to the classical model and to Schenker’s conception of its structure. 2. Minor variants of the classical model. 3. Examples of non-tonic formal returns and their interpretation from a Schenkerian perspective. 4. Tonic returns that may not be structural, but rather may function as a V of IV. 5. A special case.
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Because this overview of Schubert’s symphonies deals with fifteen separate movements, the graphs of their structures must be limited to their deep middleground/ background structures, which means that a great deal of interesting information about individual uniqueness must unfortunately be omitted.
One Movement that Conforms both to the Classical Model and to Schenker’s Conception of its Structure The one movement that conforms both to our classical model and to Schenker’s idea of sonata form is the fourth movement of Symphony No. 5. (Those movements in the next category differ from this movement only in that they vary in some way in their designs, but otherwise exhibit clear divided structures.) This is no surprise, since the character and the design of the entire symphony is classical. The exposition of the fourth movement consists of two distinct themes, the first stated in the tonic and the second in the dominant. The first theme has the design a a' ||: b a'' :||, where a is an antecedent phrase and a' is the consequent; b is contrasting in some respects, though, as is typical in similar situations, it is derived from a. Following a transition, the second theme, which might be described as a musical sentence, is stated twice. It consists of a four-bar basic idea that is repeated, then followed by a continuation to the cadence.5 From a structural perspective, both themes descend a major third, so we can predict that closure will occur with the statement of the second theme in the tonic key in the recapitulation. This, indeed, is the case. A deep middleground graph of the movement up to the restatement of the primary tone (3) at the beginning of the recapitulation is provided in Example 7.1 (84).6 Interruption of the fundamental structure occurs within the exposition, and the development section prolongs the dominant, which is transformed by the addition of the 7th in anticipation of the return. The A! harmony internal to this prolongation provides consonant support for e!2 prior to its function as the dissonant seventh of the dominant. From a motivic perspective, the development is based almost entirely on the opening gesture of the first theme.
Minor Variants of the Classical Model I had originally considered including the first movement of the Symphony No. 9 in C major (“Great”) in the first category along with the fourth movement of Symphony No. 4. That may seem a bit of a stretch considering their obvious differences—not only their characters, but also the breadth and the more adventuresome harmonic 5 For a clear definition of the musical sentence see Caplin (1998, 9–11 and Example 1.1). 6 In this and the remaining examples the Arabic numbers between the staves designate themes.
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l anguage characteristic of Schubert’s late works—yet they share similar formal designs and structures. Symphony No. 9 opens with a slow introduction with its horn theme, which functions like a motto. The introduction also presents two notable harmonic features—first, the juxtaposition of B major and G7 sonorities, which function like a secondary motto as well as predict that E major/minor will play a role in the ensuing drama. Second, it contains an emphasis on A! as upper neighbor of the dominant, a feature later expanded in the development section. The exposition contains two themes, the first in the tonic and the second (bar 78ff.) eventually in the dominant, a characteristic of our classical model. The path to the dominant is noteworthy in two respects. First is the varied statement of the B/G7 juxtaposition first heard in the introduction, and second is the subsequent statement of the second theme in E minor (III), anticipating its statement on the dominant. Stating the second theme twice in the new key is common, but stating it in two different keys is reminiscent of the three theme/three key exposition, a procedure Schubert had employed in earlier works. Here the function of E minor is clearly secondary to the primary motion from I to V, the latter subsequently prolonged by a motion to E! (!VI of the dominant). The development section extends A! (!VI), the chromatic upper neighbor of the dominant, by a progression of descending major thirds, a characteristic progression in many of Schubert’s late works: A! minor–E minor–C minor–A!minor. The retransition, based on the horn motto, further extends A! before it resolves to the dominant. The recapitulation then opens with the first theme stated in the tonic key, this time with an internal emphasis on E major (III#). This is followed by two statements of the second theme, the first in C minor, the second in C major. An interesting feature of the motion to closure is the juxtaposition/overlap of a descending progression of major thirds (C –A!–E–C) with 2/V to 1/I, as shown in Example 7.2 (84), a middleground graph of this movement. Example 7.2 reveals that both themes have descending thirds as their basis, which is also true of the horn theme (not shown). As with the fourth movement of Symphony No. 4, we can anticipate that structural close will occur by means of the statement of the second theme in the recapitulation. Because there are two statements of this theme, the first in C minor and the second in C major, it is the second statement, where §3 is reinstated, that fulfills this function of structural closure.7 The clear descent of the Urlinie, 3–2–1, comes finally in bars 562–69 leading into the coda. Example 7.2 also shows that the interruption of the fundamental structure occurs within the exposition and is subsequently prolonged through the development, corresponding 7 The modally lowered primary tone (!3) is first introduced in the prolongation of the dominant in the exposition (not shown) and subsequently emphasized in the development as the upper neighbor of 2.
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to what I have presented in Table 2 as the prototype of Schenker’s conception of the structure of sonata form. The second movement to be considered here is the first movement of Symphony No. 1. An unusual feature of this movement is the repetition of the slow introduction prior to the recapitulation, which disrupts the flow of the movement by the abrupt change of tempo and premature return of tonic harmony. Also, the development section barely strays from the dominant, which perhaps is not surprising for a youthful work. One of the issues facing the analyst dealing with this movement is the determination of primary tone, 3 or 5. As shown in Example 7.3 (85), I have chosen 5, but I can think of reasons to support the choice of 3 as well. First, the opening gestures of the exposition, the basic idea of the musical sentence and its answer, firmly articulate 3, and it is only in the continuation that the melodic line progresses to a 2. Second, the descent of the fundamental line to interruption does not receive strong harmonic support, but rather a contrapuntal progression in parallel tenths, as shown by the curved lines in Example 7.3. And third, the ascent 3–4–5 of the second theme is achieved by the overlapping of 5 above the resolution of 4 (the dissonant seventh of the dominant), which occurs in the bass, as indicated by the arrow in the example. In short, a case can be made for interpreting 5 as a prominent cover tone above 3, though the remainder of the evidence—the preponderance of descending fifths at various levels—supports the reading given here. The initial statement of the first theme in the exposition descends a fifth to local closure, and it is the second statement that leads to the interruption. The second theme ascends to its fifth e2 (2), then descends a fifth to local closure in the dominant. The main feature of the development section, which is based entirely on the second theme, is the temporary modal change from major to minor. After a lengthy retransition, the surprise comes with the restatement of the slow introduction (bar 334), which does prepare the return to 5 and the tonic. The motion to closure occurs in the extension of the second theme, following a progression through VI to IV, which supports 4 of the fundamental line, followed immediately by the remainder of the structural descent. The fourth movement of this same symphony is also in sonata form, though this might not be immediately apparent due to the absence of the standard repeat of the exposition. There may have been a practical reason for this decision, namely, the already existing repetitions within the exposition. The first theme area consists of two parts, the theme proper and the following tutti. This is then repeated, the second part completing the modulation to the dominant. The second theme area also consists of two parts, the theme, which is repeated, and the following orchestral tutti. The main features of the development are the two statements of the second theme in F major, heard locally as !VI in the key of the dominant, and the ensuing return to V by means
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of an augmented sixth chord. The recapitulation states both themes in the tonic, though there is a brief excursion recalling B!, now functioning as !VI in the home key. A middleground sketch of the movement is provided in Example 7.4 (85). Here the primary tone is identified as f#2 (3) with a 2 as covering, and the second theme is shown as a descending fifth, which, in the exposition, initially prolongs e2 (2) at the interruption of the fundamental line. Looking ahead we can see that the motion to closure occurs in conjunction with the descending fifth of this second theme in the recapitulation.8 Speaking of the second theme, it has exactly the same under lying structure as the second theme in the first movement, an ascending third 3–4–5, where 4 is the dissonant seventh of the dominant and the continuation up to 5 must be understood as achieved by reaching above the transfer of the resolution of the dissonant seventh to the bass; this ascent to 5 is followed immediately by the descent of a fifth to local closure. The voice leading of this second theme, both in the exposition and in the recapitulation, has intentionally been written out to show its relationship to the first movement. Doing so contributes to an underlying inconsistency built into this graph, namely, that it combines features of different structural levels, but not consistently throughout. That is, the representation of the first theme is minimal, but the voice leading of the second theme is shown, as are foreground statements of the descending fourth motive, which are marked by brackets in Example 7.4. Despite these acknowledged inconsistencies, the graph does illustrate what is the main point of this discussion, that the structure of this movement is consistent with Schenker’s conception of sonata form, where 3 is the primary tone and closure is ultimately achieved in conjunction with the middleground descent of a fifth associated with the second theme. This is a common paradigm. The first movement of Symphony No. 6 has a similar deep structure as the previous movement discussed, though, as shown in Example 7.5 (86), closure is not achieved through the statement of the second theme in the recapitulation, but in the following closing material, which includes a partial statement of the first theme. Despite this similarity, the character of this movement is quite different from the others we have examined. (It sounds like it could be part of a comic opera, a notion that is reinforced upon hearing the final movement.) Still it is a clear example of sonata form that opens with a slow section that introduces elements from the minor mode, foreshadowing their employment later in the movement. The first theme in the exposition is stated three times, the third functioning as the transition to the second theme and the dominant. Not shown in Example 7.5 (because of space considerations) is the employment 8 When the primary tone is 3 and the second theme is a descending fifth, the motion to closure of the fundamental line in the recapitulation will frequently occur simultaneously with the descending fifth of the second theme. This is not a conflict as stated in Marvin (2012–13). It is a fact that an individual note may function simultaneously at more than one structural level.
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of III# as dividing the path to the dominant within the first theme. Likewise, not represented is the use of !III of the dominant within the second theme. What Example 7.5 does show is the establishment of e 2 (3) as the primary tone, the modal change, and the subsequent interruption and prolongation of d 2 by the descending fifth associated with the second theme. The unusual feature of this movement is the lack of a retransition and return to the dominant in preparation for the recapitulation. Instead, as shown in Example 7.5, the recapitulation is introduced by the descending arpeggiation from V through !III to I.9 Arrival at !III, which is subsequently prolonged before passing through d! to c, is given prominence by a partial statement of the first theme (bar 187). The covering tone g 2, which is prominent throughout the development, persists through the recapitulation as well. Here the modal treatment of materials from the exposition is repeated, the main change being the statement of the second theme in the tonic. As noted above, the descent to closure follows in the closing material where we hear a partial statement of the first theme. One of Schubert’s innovations in the treatment of sonata form is the expansion of the two key/two theme exposition to three keys/three themes. Typically, the second of the three is understood as passing between the first and third, and the existence of this second area does not alter the underlying structure as long as the terminal points—the first and third tonal areas—remain unchanged. The final movements to be considered within this second category, the fourth movements of the Symphonies Nos. 2 and 4, are clear examples of this procedure. In the Symphony No. 2, the third theme is a repetition of the first theme, an arrangement, as we shall see, that mimics the process Schubert followed in the first movement. A middleground graph of the movement is provided in Example 7.6 (86), which reveals that both themes are based on descending thirds. The primary tone is d 2 (3), which progresses to c2 (2) over the dominant in conjunction with the repeat of the first theme in that key. Meanwhile, d 2 has progressed to the covering tone f 2 via the passing tone e!2 supported by the subdominant, the key of the second theme. The development section supports a motion from the covering tone f 2 through e!2, the seventh, to restate the primary tone at the beginning of the recapitulation. The graph shows the prolongation of this dominant by an A-major chord, which provides consonant support for the chromatic passing tone e§2 within the dominant’s prolongation. In the recapitulation, the second theme is stated in G minor (VI) followed by a 5–6 linear motion to introduce e!2, the upper neighbor, which subsequently becomes the seventh of the dominant, leading to 3/I for the final statement of the first theme. This statement is extended by a motion back to the covering tone f 2 before the final 9 This interpretation agrees with the one given by Laufer (1990, 28).
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descent to closure. Here the employment of the modal d!2, represented in this context by the augmented sixth chord, recalls the emphasis given to D! in the development section. Once again, we have a clear expression of a divided structure. The final movement of Symphony No. 4 presents a similar situation, though this movement is very different in character from the finale of Symphony No. 2. The exposition presents three “themes,”10 in three keys, all of which are characterized by internal expansion resulting from repetition of motives/phrase segments. Example 7.7 (87) shows the primary tone to be e!2 (3), and the first theme, which emphasizes E!(III) on the way to the dominant, is shown to descend a third. The second theme, which also descends a third, is in the key of A! (VI). This becomes the pivot, the point of departure, for the modulation to E!, the goal of the exposition. Not shown in the example is the employment of linear statements of augmented triads (two successive major thirds) in this third area, a feature that is expanded in the development section, marked on the graph by a bracket. This augmented triad leads to the subdominant and subsequently to V supporting 2 at the interruption. Above this the top-sounding part ascends chromatically from d 2 to the covering tone g 2. The ensuing recapitulation is then stated in the major tonic, so the return to the primary tone is to e§2 (§3). The second theme is stated in the key of F major (IV) and the descent to closure occurs in the return to the tonic via the dominant for the third idea. Though closure can be considered to have taken place in the major mode, subsequent events repeat the structural descent in the minor mode. All seven movements examined so far correspond closely to our conventional model of sonata form. And all exhibit divided structures. This will change in the following section.
Examples of Non-Tonic Formal Recapitulations In our discussion of the fourth movement of Symphony No. 2 (Example 7.6) it was noted that the distribution of themes in the exposition and the recapitulation—first theme, second theme, first theme repeated—copies the scheme of the first movement, where this succession of ideas is stated in three tonal areas: tonic, subdominant and dominant in B! major. The development section of this first movement (Example 7.8, 87), which is based almost entirely on the imitative treatment of a three-note figure from the second theme with a running accompaniment, leads eventually to a retransition on the dominant of E!, not the more normative dominant of B!. The formal recapitulation begins, then, with a statement of the first theme in E! (IV), and it is only following a connecting dominant that we get the tonal return with the statement 10 I have used the term “theme” here for the sake of simplicity, though this is not an accurate characterization of the third tonal area.
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of the second theme. Closure follows with the restatement of the first theme in the tonic. We have reached a crossroad here. If it were our intent to produce a reading that conforms to Schenker’s view of sonata form, then we have little choice but to interpret the subdominant at the beginning of the formal recapitulation as part of a dominant prolongation originating from the third tonal area of the exposition and terminating with the return to tonic at the statement of the second theme in the recapitulation. In this case we could posit an interruption supported by the dominant at the end of the exposition. As we shall see, there is precedent for such a reading. But I think this would be a serious mistake, because it subverts the emphasis given to this subdominant by Schubert. This suggests a different interpretation, in which I–IV–V of the exposition is understood to be embedded within a larger statement of the same progression, where the IV coincides with the statement of theme 1 at the formal return. In this case there is no interruption, but instead a continuous one-part structure. This is the interpretation given in Example 7.8. An interesting feature of both themes is that they share the same structure, which is shown in the initial depiction of the first theme—a linear ascent, where 3 is approached from above by a descent of a third: 1–2–(5–4)–3. The primary tone d2 (3) progresses up by a third over the course of the exposition, and this third is answered later by an ascending third a step lower leading to e!2, the upper neighbor of the primary tone, at the formal return. This neighbor note leads back to 3/I at the following statement of the second theme. The extended area of tonic prolongation continues up to the structural descent to closure with the final statement of the first theme. An interesting detail, one that is shared with the fourth movement of this same symphony (see Example 7.6), is the reference at the structural descent to D!, which had been emphasized earlier in the development section. The first movement of Symphony No. 5—along with the first movement of Symphony No. 2—is often cited as a prime example of the subdominant recapitulation.11 The exposition states two themes, the first in the tonic and the second on the dominant. The development opens with a sequence leading to E! minor, which initiates a section based on the opening theme. As shown in Example 7.9 (88), this E!-minor harmony is extended by a voice exchange. The “normal” procedure would be to transform this IV6 chord into an augmented sixth resolving to the dominant. Instead Schubert progresses directly to the dominant seventh of IV. The formal return then begins with a statement of the first theme in E! (IV) and the return to tonic and subsequent progression to closure follows with the statement of the second theme. 11 A feature of subdominant recapitulations in Schubert’s music is that the relationship of keys from the exposition, e.g., I to V, is often transposed in the recapitulation to end on the tonic, for example, IV to I. This procedure is most notable in works like the String Quintet, D. 956.
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Once again we are faced with two choices regarding the underlying voice-leading structure. One option, that taken by Edward Laufer (1990, 36), is to interpret the subdominant return as subsumed under a dominant prolongation. The other, the one presented in Example 7.9, is to read a tonic prolongation from the beginning through the retransition, which then leads to IV. Example 7.9 shows that the primary tone f 2 (5) is prolonged through the exposition, first by the descending fifth of the first theme and then by the descending third of the second theme on the dominant, which returns the upper voice to f 2. Looking ahead we see that the subdominant return plays a crucial role in the descent of the fundamental line to closure: it offers support for 4 in the structural descent. There are advantages, of course, to both approaches to this issue, which may be summarized as follows. The interpretation presented by Laufer shows how the subdominant return can be explained within Schenker’s paradigm, while the interpretation given in Example 7.9 utilizes Schenker’s approach to show how Schubert’s choice can lead to a different paradigm, a continuous one-part structure. The fourth movement of Symphony No. 3 presents a somewhat different situation (see Example 7.10, 88). The exposition states two themes, the first in the tonic and the second on the subdominant, which subsequently progresses to the dominant at the close of this first part, similar to what we observed in the fourth movement of Symphony No. 2. The development, then, extends the dominant, leading to its dominant to prepare the formal return and statement of theme 1 on V. In this case there are no options to consider; rather, we must read a prolongation of the structural interruption stated at the close of the exposition through the statement of the first theme at the formal recapitulation. Example 7.10 shows the primary tone of this movement to be f#2 with a prominent cover tone a 2 above, to which the music progresses several times in the course of the movement. The second theme then descends a third from g2 to e2 (2)/V (the structural interruption), which is subsequently prolonged until the restatement of 3/I in the recapitulation. We might expect closure to follow at the end of the second theme, but instead the motion pushes through that cadence, and our expectation is that the following phrase will lead to closure. Instead the music comes to a halt on a IV6 chord, initiating a coda. Closure finally comes at bar 402.12 The next movement to be discussed, the first movement of Symphony No. 4 (Example 7.11, 89), has the most unusual structure of all sonata movements in the symphonies. Following a slow introduction, the exposition presents two themes, the first in the key of C minor and the second in A!, a major third lower, a relationship that becomes a major component as the movement unfolds. This third and subsequent descending major thirds are marked in Example 7.11 by brackets. In addition, A!, the key of the second theme, is extended by a chain of descending major thirds: A!–E–C– 12 The notation at the final cadence suggests parallel fifths, but Schubert avoids this by an intervening six-four (omitted in the graph).
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A! (not shown in Example 7.11). The first theme descends a third from the primary tone e!2 (3), as does the second theme from its third, though it should be noted that both themes have prominent covering fifths. The development section opens with statements of the first theme in B! minor, which eventually leads to C! major (!III of A!) at bar 165, and this becomes the point of departure for another descending major third (enharmonic) to introduce G minor (minor V). As shown in the graph, the top voice has descended a sixth from the primary tone to g1 at the beginning of the formal recapitulation. The first theme is then stated in the key of G minor and the second theme in E!, a major third lower. Melodically we have arrived back at e!2, now supported by III, and we might expect this to be followed by a dominant supporting 2. Instead Schubert interjects an E-major chord (bar 236) from which he can approach the return to tonic harmony by yet another descending third. This return to tonic is set in the major mode, so the long-delayed descent to closure is from §3, which takes place in the coda. From a structural perspective, the movement is a continuous onepart form, which, in itself, is not that unusual. What is unusual is how Schubert employs the descending major third on occasion as a substitute for the fifth, the defining interval of tonality. The final movement to be considered in this third category is the fourth movement of Symphony No. 9 (“Great”); see Example 7.12 (89). It is a grand finale with numerous excursions and harmonic twists, often involving !III and III#. Nevertheless, with one notable exception, the movement progresses normally, that is, as an expanded version of our classical model. The exposition presents two themes, the first in C major (I) and the second in G (V). The primary tone is e3 (3), and it progresses to 2/V and interruption of the fundamental line within the second theme area. Example 7.12 shows that this d3 and the dominant are prolonged through the development. Meanwhile Schubert has written a tribute to Beethoven (the “Ode to Joy” theme), beginning in E! and progressing through A! to D!, which with the enharmonic change resolves to a D-major chord (V of V). The retransition coincides with a statement of the second theme. The one anomaly in this movement—at least as viewed from the perspective of a classical norm—comes at the formal return. Rather than a statement of the first theme in the tonic, Schubert takes us on an extended excursion beginning in E! (!III), but eventually leading back to V. This diversion is not heard as a prolongation of V, but as a substitute for I (or more appropriately as delaying the return to the tonic). The circumstances of the non-tonic return are different from the movements previously discussed, requiring a different interpretation, namely that the delay be shown as parenthetical. Eventually we do get to the tonic with the statement of the second theme, where the primary tone is restated and led to closure. This passage too is greatly extended, which cannot be adequately represented in this graph.
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Tonic Returns That May Function as V of IV Whenever there is a strong motion to the subdominant in the recapitulation, we should consider whether the preceding tonic return is structural or whether it is functioning as V of IV. There are two movements from the Schubert symphonies we should consider from this perspective. The first is the initial movement from Symphony No. 3 (Example 7.13, 90). The exposition presents two themes, the first in D major and the second on its dominant, together supporting a melodic motion from f#2 (3) to e2 (2) with the prominent covering tone a 2 above. The development section prolongs the dominant and the interruption of the fundamental descent, as indicated in Example 7.13.13 The recapitulation then states the two themes in the tonic and subdominant keys, respectively, prior to the structural descent to closure. Considering the emphasis placed on the dominant from the second theme of the exposition through the development, there is no reason to suspect that the tonic return is transient. It is the structural return to the tonic supporting the restatement of the primary tone f#2 (3). The situation presented by the second movement of Symphony No. 8 (“Unfinished”) is quite different. Here the two themes of the exposition are stated in the keys of E major (I) and C# minor (VI), and the following material leads eventually to an augmented sixth chord, suggesting for a fleeting moment that the dominant is to follow. But there is no dominant and no development section; instead Schubert restates the first theme in the tonic key, which leads to a statement of the second theme in A major (IV). In this instance, the tonic return serves to introduce the subdominant, completing the descending arpeggiation E (I)–C# (VI)–A (IV) across a formal boundary. As shown in Example 7.14 (90), the subdominant is extended by a deceptive progression, where VI (bar 258) supports the passing tone g#2 within the descending third leading to 2/V and closure.14 The overall structure is a continuous one-part form with no interruption.15
A Special Case I find the first movement of the Symphony No. 8 (Example 7.15, 91) to be unique in several respects. First, it is an extremely powerful work from an emotional perspective, expressing a wide range of sentiments from the brooding opening idea—later stated with conviction in the development section (on IV)—to the lilting/carefree 13 Example 7.13 also shows the prominence of !VI in this movement, B! as !VI in both the exposition and recapitulation, and F as !VI of the prolonged dominant. 14 This graph is based on Example 6.12 in Beach (2016, 120). 15 Another example where the tonic return serves to introduce the subdominant is found in the third movement of Symphony No. 4, where the overall harmonic progression is I–!III–III§–(I) –IV–V–I.
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second theme to the powerful, though tragic, ending. It also has a unique tonal plan. Following the introductory motto theme, the exposition presents two themes, the first in B minor (I) and the second in G major (VI), which lead eventually to the statement of the motto theme in E minor (IV) in the development, completing the descending arpeggiation in thirds, I–VI–IV, similar to, though different from what takes place in the second movement of this symphony. The following dominant leads to the restatement of the first theme in the tonic, completing the progression I–VI–IV–V–I. Following the first theme area in the recapitulation, which leads to a cadence on the minor dominant, the second theme is stated first in D major (III), then later in the tonic, before leading through the dominant to closure. The movement closes with a coda featuring the rising third, the opening gesture of the motto theme, a gesture that becomes integral to the second movement as well. The two movements, although very different, share many characteristics, including the encompassing progression outlined above. Both have undivided structures. Identification of the primary tone here is complicated by the existence of conflicting information. My initial impression was that it must be 5 due to its prominence in the first theme. Furthermore, f#2 is clearly prolonged until the statement of the second theme in the tonic in the recapitulation, where the motion to closure is generated from 3, not 5. There does not appear to be a statement of 4, even an implied one, to connect f#2 to d 2, which strongly suggests the function of this f#2 is that of a covering tone (indeed a very prominent one!) and that the true primary tone is d 2 (3), which does not fully emerge until well into the recapitulation. This is the interpretation given in Example 7.15, which is reproduced from Beach (2016, Example 6.7, 111).16 I was influenced to some extend in this matter by Ernst Oster, who told me—rather reluctantly, I might add—that he thought Salzer (1962, Example 497) was correct in his interpretation of this movement, at least in this regard. But there is other evidence to support the choice of 3 as primary tone, including the rising-third motto and subsequent prominence of 3 in the opening motto theme, which is restated at the original pitch level in the coda, where the motion 3–2–1 is stated several times.
Conclusion I have organized the presentation of the fifteen movements from the Schubert symphonies according to certain formal characteristics, which does not lend itself easily to making general observations about stylistic trends. But if we now consider these movements in chronological sequence, it appears the period of exploration/experimen16 Though it is certainly possible to read an interruption in this movement, I have not done so because it seems that the primary tone does not emerge clearly until the recapitulation.
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tation centers on the mid-teens, the period when Schubert wrote Symphonies Nos. 2 through 5. With a few exceptions, the sonata-form movements in the symphonies are quite traditional; certainly, they are less experimental than some of the chamber music, starting with the “Trout” Quintet, D. 667 (1819). The first movement of this work along with that of Symphony No. 5 are often cited as prime examples of the subdominant recapitulation. The principle behind the subdominant return is that the key relationships expressed in the exposition are transposed in the recapitulation to lead to—rather than begin on—the tonic. This becomes particularly clear in movements of this type where there are three themes/three keys in the exposition. What is fascinating about some of the late chamber music is that Schubert found a compromise between the traditional tonic return and the transposition scheme. Examples of this type of compromise—what I have labelled as hybrid solutions—can be found in the first movements of the Octet in F, D. 803 (1824) and Schubert’s last work, the String Quintet in C major, D. 956 (1828).17 There is nothing comparable to these “hybrid” solutions in the symphonies. The Symphony No. 9 (“Great”) offers a multitude of interesting things to study and write about—tonal excursions, parenthetical insertions, and so forth—but underneath all this the design of its movements is quite traditional. All this is interesting, but the crucial issue we face is how to interpret some of Schubert’s “innovations” from a Schenkerian perspective. Schenker’s understanding of the structure of sonata form is absolutely brilliant, but is it adequate to explain all variants we encounter in works by Schubert and other composers of the nineteenth century? I have identified five movements from the symphonies that, in my opinion, have undivided structures. With three of these—the first movement of Symphony No. 4 and the two movements of Symphony No. 8—there is no alternative. We could debate about the other two, the first movements of Symphonies Nos. 2 and 5, but I have already indicated my opinion that it would be a mistake, a musical mistake, to force them into Schenker’s mold, which, after all, was published over eighty years ago. So, my answer to the question must be no. We tend to accept Free Composition as the final word, but it is a fact that Schenker’s ideas were ever evolving, and I would like to suggest that inclusion of undivided structure as an option for sonata form is a natural evolution of Schenker’s observations (and pronouncements!) to make them more inclusive. In fact, Oster’s observations on sonata form in his translation of Free Composition already point us in this direction. 17 In the first movement of the Octet, the three keys of the exposition are F (I), d (VI) and C (V). Though the recapitulation begins in F, this soon leads to the subdominant and statements of the three themes in B! (IV), g (II) and F (I). In the first movement of the String Quintet the three themes are stated in the keys of C, E! (!III) and G (V). Once again the recapitulation begins on the tonic, but this soon leads to statements of the three themes in F (IV), A! (!VI) and C (I).
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Works Cited Beach, David. 1993. “Schubert’s Experiments with Sonata Forms: Formal-Tonal Design versus Underlying Structure.” Music Theory Spectrum 15, no. 1: 1–18. _______. 2015. “The Interaction of Structure and Design in the Opening Movements of Schubert’s Piano Trios in B! Major (D. 898) and E! Major (D. 929).” In Bach to Brahms: Essays on Musical Design and Structure, edited by David Beach and Yosef Goldenberg, 239–58. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. _______. 2016. “Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony: Analytical Observations.” In Explorations in Schenkerian Analysis, edited by David Beach and Su Yin Mak, 99– 122. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. _______. 2017. Schubert’s Mature Instrumental Music: A Theorist’s Perspective. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Caplin, William. 1998. Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. New York: Oxford University Press. Clark, Susannah. 2011. Analyzing Schubert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Green, Douglass M. 1979. Form in Tonal Music: An Introduction to Analysis, 2nd ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Hepokoski, James and Warren Darcy. 2006. Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata. New York: Oxford University Press. Hunt, Graham. 2014. “When Structure and Design Collide: The Three-Key Exposition Revisited.” Music Theory Spectrum 36: 247–69. Laufer, Edward. 1990. “Voice-Leading Procedures in Development Sections.” Handout accompanying lecture given at the University of Western Ontario; published in Studies in Music from the University of Western Ontario, edited by R. Parks, 69–120. London, Ont.: Dept. of Music History, University of Western Ontario, 1996. Mak, Su Yin. 2006. “Schubert’s Sonata Forms and the Poetics of the Lyric.” Journal of Musicology 23, no. 2: 263–306. _______. 2016. “Structural and Form-Functional Ambiguities in the First Movement of Schubert’s Octet in F Major, D. 803.” In Explorations in Schenkerian Analysis, edited by David Beach and Su Yin Mak, 123–41. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press.
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Marvin, William. 2012–13. “‘Und so weiter’: Schenker, Sonata Theory, and the Problem of the Recapitulation.” Theory and Practice 37–38: 212–42. Music Analysis 33, no. 2, 2014. Special issue on Schubert’s String Quintet with contributions by Scott Burnham, Julian Horton, John Koslosky, Nathan Martin, and Steven Vande Moortele.
Salzer, Felix. (1928) 2015. “Die Sonatenform bei Franz Schubert.” Translated by Su Yin Mak as “Felix Salzer’s ‘Die Sonatenform bei Franz Schubert’: An English Translation With Critical Commentary.” Theory and Practice 40: 1–121. _______. 1962. Structural Hearing. New York: Dover.
Schenker, Heinrich. (1935) 1979. Free Composition (Der freie Satz). Edited and translated by Ernst Oster. New York: Longman.
Sly, Gordon. 2009. “Design and Structure in Schubert’s Sonata Forms: An Evolution toward Integration.” In Keys to the Drama: Nine Perspectives on Sonata Forms, edited by Gordon Sly, 129–56. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Webster, James. 1978–79. “Schubert’s Sonata Forms and Brahms’s First Maturity.” 19th-Century Music 2, no. 1: 18–35, and 3, no. 1: 52–71.
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8 Displacement, Superimposition, and Dissonance in Ravel’s Late Style SIGRU N HEINZELM A NN
Introduction Any adaptation of the methodological tools offered by Schenkerian analysis must necessarily engage the framework developed by Heinrich Schenker and subsequent generations of Schenkerian scholars. Beginning with a brief discussion of the basic tenets of Schenkerian analysis, I summarize areas of further development before introducing my own extensions and their analytical application in examples drawn from Ravel’s post-war oeuvre. Schenker viewed his mature theory primarily as a theory of tonality. At the core of tonality resides the tonic triad, which is composed out through multiple elaborations (of different kinds) to encompass the entire time span of a composition. The concept of composing-out (Auskomponierung) implies three spatial dimensions: The vertical dimension of the triad (harmony), the horizontal dimension of the composing out (voice leading), and, by distinguishing between different layers or stages of elaboration (Schichten), we gain a third dimension, namely that of depth (see Example 8.1, 94).1 1 I owe this observation to Carl Schachter, who at a conference in the 1990s answered my question by explaining how to imagine the different layers of a graph in their hierarchical relation to each other. He explained that the hierarchy depicted in the graphs was really a three-dimensional one in that the middleground and background were operating simultaneously behind the foreground. Since then, I imagine a Schenkerian graph as a kind of superimposed set of glass panels (as shown in Example 8.1, which rearranges Schenker’s graphs on Chopin’s Etude Op. 10, No. 12 from Five Graphic Music Analyses; see Schenker [1933] 1969), constituting a tonal space through which we move with the unfolding of a piece, the flow of time (pictured from left to right). – As Oliver Schwab-Felisch has recently brought to my attention, Felix-Eberhard von Cube’s graph of the C-
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Since sounded music unfolds in real time, we may add a temporal dimension, that is, the time span the music traverses as the succession of sounds carries us through our imaginary three-dimensional space. The multidimensional relationships between the structural layers are governed by four conditions, as observed by Straus (1987) and subsequently taken up by Heinzelmann (2013), some of which are provided by tonality itself. Taking the three-dimensional space and Straus’s conditions as our conceptual bases, we can construct three kinds of extensions or adaptations to Schenkerian analysis by: 1. creating new distinctions within the traditional tonal framework 2. transferring Straus’s four conditions to an analog 3D space, for instance, one based on different pitch spaces 3. combining the traditional Schenkerian framework with non-Schenkerian approaches. This last kind of extension allows the analyst, among other things, to embed unorthodox types of prolongation (e.g., those considered dissonant in common-practice harmony) or analytical constructs outside of Schenkerian analysis into a larger tonal framework; this process yields interesting analytical insights especially into repertoire that straddles the tonal/post-tonal boundary.2 Extensions to Schenkerian analysis residing in one or more of these three areas include prolongations of seventh chords (Goldenberg 2008), expanded definitions of consonance or adaptations of the consonance-dissonance condition, and of voice-leading constructs to non-tonal spaces (Straus 1987; Väisälä 2004; Heinzelmann 2013). Further extensions concern the interaction of the spatial and temporal dimensions; developments in this area prove a fascinating endeavor especially for studies of performance and analysis. Before I present my analytical considerations of select passages from Ravel’s music, in particular certain prolongation techniques in his late works (post WWI), I would like to draw attention to one more aspect of the development of Schenkerian analysis in North America. The governing principles for prolongation developed by Schenker derive their logic and consistency from the rules of harmony and voice leading, specifically from species counterpoint and the concept of Stufen. Together, they create an underlying operational structure in the form of a generally assumed, agreed-upon major Prelude from J.S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, vol. I, features a similiar 3D arrangement of the three structural layers. Von Cube calls this a “Perspective rendering as a demonstration of the perauditive” (Cube 1988, 274–275). 2 As I have shown elsewhere, such embedded frameworks can include collectional analysis or NeoRiemannian progressions, e.g., in the music of Ravel. A student of mine is currently working on an analysis of a work by Liszt that incorporates functional relationships according to Albert Simon into a Schenkerian framework.
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set of conditions that defines the normative behavior and interaction of melodic and harmonic motion. Relying on these norms, subsequent generations of Schenkerian scholars could distill certain concepts partially or implicitly present in Schenker’s analytic practice but not explicitly conceptualized in his own writings. From these deductions sprung arguably some of the most prolific areas of modern Schenkerian analysis, namely studies of: 1. metrical and phrase-structural implications of Schenker’s approach (Schachter 1976, 1980, 1987; Rothstein 1981, 1989, 1990) 2. inferred aspects based on contrapuntal rules such as implied tones, displacement, and normalization (Schachter 1976; Rothstein 1990, 1991) 3. motivic relationships (Burkhart 1978; Kamien 1983; Rothgeb 1983; Schachter 1983; Cadwallader and Pastille 1992) 4. multifaceted relationships between analysis and performance that developed out of “Schenkerian thinking” (Schenker 1912, 2000; Rothstein 1984; Schachter 1994; and many more) While in a previous essay on adapting Schenkerian analysis to the music of Ravel (Heinzelmann 2013) I was more concerned with extensions beyond traditional Schenkerian concepts, in the analyses below I will build on principles from the deductions of the second- and third-generation Schenkerians, especially on concepts from the area of counterpoint. The two main techniques I explicate here to analyze selected excerpts from Ravel’s later work (mainly from the slow movement of his Piano Concerto in G) are displacement and dissonant superimposition. Both create dissonance through contrapuntal misalignments and, in principle, complement each other. Displacement implies that two or more parts belonging together have been moved apart. Displacement and the subsequent analytical process of normalization are well-known concepts to those familiar with the writings of Carl Schachter (1976, 1980, 1987) and William Rothstein (1990). Dissonant superimposition, on the other hand, implies that two or more parts not belonging together harmonically appear simultaneously. I define dissonant superimposition as the simultaneous unfolding of independent voice-leading strands, initially incompatible by virtue of creating competing prolongations at the musical surface. After being reduced separately, they can be coordinated at a deeper level to form a shared tonal progression. This means that we often hear in Ravel’s music a kind of “meta-dissonance” between initially conflicting simultaneous prolongations whose incompatibility is eventually resolved at a deeper level (see also Heinzelmann 2013, 239–43). For the first type of misalignment, displacement, I adapt the technique of “rhythmic normalization” employed by Rothstein (1990); that is, realigning displaced voice-
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leading strands vertically. For the second type, dissonant superimposition, I separate the voice-leading graphs into two initially independent strands that merge where the strands form intersecting tonally functional nodes. These nodes anchor the progressions in the underlying tonal framework and so yield deeper structural levels.
Displacement A very simple example of displacement between two contrapuntally related voices occurs in the first movement of Ravel’s Sonate pour violon et violoncelle (henceforth the “Duo Sonata”). The second theme of this sonata design unfolds in a syncopated twopart counterpoint (Example 8.2, 95), segments of which would not be out of place in a Dorian first-species counterpoint exercise (if we disregard the historical aesthetic differences, especially in the treatment of register). That Ravel was concerned with melody and counterpoint in the Duo Sonata can be gleaned from his remarks in his autobiographical sketch: “I believe that this Sonata [for violin and cello] marks a turning point in the evolution of my career. In it, the thinness of texture is pushed to the extreme. Harmonic charm is renounced, coupled with an increasingly conspicuous reaction in favor of melody” (Orenstein 1990, 32). My point here is that the syncopation functions not like a fourth-species counterpoint, which would resolve the dissonances accordingly; instead, the syncopation simply displaces the underlying consonances by an eighth-note, thus increasing the number of dissonances on the sounding surface (“renouncing harmonic charm”) while each melodic line in itself progresses smoothly—with the exception of the register adjustment in the cello and a few skips in the violin.3 The two adjacent dissonances marked with asterisks in the normalized bars 71–72 of Example 8.2 are an exception. Had Ravel continued the cello line by step, the second beat would have arrived on D, with an upper voice matching the stepwise progression in contrary motion to arrive on A: such a stable fifth on D would have been too conclusive for this moment of the theme (we are in the middle of a six-bar antecedent). Instead, Ravel leaves the listener with a nicely ambiguous, open-ended turn toward V (or II?), allowing the phrase to continue for two more (harmonically ambiguous) bars, which in turn suggests the half cadence of the antecedent.4 As shown by the empty note head in Example 8.2 (bar 73), the registral displacement from the e1 to the f is a consequence of the limits imposed upon the cello by the 3 The syncopation continues the rhythmic momentum of the cello part leading up to the secondary theme; the triple gesture on an enriched G-major harmony fulfills the triple hammer-blow arrival at the medial caesura (see Duo Sonata, I, bars 61–67 in the Durand score). 4 Listeners familiar with Ravel’s work will note the similarity of the rising cello line with that from the opening of his String Quartet in F major.
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violin’s downward moving line. When in the consequent phrase the violin opens up the registral space from bar 76 on (not shown in the example), the cello’s rising line now uninhibitedly soars up stepwise all the way to g1 (bar 80). As we shall see in the next example, Ravel uses such gapped lines also to shift contrapuntal alignments out of place. While the Adagio of Ravel’s Concerto in G certainly does not “renounce harmonic charm,” we can observe a similar displacement of intervals that contrapuntally belong together, albeit at a much larger scale. Anyone who had the pleasure to hear this piece performed in public will have been struck by the “social” effect of the opening’s instrumentation. A pianist performs alone a slow, introverted melody with accompaniment (that is, a song) while the members of the orchestra witness the soloist’s extended song in silence. The presence of the fellow musicians on stage listening intently to the soliloquy intensifies the atmosphere of solitude and vulnerability.5 Roland Manuel described this Adagio as a “lied whose calm contemplation brings it unusually close to Fauré’s musings” (Nichols 2011, 323ff.). Other contemporary music critics regarded the kinship to Fauré less positively. Florent Schmitt, for instance, wrote, “the melodic line, despite its implacable calmness, does not attain the grandeur of a Fauré adagio” and also pointed out the similarity of the melody to the opening of the second movement from Liszt’s Faust Symphony (Nichols 2011, 324). Even worse was the assessment of Messiaen (who in 1931 could have seen only proofs of the work), who called this movement a “Largo which turns a phrase reminiscent of Fauré on a bad day into Massenet” (Nichols 2011, 324). Through Marguerite Long we know that Ravel modeled the long breath of the melody after the slow movement of Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet, K. 581 (Manuel 1972, 102). While it is not my intention to engage in a direct comparison of the two phrases, I will in the course of my analysis point to some shared and some differing characteristics.6 Mozart’s twenty-bar phrase is a sixteen-measure period with two pre-cadential extensions: the first, a slowing down through doubling of the melodic note values, extends the antecedent by one bar; the second extends the consequent through an evaded cadence that initiates a dramatic three-bar insertion before attaining the perfect authentic cadence in bar 20. If phrase extension is part of Ravel’s modeling Mozart in
5 After one of my distinguished piano teachers had completed a live performance of the Concerto some years ago, a colleague of hers (a musicologist) remarked that she did not like the second movement at all, because “it wasn’t going anywhere.” I hope my contribution here will show otherwise; yet the remark, puzzling as it was at the time, triggered my curiosity to listen and look more closely. 6 Readers interested in a detailed comparison of the two melodies may read Hans Peter Reutter’s essay in the Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musikheorie (2008).
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the Adagio of the Concerto in G, he exceeds his model by twenty-five bars: Ravel’s long E-major phrase of an asymmetrical period extends over forty-five (!) bars. The antecedent begins in bar 2 after a one-bar prefix, arrives at a first melodic half cadence in bar 8, and ends in bar 15 with a B-major half cadence (Example 8.3, 96). The consequent phrase (not shown in Example 8.3) of the Adagio is expanded by varied sequential repetitions and should conclude in bar 35 after the long cadential trill (bars 34–35, Figure 1 in the Durand edition); it does so melodically to some degree by resolving the trill on 2 upward to 3 in bar 36. However, the harmonic motion thwarts the anticipated resolution to E major by lowering D# to D§ (bar 35), thus transforming the V7 on B into a II7 chord that initiates a II–V7–I cadence on A major (bar 36), so that the melodic resolution on G# forms a major seventh with the A in the bass. Overlapping with the derailed cadence, the gently entering flute and lower strings engage with the resulting harmonic detour, now allowing the high winds to partake in melodic fragments of the piano’s soliloquy and eventually arriving at the first perfect authentic cadence in D# minor, turned into major by a Picardy third in bar 45 (Durand edition, Figure 2).7 The opening of the Adagio reveals an abundance of dissonant intervals at the musical surface. Example 8.3 shows intervals of interval-class 1 (ic1), that is, intervals involving half-step dissonances and their compounds, and interval-class 2 (ic2), that is, intervals involving dissonances of a major second and its compounds. The origin of the dissonances lies in the contrapuntal misalignment of the voices that shape the phrase. The graph of Example 8.4 (97) shows how, after the initial parallel consonant skip between the outer voices (E and g#1 to G# and b1, bars 2–4), an octave transfer in the bass to g# creates space for the long stepwise descent of the bass line to the B1 in bar 15. The initial motion in parallel tenths is displaced in bar 7 when the melody skips from b1 to g#1, a motion incongruous with the stepwise motion in the bass from g# to f#. However, as the graph shows, it is actually the bass line whose passing tone f# causes the disjunction by taking an additional bar to complete the motion back to the tonic e. Since by now the upper voice has moved on to f#1, instead of arriving at I, we hear II 42 in bar 8. The displacement by one bar between bass line and melody (the upper voice is three quarters ahead) continues to generate a succession of seventh chords until the 7 In viewing the phrase as an extended period, I place a different emphasis on the underlying model than Reutter, who finds that “to view this melody as an extended period in the classical sense makes not much sense, since the melody resembles more closely the romantic type of a sentencelike spinning out” (my translation). The original reads: “Diese Kantilene als erweiterte Periode im klassischen Sinne zu betrachten ergibt wenig Sinn, da die Melodie viel eher einem satzartig schweifenden ›romantischen Fortspinnungstypus‹ gehorcht” (Reutter 2008, 91).
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two voices briefly realign in bar 9, where the bass moves on to d# while the upper voice rearticulates f#1. This temporary alignment marks the beginning of a long dominant prolongation that extends to the half cadence in bar 15. In bar 10, the suspended D#1 in the upper voice delays the resolution to e1 by three eighth notes, so that now for the first time the upper voice lags behind the bass line. The delay of the resolution by three eighth notes (instead of a more normative onebeat quarter) follows the ambiguity of competing metric patterns: while the melody for the most part expresses the notated 3/4 meter, the alternation of a one-eighth bass tone followed by two eighths of harmony in the accompaniment strongly invokes a steady 6/8 pulse. Thus, the resolution on e1 in the melody, which falls on the weak second half of the 3/4 meter, coincides with the 6/8 second-beat c# in the bass. However, when the melody passes through d#1 to arrive at c#1 on the downbeat of bar 11, it has moved ahead of the bass line once more, if only by an eighth note. The voice-leading reduction of the Adagio’s opening measures (Example 8.4) further shows how the melody’s upward arpeggiation to the obligatory register in bar 11 allows the bass line to catch up in its descent; for a brief moment the distance of the tenth is restored, albeit only implied by the prolonged melodic function of C#. Various parameters contribute to mark bars 11–12 as an articulation of the subdominant: The ornamented octave transfer lifts the melody out of its steady descent; the doubly extended C#2 allows its supporting bass note A to catch up, while the upper voice’s subsequent skip over b1 to a1 aligns with F# to form II. The relationship between IV and II is further strengthened by the slightly skewed voice exchange A–C# between the soprano and alto voices. From bar 12 onward, the metric setup shapes once more the misalignment b etween upper and lower voice. The melody’s unfolding thirds (bars 13–15) then gradually reduce the temporal distance between upper voice and bass again toward the realignment of the tenth B1–d1 on the downbeat of bar 15, marking the arrival on the halfcadence through a moment of repose from both the dissonances and the contrapuntal misalignment. The points of greatest alignment between melody and bass allow the listener to take in the harmonic functions, providing the ear with a clear sense of harmonic progression, despite the numerous surface dissonances: while bars 1–6 prolong the tonic, bars 9–15 prolong the dominant through the alignments in bars 9 and 15, which are briefly interrupted by the embedded subdominant (bars 11–12); the subsequent prolongation of the tone a1 (bars 12–15) highlights the seventh of the dominant. Thus the entire antecedent can be heard as an expression of the first branch of Schenker’s prototypical 3–2 interruption paradigm common to periods. In addition to the misalignment of outer voices, the inner voice, introduced in bars 3 to 6 to escort the melody in parallel thirds, also begins to pull apart from its liaison
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beginning in bar 8. If we take the initial interval of a third between the inner and upper voice as the normative relationship between both linear progressions, we can see in Example 8.5 (98) how the inner voice tends to anticipate the melodic line in most cases. The exception is in bar 11, where the pitch a that forms the third below the melody’s c#1 cannot function as a consonant third, since it first has to be understood as a passing tone at a lower level before assuming its proper role in bar 12. Example 8.5 shows how the sum of misalignments between the three main voice-leading strands of the Adagio’s opening creates a rich veil of omnipresent surface dissonances that only lifts in the few moments of cadential repose. It is worth pointing out that up to this point, we have not even heard a single note outside the diatonic collection of E major. The restraint and simplicity of pitch material may account for both Michael Russ’s and Roger Nichols’ assessment of Ravel’s Lied. According to Russ, “the ‘archaic lyricism’ of Satie’s Gymnopedies . . . hovers over this melody, mainly through the constant employment of mild harmonic dissonances that cannot simply be regarded as inessential or colouristic” (Russ 2000, 133), while Nichols evaluates the fruits of Ravel’s “labourious craft” as “an unexampled success in the handling of simple, diatonic ideas which give off not the faintest scent of pastiche” (Nichols 2011, 329). I do not discuss the consequent phrase (bars 27–45) of the Adagio’s extended period from a Schenkerian point of view here because it continues with similar contrapuntal displacements as those already described. I would like, however, to mention that a brief chromatically ascending bass line in bars 27–29 attempts to stem the downward trajectory, before sinking (bar 29) toward the subdominant F#. This, in turn, initiates Ravel’s favorite II–V–I cadence that points to E major, albeit derailed “plagally” in bars 35–36. Beginning on the A in bar 36, a second, longer ascent, A–B–c#–d#–e (bar 39) –e# (bar 42) –f#–g#, eventually transforms the initiating A into the A#-minor dominant (bar 44) that cadences on D# in bar 45. The possible confusion that may arise when attempting to attribute consonant or dissonant status to the tones thusly displaced warrants a brief review of my methodology up to this point. Knowing that progressions in Ravel’s music tend to follow the primacy of the bass line, I first established the long descending progression in the bass. Noticing the essentially parallel trajectory of the melodic line, I was able to pinpoint the misalignment of the linear intervallic pattern of parallel tenths. The outer-voice counterpoint then provided the framework to assess the displacements of the inner voices. Before “normalizing” the outer voice-leading strands of the Adagio’s opening antecedent phrase, I propose using the voice-leading sketch that served as the basis for Examples 8.4 and 8.5 to consider motivic aspects of the antecedent phrase (see Example 8.6, 99). If we take the melody’s main structural notes that run parallel to the
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bass line, from the initial tonic (g#1 and b1) to the beginning of the upper voice’s Zug on g#1 to the first dominant node (where the upper-voice f#1 aligns with the bass D#), we notice that the embellishment in bar 9 retraces the melodic outline before skipping to d#1. The embellishment thus forms a motivic parallelism that serves to emphasize the melody’s motion toward the dominant. Witnessing the motive’s transformation from its initial strong tonic underpinnings into an ornament where the formerly tonic notes are now subordinate to the dominantfunctioning role of the f#1 (the g#1), the listener is gently guided to perceive the motion toward the dominant as a gathering of energy, the rhythmic acceleration of the condensed motive propelling the music forward into dominant territory. This is noticeable, I think, because apart from the embellishing turns in bars 4 and 7 the melody so far has moved mainly in quarter and half notes. Example 8.6 also distills a distinct five-note motive consisting of an upper-neighbor motion followed by a downward skip of a third before landing on a variable fifth note. Instances of this motive occur at various structural levels throughout the remainder of the movement (see also Example 8.10, 103). The motive’s four iterations help to clarify the phrase structure: the 15-bar antecedent is organized like a musical sentence (see also Example 8.8, 101). Normalizing the outer voices of the Adagio’s opening measures, Example 8.7 (100) shows how the inner voices engage in a syncopated pattern not unlike that shown in Example 8.2; these inner voices sometimes generate functional suspensions, at other times they simply enrich the harmonies through added dissonances. Following the inner voices, we find that a further linear progression joins the trajectory of the outervoice descent, moving from e1 in bar 6 to a in bar 12, eventually completing its descent with the g# to f# in bar 15. The gap of bars 11–12 not only prevents this linear progression from forming parallel octaves to the upper voice, but also supports the aforementioned embedded subdominant. Beginning in bar 13, another linear progression from d#1 completes the previous trajectory arriving at the half cadence in bar 15 with an accented passing tone g# to f#. Distilling the harmonic and melodic substance of the Adagio’s opening measures into a chorale-style reduction, Example 8.8 interprets the antecedent of this expansive opening soliloquy as an eight–bar sentence. The reduction will not map one-toone onto the Schenkerian voice-leading graphs since my purpose here is to illustrate especially the rich harmonic complexity of the continuation. The durational reduction condenses two bars of 3/4 into one bar of 4/4. With the omission of the one-bar prefix (accompaniment only), the bar numbers above the chorale show the distribution of Ravel’s 14-bar phrase compared to the regularly phrased chorale. For the most part, the even distribution of one bar of the original per each half-note duration in the reduction suggests that the melodic and harmonic substance of the phrase orients itself to
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the 6/8 meter. The few exceptions, however, are interesting. Bars 6–7 are a rhythmicmetric variant of bars 2–3, couching the neighbor-note into a true 3/4. Ravel’s bar 8 connects to the continuation one bar “early”; bar 14 also appears “early” because its representation of the upper voice of the unfolding thirds would have belonged to the previous bar, which was prevented by the unyielding f#1. Since my durational reduction was intended to remain close to the original, this resulted in the non-normalized syncopation in its penultimate bar. To complete the imaginary 16 bars of 6/8, the half cadence in bar 15 would have to extend the dominant for two bars.8
Superimposition Skipping to the end of the extended opening period of the Adagio from Ravel’s Concerto in G, namely its arrival on the D#-major cadence at bar 45, we notice how the melody subsequently takes a slow breath of two quarter-note beats before initiating the Adagio’s second phrase with an anacrusis of three sixteenth notes (Example 8.9, 102).9 In outlining a B-major V 42 harmony up to the downbeat of bar 47, the melody strongly implies E major as its local tonal center, with the subsequent pitches up to bar 49 confirming E major as the melody’s underlying collection. The simultaneous harmonic progression, however, reinterprets the D# major as local II by outlining a II–V 6 5 –I cadence to C# minor. Ravel draws our attention to the ic1 dissonance by placing instances of the ic1-dissonance very audibly, most often pitting the dissonant melody tones against the 6/8 beats of the bass (especially in bars 46–47). This suggests some kind of intention or sheer delight in the clash by the composer.10 As evident in Example 8.9, bars 49–53 form a sequence to bars 45–49 a whole step lower, now superimposing the melody’s A major above C# minor in the accompaniment. How can we reconcile the two seemingly incompatible voice-leading strands? Ravel’s penchant for clearly functional harmonic progressions provides the clue (see Example 8.10). In bars 48 and 52, the upper voice’s 9–8 motion merges with the accompaniment’s local harmonies. In bar 48, the melody’s d#2–c#2 match the arrival of the C#-major II–V 65 –I cadence, while in bar 52 the c#2–b2 sound as the correct 8 In a way, it does, since bar 16 continues dominant function for another bar. Since the next sub phrase occupies three bars, we may consider bar 16 a kind of phrase overlap. From there, the extended consequent moves in even groupings, 4 + 4 + 2 + 2, until in bar 32 an augmentation of a previous motive expands the group before the cadential trill to 6 (instead of 4) bars. 9 I would like to thank Werner Lemberg for creating the score excerpts of Examples 8.9 and 8.11, based on the 2-piano version of Ravel’s Concerto in G by Lucien Garban. 10 In my experience of playing the piano part, these dissonances, cloaked as they are in pianissimo and each sounding in its horizontally consonant context, strike me as perhaps the most gentle or tender ic1 dissonances in Ravel’s oeuvre—in the first of the Valses nobles et sentimentales, for example, we hear crunchy ic1 dissonances of an entirely different quality.
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melodic arrival to the II–V 65 –I cadence in B minor. Based on the aural revelation of the sequential progression, our ears quickly readjust: eventually we reinterpret the initial contradictory harmonies as two different pathways to the same cadential goal. Thus the upper voice approaches the two local minor tonics through their majormode mediant. The seemingly major-mode 5–4–3–2–1 fifth-progression into the inner voice morphs into a minor-mode 7–6–5–4–3. The unorthodoxy and ambiguity of the beginning lies in the fact that 1 is neither heard nor implied until the arrival of the local tonic, thus creating a curiously mixed sense of surprise and predictability when we “land” on the cadence. Of course, the proportions of surprise versus predictability will vary for each listener; to some, the pull of the underlying descending-fifth sequence may weaken any initial sense of harmonic independence of the melodic progression. Each of the two sequential phrases spins out with a pentatonic motion into an inner voice 5 (bars 49 and 53, respectively). That the two harmonic strands merge quite smoothly at the cadence is a result of their particular distance, namely the third relationships between the competing keys: While the major II of D# major suggests a motion toward C# major, the turn toward C# minor easily absorbs the upper voice’s E major into its orbit; this is particularly relevant since the B completely loses its dominant connotations in the post-cadential pentatonic descent. The third relationship between E major and the underlying C# minor also accounts for the intriguing fact that the major harmonies outlined in the upper voice are, in fact, subordinate to the minor-mode voice-leading approach to the cadence (see Example 8.10), anticipating the collection of C# minor, while the accompaniment stays much closer to the C#-major collection.11 Indicating the voice leading of a deeper structural level, the stemmed notes in Example 8.10 show how this whole passage would reduce to a large-scale third progression from the initial D# major through C# minor to B minor at the middleground, with the flagged local leading tones in the bass embellishing each Stufe. A third phrase (bars 53–57, not shown in the example) then returns to a diatonic progression with some displaced voice leading (though less so than in the opening section) and concludes this formal section with a modulation to D major, once again sealed with a II–V–I cadence. My final example of dissonant superimposition in the Adagio of Ravel’s Concerto in G concerns the passage immediately following the D-major cadence of bars 56–57. As shown in the score excerpt of Example 8.11 (104), bar 58 juxtaposes a D!-major V7 chord with a half-diminished seventh chord on D. The arabesque-like embellishments 11 Pace Gottfried Weber (1832), I am tempted to call this particular harmonic feature in Ravel’s music a Scheindissonanz: on the surface, the harmony appears dissonant, but its function on a deeper level is consonant.
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of the D!-major chord contrast with the ascending chordal planing, a composing-out of the half-diminished harmony.12 The texture, orchestration and the obscured tonality create a veiled impression, setting up tension that will build in stages toward the climax in bar 71. Clarity of texture and tonality return in bar 62 with the arrival on E minor and the subsequent II–V–I cadence in G major, bars 64–65. Since these four bars (62–65) are a rhythmic variant of bars 54–57, we may consider bars 58–67 as a thematic variation of bars 45–57.13 As in the previous example, Ravel superimposes a major- and a minor-mode approach toward the cadence. The upper strand draws its pitch content from the diatonic 6!collection, the lower strand from the diatonic 3!collection. The voice-leading graph of Example 8.12 (105) shows how the upper-strand’s Scheindissonanz of D! major suggests a resolution to G!. When the bass engages an authentic cadence toward E! (bar 59–60) by subposing B! below the lower strand’s half-diminished seventh chord on D to create an E!-major V9 chord,14 we reinterpret the 6! collection of the upper strand as E! minor. Although the bass moves in the prototypical 5–1 pattern, the expected cadence is elided, since instead of E! minor we hear an enharmonically reinterpreted half-diminished seventh chord on D#. Bars 60–61 repeat the procedure of bars 58–59 a half step higher and now actually cadence on E minor in bar 62, then repeating the cadential idiom of bars 55–57 to establish G major. On the next deeper level, the whole passage can be reduced to a chromatic ascending 5–6 sequence (simplified, do–B!6, e!–d#6, e).15 Notwithstanding the superimposition of competing collections, the cadential moments provide nodes of shared tonal function. Both strands yield to the same tonic, each compromising in the process: the upper strand by loosening its major-mode identity (G! and G, respectively) to retain its collection, the lower strand by abandoning 12 The arabesque figures are, in fact, a diminution of the melodic substance from the previous section, bars 45–57. 13 The melodic outline is an exact transposition from D major to G major. The rhythmic and metric differences are a consequence of the G-major melody having to fit into 2.5 beats + 3 bars whereas the D-major melody occupies 1 beat + 4 bars. The first three pitches of each have the same note values, but then the next three eighth notes of bar 54 get compressed into sixteenth notes; the first eighth of bar 63 matches the last eighth of bar 54. This difference of one eighth is made up when, in bar 55, 3 takes up three eighth notes and is tied into the next bar, while 3 in bar 63 takes up a quarter and is tied into the next bar, so that bars 56–57 and 64–65 are rhythmically and metrically identical. 14 Subposition is a term adapted from Rameau by Kaminsky (2000, 35) and expanded by Heinzelmann (2013, 226ff.). It means that a bass note is posed below an existing harmony and may so either confirm, define, or alter the chord’s harmonic function. 15 The two-fold gesture of this sequence functions like a sentence’s presentation, eventually followed by a longer continuation (bars 66–73) that builds up toward the climax in bar 71 before receding to prepare for the return of part A’ (bar 74).
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its major-mode goals (E! and E major, respectively) and its collections (3! and 4#) to retain its tonic. The lower half of Example 8.12 highlights how Ravel maximizes the instances of ic1 dissonances by juxtaposing exactly those harmonies of each strand that involve scale degrees not shared between the competing collections, namely 4, 6, and 7 of the parallel major and minor collections. When we compare these two dissonant superimpositions of the Adagio (Examples 8.9–10 and 8.11–12), we find three procedures typical for Ravel’s later harmonic language: he juxtaposes third-related keys whose collections differ by three accidentals; he superimposes harmonies that emphasize the non-shared pitch-classes to maximize ic1 surface dissonances; and he combines parallel major- and minor-mode tonics from the two collections to create shared nodes that anchor the music in recognizable tonally functional progressions. On a middleground level, the descending-fifth sequence of bars 45–53 elaborates the third-progression in the bass, D#, C#, B. Subsequently, B minor becomes VI of D major, leading through IV/II–V–I to the D-major cadence in bar 57. The chromatic ascending 5–6 sequence of bars 58–62 picks up from D (halfdiminished) to ascend chromatically through D# to E minor, from where the progression follows again the harmonic path through IV/II–V–I to the G-major cadence in bar 65. Interestingly enough, the bass motions of the two sequences recall the two kinds of bass motion of the opening phrase: the downward trajectory of the diatonically descending bass line is briefly relieved by a chromatically ascending line. That the long diatonic descending lines seem to follow some natural gravitational pull while the ascending lines are able to ascend only for short periods and through the effort of inserted chromatic steps may motivate the long Steigerungspassage which builds up tension against a stationary G pedal (bars 65–72) before yielding to F in bar 73, then sinking into E major for the recapitulation of the A section (bar 74, Durand edition, Figure 6).
Conclusion In considering simultaneous prolongations that may be heard as belonging to two different tonalities, my analytical examples here approach the idea of competing tonal priorities discussed so eloquently by Peter Kaminsky (2004). It is no coincidence that his essay also centers around works of Ravel’s post-war oeuvre, since Ravel’s gradual expansion of tonal structures increasingly challenges our sense of tonality through referencing competing tonal anchors. While Kaminsky’s concept of dual priority may be invoked for some of my examples, I believe that my concept of dissonant superimposition as demonstrated here is located somewhat closer to traditional tonal
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paradigms. In my examples, the competing harmonies remain so close to the musical surface that they get subsumed into the larger-scale harmonic progression at the middleground. In the examples by Kaminsky, such as Ravel’s Violin Sonata or passages from his opera L’Enfant et les sortilèges, the competing keys alternately yield to each other rather than merge. Staying relatively close to traditional graphing techniques, my conceptual approach aims to portray the listening experience of seemingly incompatible strands running parallel for a while, then merging when the main tonal strand absorbs the competing one into its orbit to create a sense of tonal anchoring by relaxing into familiar cadential patterns. In Kaminsky’s dual-priority examples, on the other hand, the listening experience vacillates between the two alternative tonal points of reference, depending on which tonality Ravel brings into focus at each given moment. The aim of this article has been twofold. First, by elucidating two specific contrapuntal techniques Ravel employs to maximize surface dissonances without abandoning tonality, I offer a methodology to untangle the complex web of contrapuntal and harmonic relationships we find in Ravel’s late music. Accordingly, I focused in great detail on the relationships between surface details and the underlying tonal patterns that lead from the foreground to the middleground. Although the majority of my examples are drawn from the Adagio movement of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G, the methodology will also apply to other works and passages in Ravel’s music and could serve as a point of departure to rethink Schenkerian analysis as a valuable analytical tool for music of other composers not yet explored. Second, I chose to demonstrate how Schenkerian tools can be adapted to create valuable analytical insights into repertoire not usually associated with a Schenkerian canon, specifically music such as Ravel’s that expands tonality to its limits without abandoning it altogether. In stretching the “distance between the musical surface and the underlying norms” (Rothstein 1990, 89) without tearing the strings that tether the dissonant surface to these norms, the compositional techniques we discover in Ravel’s late music are a logical development of those of his earlier works. While in the pre-war works Ravel expanded his harmonic language primarily at the level of single harmonies (such as chords of stacked thirds, unresolved dissonances, acciaccaturas, dissonant substitutions, subpositions), a few passages already anticipate the later expansion of his dissonant challenges to tonality towards larger units. Adapting Schenkerian analysis to Ravel’s evolving harmonic practice allows us to trace his gradually expanding vocabulary of dissonance treatment. Considering my previous analyses of selected pre-war works from a Schenkerian perspective (Heinzelmann 2013), I perceive a thread of Ravel’s thinking in competing tonal layers from a simple combination of relative keys in his earlier works to the complex and dissonant combinations I describe here. An early example of such layering is what I called the “split approach” toward the second-key area in the recapitulation of
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the String Quartet’s first movement (1903), where the four parts of the quartet divide into two competing strands of D minor and F major. In the first movement of the Piano Trio (1914), the simultaneous prolongations of pentatonic A minor and an augmented triad (generated by an enneatonic collection) already involve initially incompatible layers before the expositional and recapitulatory closing groups of the sonata form,16 and the prolongation of unresolved appoggiaturas in Ravel’s own analysis of the middle section of his seventh Valse noble (1918) maximizes dissonance to a degree that one may briefly perceive two different keys a half-step apart. The examples discussed here further develop these earlier compositional techniques of competing prolongations, which eventually lead to the competing tonal centers (dissonant intervals apart) in works such as the Violin Sonata and the opera L’Enfant et les sortilèges, as so insightfully presented by Kaminsky (2004). Perhaps the most extreme manifestation of Ravel’s conceiving music in independent layers is the short piece Frontispice from 1918. It is scored for piano 5-hands or possibly player piano (Lawson 1989), where each hand or layer is notated on a separate staff and each line independently follows its unique motivic and rhythmic patterns before all lines join in an augmented-triad intonation of the ostinato motive, expanding over four measures in register, density and dynamic. Compared to the rest of Ravel’s known oeuvre, the experimental appearance of this outlier makes one wonder which directions he might have explored had his career and life not been shortened by his untimely death.
Works Cited Burkhart, Charles. 1978. “Schenker’s Motivic Parallelisms.” Journal of Music Theory 22: 145–75.
Cadwallader, Allen and William Pastille. 1992. “Schenker’s High-Level Motives.” Journal of Music Theory 36: 119–48. Cube, Felix-Eberhard von. 1988. The Book of the Musical Artwork. An Interpretation of the Musical Theories of Heinrich Schenker. Translated, with an afterword, by David Neumeyer et al. Lewiston; New York: The Edwin Mellen Press.
Goldenberg, Yosef. 2008. Prolongation of Seventh Chords in Tonal Music. Lewiston, NY: Edward Mellen Press.
Heinzelmann, Sigrun. 2011. “Playing with Models: Sonata Form in Ravel’s String Quartet and Piano Trio.” In Unmasking Ravel: New Perspectives on the Music, edited by Peter Kaminsky, 143–79. Rochester: Rochester University Press. 16 In the terminology of the Sonata Theory of Hepokoski and Darcy (2006), these two cadences form the EEC (essential expositional closure) and the ESC (essential structural closure), respectively. For a detailed analysis of this movement’s sonata form, see Heinzelmann (2011).
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_______. 2013. “The Problem(s) of Prolongation in Ravel.” In Essays from the Fourth International Schenker Symposium, Vol. 2, edited by Poundie Burstein, Lynne Rogers, Karen M. Bottge, 209–49. Hildesheim and New York: Olms. Hepokoski, James, and Warren Darcy. 2006. Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata. New York: Oxford University Press. Kamien, Roger. 1983. “Aspects of Motivic Elaboration in the Opening Movement of Haydn’s Piano Sonata in C Minor.” In Aspects of Schenkerian Theory, edited by David Beach, 77–93. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Kaminsky, Peter. 2000. “Of Children, Princesses, Dreams and Isomorphisms: TextMusic Transformation in Ravel’s Vocal Works.” Music Analysis 19, no. 1: 29–68. _______. 2004. “Ravel’s Late Music and the Problem of ‘Polytonality.’” Music Theory Spectrum 26, no. 2: 237–64. Lawson, Rex. 1989. “Maurice Ravel: Frontispice for Pianola.” The Pianola Journal 2: 36–38. Manuel, Roland. 1972. Maurice Ravel. Translated by Cynthia Jolly. New York: Dover. Nichols, Roger. 2011. Ravel. New Haven: Yale University Press. Orenstein, Arbie, ed. 1990. A Ravel Reader. New York: Columbia University Press. Reutter, Hans Peter. 2008. “Mozart, Ravel, die imperfizierte Kadenz und die perfekte Melodie. Zwei Melodien aus Mozarts Klarinettenquintett KV 581 und Ravels Klavierkonzert G-Dur.” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie 5, no. 1: 89–107. https://doi.org/10.31751/274. Rothgeb, John. 1983. “Thematic Content: A Schenkerian View.” In Aspects of Schenkerian Theory, edited by David Beach, 39–60. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Rothstein, William. 1981. “Rhythm and the Theory of Structural Levels.” PhD diss., Yale University. _______. 1984. “Heinrich Schenker as an Interpreter of Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas.” 19th-Century Music 8, no. 1: 3–28. _______. 1989. Phrase Rhythm in Tonal Music. New York: Schirmer. _______. 1990. “Rhythmic Displacement and Rhythmic Normalization.” In Trends in Schenkerian Research, edited by Allen Cadwallader, 87–113. New York: Schirmer. _______. 1991. “On Implied Tones.” Music Analysis 10, no. 3: 289–328.
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Russ, Michael. 2000.“Ravel and the Orchestra.” In The Cambridge Companion to Ravel, edited by Deborah Mawer, 118–39. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Schachter, Carl. 1976. “Rhythm and Linear Analysis: A Preliminary Study.” The Music Forum 4: 281–334. New York: Columbia University Press. Republished in: Schachter, Carl. 1999. Unfoldings, edited by Joseph N. Straus, 17–53. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. _______. 1980. “Rhythm and Linear Analysis: Durational Reduction.” The Music Forum 5: 197–232. New York: Columbia University Press. Republished in: Schachter, Carl. 1999. Unfoldings, edited by Joseph N. Straus, 54–78. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. _______. 1983. “Motive and Text in Four Schubert Songs.” In Aspects of Schenkerian Theory, edited by David Beach, 61–76. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. _______. 1987. “Rhythm and Linear Analysis: Aspects of Meter.” The Music Forum 6: 1–60. New York: Columbia University Press. Republished in: Schachter, Carl. 1999. Unfoldings, edited by Joseph N. Straus, 79–117. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. _______. 1994. “Chopin’s Prelude in D Major, Op. 28, No. 5: Analysis and Performance.” Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy 8: 27–45. Schenker, Heinrich. 1912. Beethovens neunte Sinfonie: Eine Darstellung des musikalischen Inhaltes. Vienna: Universal Edition; reprinted 1925 and 1969. Translated as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony: A Portrayal of Its Musical Content by John Rothgeb. Edited by John Rothgeb. New Haven: Yale University Press 1992. _______. (1933) 1969. Five Graphic Music Analyses (Fünf Urlinie-Tafeln). New York: David Mannes Music School; reprint with new introduction and glossary by Felix Salzer, New York: Dover 1969. _______. 2000. The Art of Performance. Translated by Irene Schreier Scott. Edited by Heribert Esser. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Straus, Joseph N. 1987. “The Problem of Prolongation in Post-Tonal Music.” Journal of Music Theory 31, no. 1: 1–21. Väisälä, Olli. 2004. Prolongation in Early Post-Tonal Music. Studia Musica 23. Sibelius Academy, Helsinki: Hakapaino Oy. Weber, Gottfried. 1832. Versuch einer geordneten Theorie der Tonsetzkunst. Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne.
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9 Motivic Elaboration and Chromaticism in the Andante cantabile of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in B! Major, K. 333 ROGER K A M IEN
One of the most striking features of the Andante cantabile of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in B! major, K. 333 (1783) is the dissonant sonority opening the development section (bar 32). Robert D. Levin (1994, 325) refers to its “audacity,” and Scott Burnham even calls it “a sound so different as to make us question our ears” (2013, 84). In the context of a Schenkerian analysis of the entire movement, this essay aims to show that this shocking sonority relates to chromatic details in the exposition.1
Exposition The exposition (bars 1–31) consists of a first theme (bars 1–8), bridge (bars 8–13), second theme (bars 14–21), and closing theme-codetta (bars 22–29; 29–31). Although distinctive in character and design, the sections are interrelated by shared melodic and rhythmic gestures. The melody of each section begins on the fifth scale degree of the local tonic. Furthermore, parallel thirds and sixths contribute to the songlike character of the exposition. In the vocal duets of Mozart’s operas, parallel thirds or tenths are often associated with words of kindness, sweetness, joy, love, togetherness, and reconciliation.2 1 My deep thanks to Charles Burkhart, Anita Kamien, Murray Perahia, and Naphtali Wagner for sharing their insights on Mozart’s Andante cantabile with me. 2 Well-known examples include No. 7, Duettino, Là ci darem la mano (bars 50–56) from Act I of Don Giovanni, No. 1, Duettino (bars 66–73), from Act I of Le Nozze di Figaro, and the duet “Pa, pa, pa” (bars 36–50) from the Act II finale of Die Zauberflöte.
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Roger Kamien Opening Theme The opening theme is a parallel period governed by an interruption structure from 5 (b!1); see Example 9.1a (108), bars 1–8. I interpret f 1 (bar 3, second beat) as 2 because it is emphasized by a diminished triad that tonicizes the supporting II6 chord.3 Owing to the parallel thirds in bars 1–2, the opening theme initially conveys the feeling of a vocal duet.4 Varied motivic repetitions in the theme begin in bar 2, in which the opening descending third b!1–a!1–g1 (bar 1) is rhythmically expanded. This third also appears in two different registers in the scalar ascent that bridges the antecedent and consequent phrases (see the b!–a!1–g1 with downward stems in Example 9.1a, bars 4–5). The top-voice descent b!1–a!1–g1–f 1 of bars 2–3) is imitated an octave lower in bars 3–4 (Example 9.1a, b!–a! in the bass, continuing into the inner voice: g–f). Particularly important to the theme is the opening neighbor-note pattern b!1– 2 c –b!1, which is expanded by the neighbor note c2 (Example 9.1a, bars 1–2 and 3). The neighbor note c2 of bar 3 resolves to the b!1 of bar 5, helping to bridge the antecedent and consequent phrases. Immediately following the c 2 is a descending triad filled in by accented passing tones that echo the preceding slower descent in bars 1–3. Finally, c in the bass decorates the B! supporting the semicadence (bar 4). The consequent phrase opens with a variation of the antecedent in which the melodyis richly ornamented and reharmonized (Example 9.1a, bars 5–6). The neighboring c1 (bar 5) is now an incomplete neighbor supported by “VI6” (not a complete neighbor supported by “IV 64 ”); b!1 (bar 6) is an accented passing tone (not a chord tone); a!1 is supported by “V7 ” (not f); and g1 is supported by VI (not I6). The descending triad filled with accented passing tones (bar 3) motivates the accented passing tones in bar 5, second beat, and bar 7, first beat. The first theme and bridge are closely linked. A hemiola in bars 6–7 and a new sixteenth-note accompaniment (bar 8) transform the metrically weak eighth bar into the strong opening bar of the bridge.5 Another element of connection is the neighbornote c2 (bar 7) that resolves to the b!1 of bar 8.
3 Laufer (1991, 1033, Example 2) reads the top line descent of the antecedent phrase as b!1 (bar
1)–a!1 (bar 3)–g1–f 1 (bar 4, in tenor). 4 The melodic pattern of parallel thirds in bars 1–2, first beat, is identical to that of the opening thirds in the piano part of the Andante ma un poco adagio of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D major, K. 175 (1773). 5 Kamien (1993, 318–20 and 327–30) deals with conflicting metrical patterns in accompaniment and melody in the Andante cantabile.
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Bridge The bridge is built upon a tonic pedal point and ends with motion to a semicadence on V (bars 12–13). The melody of the bridge begins on the upbeat to bar 9 and initiates a metrical pattern opposed to that of the bass. The opening third g1–b!1 (bar 1, first beat), now reappears in the context of two new upbeat rhythmic patterns. The first consists of three portamento repeated eighth notes (bar 8). The second upbeat pattern is a legato, descending figure in eighth notes (bar 12) that derives both from the opening descending third (bar 1, beats 1–2) and more directly, from the descending quarter notes in bar 2. The bridge expands the upper register with high descending triads filled with accented passing tones (bars 9 and 11) that derive from the descending decorated triads in the first theme (Example 9.1a, bars 3, 5, and 7). Even the opening descending third reappears in the bridge, but in a less obvious form. In the accompaniment, the a! of bar 9 resolves down to the inner-voice g in bar 10 (see the letter names in Example 9.1a, bars 8–10). Second Theme In contrast to the parallel period design of the first theme, the second theme in V consists of a presentation (bars 14–17) followed by a continuation (bars 18–21). This theme seems to grow out of the bridge due to the descending and ascending eighthnote bass arpeggio connecting bars 13 and 14, as well as the opening grace note f 1 that picks up the bridge’s ending melodic tone. As in the first theme and bridge, descending arpeggios filled in with passing tones feature prominently. If the first theme initially suggests a vocal duet, the second theme suggests a soprano solo, owing to the grace note leaping up to f 2 (bar 14), the three upbeat portamento f 1s leaping up to an unsupported e!2 (bars 15–16), and the unsupported a!2 beginning the continuation (bar 18). The second theme introduces the rhythmic pattern of a dotted quarter note on the downbeat followed by four thirty-seconds (bars 14, 16, and 18). Hemiolas appear in the first four bars of this theme. Notice the harmonic changes on the third beats of bars 14 and 16. The continuation momentarily raises the emotional temperature of the movement. It begins with the upbeat figure of three repeated notes, now shifted to the bass (B!, bar 17), followed by the extravagantly wide upward leap to the seventh a!2 (bar 18). A less gifted composer might have resolved the dissonance with a g2 on the downbeat of bar 19. Instead, Mozart introduces the new chromatic passing tone f#2 that could be heard initially as g! of a minor IV chord in B! major. This “minor” crisis is soon resolved with the inconspicuous arrival of g2 on the second sixteenth of bar 19 (second beat). Mozart links the second theme with the beginning of the closing theme by
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Roger Kamien means of a descending fifth progression from f to b!1 (bars 20–21) that is imitated an octave lower in the accompaniment of bar 21. Closing Theme and Codetta The closing theme consists of two four-bar phrases which are quite similar, but the first phrase ends with 3 in the top voice, whereas the second phrase ends on 1 (Example 9.1a, bars 25 and 29). The closing theme begins on a weak measure, with no metrical reinterpretation as in bar 8. Starting on the second sixteenth note of bar 21, the sixteenth-note accompaniment figure—consisting of eleven notes—sounds like an extended upbeat to the next (strong) bar. This interpretation is supported by Mozart’s notation in the autograph, in which a slur and separate flags differentiate the first sixteenth from the following ones. The anacrusis effect of the accompaniment figure in bar 21 is confirmed in bar 25, when it is compressed into just seven sixteenth notes, while preserving the descending fifth in a more rapid variant (please refer to the score). Upbeat figures of three eight notes, both in portamento and legato versions, pervade the closing theme. For the first time, the portamento figure is enriched by an upward scale figure below the repeated tones. The legato versions include rising sixths as well as descending thirds accompanied by rising thirds in the left hand (bars 23 and 27), a texture derived from bar 2 of the opening theme and the next to last bar of the bridge (bar 12). The melody of the codetta (bars 29–31) employs a variant of the common closing pattern 8–7–6–§7–8. Pitch classes B!–A!–G, and C–B!, prepare for the return of bar 1 when the exposition is repeated. At the end of the codetta, an upbeat figure of three rising thirds leads smoothly into a repetition of the exposition as well as to the beginning of the development.
Tonal Overview of the Movement Before discussing the development section in detail, a tonal overview of the Andante cantabile may be helpful (Example 9.2, 109). Notice that the initial 5 is prolonged up to the recapitulation and a fifth descent from 2 takes place in an inner voice, a procedure first discussed by Ernst Oster (Schenker [1935] 1979, 139).
Development Section The development section prolongs the V (B! major) of the exposition by means of the II and IV, with the seventh A! first prepared as a consonance and then becoming
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a seventh (Example 9.1b, bars 43 and 48, 109). The development divides into three sections, bars 32–35, 36–43 and 43–50, each including the upbeat figure of three repeated eighth notes. Section 1 Prepared by the tonicization of II6 in bar 3, the opening section of the development (bars 32–35) modulates to II (F minor) from the V at the end of the exposition. The rising three-tone upbeat figure in thirds that initially leads back to the songlike first theme now leads to the shocking dissonance beginning the development.6 The first two bars of the development sound like a distorted or disturbed variation of bars 1–2. Though articulated differently, the rhythmic pattern of a quarter note followed by four eighths and a quarter note is the same and several of the right-hand thirds are preserved as well (see the asterisks in Example 9.1b, bars 32–33). The ascent d1–e!1– f 1–f#1–g1 in the inner voice of the right-hand thirds of bars 31–32 derives from the same ascent in the melodic line of bars 18–19. In both passages the pitch class F# functions as an accented passing tone. The inner-voice melodic pattern starting with f 1 (last eighth of bar 31) takes center stage when it is imitated in the top voice of bars 33–35, now emphasized by the upbeat figure of three repeated eighth notes (see the letter names in Example 9.1b). Section 2 In section 2 (bars 36–43), an ascending bass line from F (bars 35–36) supports a descending top voice that initially appears more than three octaves above it (a!2, bar 36), recalling the leap from B!2 to a!2 in bars 17–18 of the exposition. Beginning ominously with a four-fold repetition of F, the bass climbs chromatically when the motivic pitch classes F–F#–G finally appear in a low register (Example 9.1b, bars 37–39). The upper melodic line creates successive diminished-seventh harmonies in bars 37–38 and includes two descending third progressions inspired by the one in bars 32–33 (see the brackets in Example 9.1b, bars 36–37 and 38–39). The end of section 2 (bars 41–43) parallels the end of the first theme (bars 6–8) in that it leads to a section based motivically on the bridge and contains a hemiola (bars 41–42) that transforms the opening of section 3 (bar 43) into a metrically strong bar.
6 Although very different in character, Mozart’s Minuet for Piano in D major, K. 576b, is similar to our Andante cantabile in that it opens on 5 with a series of parallel thirds in the right hand, and its second part (bar 17) begins with a harsh dissonance.
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Roger Kamien Section 3 Section 3 (bars 43–50) functions as retransition that leads from IV to V7. It dramatically transforms the bridge through its dissonances, rapid chord changes, frequent a ccents, and incessant repetition of the eighth-note figure. The bass descends scale-wise from a! to B!, subdividing into the descending thirds a!–f–d!–B! (Example 9.1b, bars 43–48). These bass tones support A! major, F minor, D! minor, and B!7 chords and applied 43 chords tonicize the F-minor and D!-minor harmonies. The F-minor chord and its preceding applied 43 chord are dynamically stressed by sf indications, whereas the strange D!-minor chord and its preceding 43 chord are highlighted by sfp indications (see Keefe 2017, 148). The top voice third progression from f!2 to d§2 culminates the series of such progressions initiated in bars 32–33 (see the bracket in Example 9.1b, bars 47–48). The passing tonicizations of F minor and D!minor result in delicate recollections and reflections of earlier events in the development section. The F minor of bars 44– 45 grows out of the applied diminished triad in bar 3 and the powerful emphasis on F minor at the beginning of the development section (Example 9.1b, bars 32–36). This connection is strengthened by the top-voice figure e§2–g2–f 2 in bars 34–35 and 44–45. The unexpected progression from F minor to D! minor brings the top voice motion f 2–g!2–f!2 that enharmonically contrasts with the f 2–f#2–g 2 near the beginning of the development (Example 9.1b, bars 33–35 and 45–47). Ending the development is a three-bar extension of V7 with repeated four-voice chords shifted up an octave, the most orchestral sounding passage in the movement. This parallels the three-bar prolongation of V in the codetta, in which a melodic figure is shifted down an octave. Like the f#2 of bar 19, the f#2 of bar 34 could be heard initially as g!2, here resulting in a momentary Neapolitan sixth chord in F minor.
Recapitulation In the first theme and bridge of the recapitulation, the melody includes more decorative tones, chromaticism, and faster rhythms than in the exposition. The harmonic progressions of the exposition are retained with some subtle deviations. We now consider some of the most interesting deviations from the exposition. First theme In bar 53, II6 appears immediately on the first beat replacing the diminished triad of bar 3. However, this triad is recalled by the incomplete neighbor e§1 on the second sixteenth note. As though to compensate for the missing diminished triad, a diminished
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seventh appears on the fourth eighth note of bar 56. In bars 56–57, VI is followed by V 65 of IV–IV progression, whereas in bars 6–7 the VI leads directly to II6. Bridge One of the most remarkable changes appears in the bridge. In the exposition, bar 11 simply repeats bar 9, whereas in the analogous bar 61 there is a dramatic upward leap of a seventh to a dissonant c3. This tone creates registral tension that resolves with the b!2 (bar 64) opening the second theme. Second theme Another striking deviation appears near the end of the second theme (bars 67–69), which seems calmer than the corresponding bars of the exposition (bars 18–19), because the momentarily threatening effect of the quasi-minor IV chord has been almost eliminated (Example 9.3, 109). The appoggiatura d!2 (bar 68)—corresponding to the chromatic passing tone f#2 of bar 19—is initially supported by the melodic sixth g–e! (suggesting V6 of IV) so it cannot be heard as anything but a decorative tone. Closing Theme and Codetta In the exposition the two phrases of the closing theme and the codetta are in the same register whereas in the recapitulation the second phrase and the following codetta appears an octave higher (compare bars 21–31 with bars 75–81). This allows the codetta melody to rise to an f 3 (bar 80), usually the highest tone on Viennese fortepianos of the 1780s. It also enables the codetta to end in a register with a first ending that leads back to the beginning of the development section. The Andante cantabile fades away with a two-bar second ending marked pp, the only such dynamic indication in the movement.7 Mozart had to provide a second ending because the first ending returns to the dissonant opening of the development section. The last of the three rising thirds of the second ending do not lead upward, but for the first time are suspended over the bar line and resolve downward to the calming third e!1–g1.
7 The ebullient third movement Presto of Piano Sonata in G major, K, 283 (1774) is the only other Mozart piano movement in sonata form that concludes with first and second endings: the first with an imperfect V–I cadence and the second, four bars in length and marked “Coda,” with a conclusive perfect authentic V–I cadence.
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Conclusion This study has shown how the development of the Andante cantabile radically transforms and dramatizes lyrical thematic material from the exposition. The diminished triad tonicizing II6 in the first theme (bar 3) prefigures the development’s shocking opening sonority and modulation to the key of F minor (bars 32–35). The ascending chromatic passing tone f#2, introduced in the songlike second theme (bar 19), reappears in three different octaves in the development: First as f#1 in the middle voice of the shocking sonority (bar 32), then as f#2 (bar 34), where it can be heard initially as g!2, and finally as F (bar 38), within a tense chromatic ascent in the bass, where it is lengthened from a quarter note to a dotted half note. The bridge section of the exposition, built upon a tonic pedal, is transmuted into the development’s retransition (bars 43–50), now with a descending bass line supporting A! major, F minor, D! minor and B!7 chords. The surprising progression from F minor to D! minor brings the top-voice motion f 2 –g!2–f!2, creating an enharmonic contrast with the pervasive motive F–F#–G.
Works Cited Burnham, Scott. 2013. Mozart’s Grace. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Kamien, Roger. 1993. “Conflicting Metrical Patterns in Accompaniment and Melody in Works by Mozart and Beethoven,” Journal of Music Theory 37, no. 2: 311–48. Keefe, Simon P. 2017. Mozart in Vienna: The Final Decade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Laufer, Edward. 1991. “Motivic Continuity and Transformation in the Piano S onatas.” Mozart Jahrbuch: 1029–37.
Levin, Robert D. 1994. “Mozart’s Solo Keyboard Music.” In Eighteenth-Century Keyboard Music, edited by Robert L. Marshall, 308–49. New York: Schirmer Books. Schenker, Heinrich. 1935. Der freie Satz. Vol. 3 of Neue musikalische Theorien und Phantasien. Vienna: Universal Edition. Translated as Free Composition by Ernst Oster. New York: Longman 1979.
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Part III: History and Reception
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10 The Reception of Heinrich Schenker’s Music Theory in German-Speaking Countries After 1945 OLIV ER SCH WA B-FELISCH
Part 1: 1945–2000 In 1945, Schenkerism seemed virtually silenced in the German-speaking world. The Nazis had confiscated Schenker’s works, closed the Schenker Institutes in Vienna and Hamburg, and forced the discontinuation of the monthly periodical Der Dreiklang. Most of Schenker’s students had been compelled to emigrate; in their home countries they had faced work bans, expropriations, and ultimately threats of physical extermination. Last but not least, Schenker and Reinhard Oppel had passed away. At first, it may seem as though this silence has lasted almost into the 2000s. In his 1969 lecture “On the Problem of Musical Analysis,” Theodor W. Adorno could state as a matter of fact that Schenker was “forgotten today” ([1969] 1982, 173). And still today the Schenker Lehrgang in Vienna is the only course at a German-speaking academic institution in which Schenker’s theory serves as an integral part of the curriculum.1 On closer inspection, however, a more nuanced picture emerges. Measured by the number of publications referring to Schenker and his theory, Schenker has at least played a certain part in German-language music research after 1945. The who and how of this reception are the subject of the first section of this part; it outlines the reception of Schenker’s work from 1945–2000 and examines four common explanations for the fact that the reception of Schenker in German-speaking countries remained at the low level described during this period. The second section sketches one further explanation and places it in a political context. 1 Seminars such as the two-semester introduction to Schenkerian analysis given by Steven Hinton at the Technical University Berlin in 1989–90 were a rare exception.
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Schenkerians and Others The first group of scholars to be discussed here consists of German-speaking theorists trained by Schenker himself or Schenkerians of the first to third generation. Oswald Jonas and Felix-Eberhard von Cube need no introduction to an English-speaking audience; Jonas’s student Hellmut Federhofer is briefly characterized in the second part (page 164). Franz Eibner, who studied with Jonas at the Schenker Institute of the Neues Wiener Konservatorium (Fritz 1996, 14) became full professor of the Lehrkanzel für Tonsatz nach Heinrich Schenker, a newly created position at the Vienna Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst in 1974. From 1976–86 he directed the Schenker-Lehr gang, which had been founded on his initiative. Eibner has published extensively on Schenkerian topics (see Fink-Mennel 2006, 164–67). Erwin Ratz, whose Einführung in die musikalische Formenlehre (1951) became one of the most widely read German-language music theory books after 1945, saw Schenker as a decisive influence on his musical thinking. In 1947 Ratz wrote to his former teacher Jonas: “My distant goal is, after all, . . . to unite Schönberg and Schenker with respect to the theory of form” (cited after Giannini 2019, 212).2 Actually, the first edition of the Formenlehre contains an explicit reference to Jonas—even more, Ratz emphasized that Schenker’s notions could provide “valuable services” in analysis (Ratz 1951, 9). In the 1973 edition, however, this passage was deleted for unknown reasons (Giannini 2019, 212). Apart from a few passages of the Formenlehre, which are recognizably influenced by Schenker (Ratz 1951, 48–50), Ratz has not contributed further to the Schenkerian discourse. In 1979, Karl-Otto Plum, a student of von Cube, published “Untersuchungen zu Heinrich Schenkers Stimmführungsanalyse” (1979), a text that was long regarded as the first German-language dissertation on Schenkerian analysis (see Drabkin 1983). Thomas Wozonig, in contrast, attributes temporal primacy to Friedrich Neumann’s thesis “Der Typus des Stufenganges der Mozart’schen Sonatendurchführung,” supervised by Federhofer and submitted in 1958 (2018, 135–36). The biographical background of two further authors writing shortly after the end of World War II is still obscure. In 1950, Hans Wingert published an essay which is especially interesting in its ideological position: Wingert rejects the criticism that “Schenker looks exclusively backwards” (1950, 111). If Schenker’s laws are eternal, he argues, his theory must be regarded as a “directive into the future” (1950, 111; see Schwab-Felisch 2005b). Wingert, who, according to an undated prospectus of the Schenker Institute, was responsible for the theoretical repetitorium at the Schenker-Institute in Hamburg 2 Unless otherwise noted, translations from German into English were made by the author of this article based on a preliminary translation by https://www.deepl.com/translator. Wieland Hoban proofread the entire text.
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(Schenker Documents Online s.v. “Wingert”), could have gained his professional expertise in a Schenkerian context: in an article on the Hamburg music a cademy he reports on “a musician who had studied in Vienna” and “moved to Hamburg 25 years ago.” (Wingert 1953, 41) As the context suggests, these lines may refer to himself. Even less clear is the biographical background of Heinrich Hartmann, who published a fairly well-informed text on Schenker in 1952. Like Wingert, Hartmann believes in universal laws; not Schenker’s laws of music, however, but Marx’s laws of the relation between economy, social classes, and culture. This is precisely what enables him to limit the historical validity of Schenker’s Schichtenlehre (see Schwab-Felisch 2005b). When Hartmann, “a serious young man . . . , modest, educated and accomplished,” entered the office of the Österreichische Musikzeitschrift to offer his manuscript, he was apparently still unknown (Hartmann 1952, editorial note). Even in the decades after 1950, however, no further publications by a musicologist or musician of this name are documented. “Heinrich Hartmann,” a name identical to that of an early Baroque composer (ca. 1582–1616), may thus be a pseudonym. Finally, two scholars of the third student generation are worthy of special mention: Harald Kaufmann, who had earned a doctorate in philosophy as well as in law, founded in 1967 the Graz Institut für Wertungsforschung (today: Institut für Musikästhetik), the only German-speaking institution devoted exclusively to the philosophical discussion of music. Kaufmann, who was strongly influenced by Adorno, had studied with Federhofer, but then sharply criticized methodological aspects of his work (1963); Federhofer’s response was correspondingly displeased (1964). The tribute to Schenker, however, which Kaufmann published 30 years after Schenker’s death, appears unusually insightful and nuanced despite all its ideology criticism (1965). Peter Barcaba, a student of Eibner’s, directed the Schenker-Lehrgang during 1986– 94 and published numerous papers on Schenkerian theory. At least two of Barcaba’s students were of particular importance for the reception of Schenker’s work in the German-speaking world from the mid-1990s on: Martin Eybl and Bernhard Haas (see below, pages 160–62). Representatives of the group of scholars outlined above share certain characteristics: they are sufficiently familiar with Schenker’s mature theory, even in its technical aspects; most of them use it in their own analyses. And despite all possible criticism, they are at least not fundamentally opposed to Schenker; in most cases they expressly advocate his Schichtenlehre. Representatives of German-language university musicology, on the other hand, show a different profile: they generally make no analytical use of Schenker’s mature theory; in the few cases where they deal with it, they generally do not discuss questions that presuppose specialist theoretical knowledge, but rather offer summaries of Schenkerian basic concepts; otherwise they tend to limit themselves to early writings
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by Schenker or to non-analytical (i.e., aesthetic, historical, philological, or performance-practical) aspects of Schenker’s œuvre. With rare exceptions, most of these scholars have published only one or two articles on Schenker each.3 At times, Schenker’s musicological reception in German-speaking countries is characterized by a certain ambivalence. Carl Dahlhaus, for instance, wrote in his review of Der freie Satz: “One will hardly be able to deny that Heinrich Schenker, along with Riemann, Halm and Kurth, has been one of the great music theorists of recent decades; one will therefore have to read his books, even though they are difficult and not infrequently annoying to read” (1959, 523). Moreover, positive and negative evaluations are often unevenly distributed: the recognition given to Schenker remains general and aspecific, while the presumed need to reject particular aspects of his work is justified in concrete terms. Quite a few musicologists are inclined to criticize Schenker’s concepts on principle.4 Consequently, there is a noticable tendency to assume that the reader meets Schenker critically and at the same time is not too familiar with his theory. This becomes evident not least by the factual errors that musicologists seem to allow themselves more frequently with Schenker than with other topics.5 Occasionally, even the rhetoric is disparaging: Walter Kolneder, for instance, confronts Schenker’s terminology with what he considers the correct “professional language” [“Fachsprache”] of musicology (1958, 61–62). Kolneder’s attitude towards Schenker becomes particularly clear where he compares him to a “moderately gifted student of composition who has only just heard about the prohibition of parallel fifths” (1958, 64). 3 Carl Dahlhaus is the most prominent of these exceptions. Up to the 2000s, Dahlhaus was the only full professor of musicology in the German-speaking world who—apart from Hellmut Federhofer—dealt with Schenker time and again for most of his professional life. For all the severity that Dahlhaus’s criticism of Schenker could assume, Dahlhaus nevertheless had a clear idea of Schenker’s significance (see, for example, Dahlhaus 1985, 38–39). 4 Of course, there are counterexamples. Rudolf Frisius, who wrote the foreword to the photo mechanical reprint of Schenker’s Harmonielehre (1978) was one of the few German authors musically trained outside the Schenkerian tradition who recognized the specificity of Schenker’s approach to harmonic theory and evaluated it positively. Keller (1966), on the contrary, had still shaken his head over Schenker’s idiosyncrasies. Ernst Apfel (1967) explicitly refers to Schenker in his attempt to reduce harmonic functions to merely tonic and dominant. And in her Dahlhaussupervised dissertation, Lotte Thaler (1984, 117–26) deals in no less than 10 pages with Schenker’s specific form of organicism. 5 In a review published in 1996, for example, it is stated that a Schenkerian diagram connects structural notes in the upper voice as well as in the bass with graphically similar beams. This simple observation leads to far-reaching conclusions: “Why did composers of the 17th and 18th centuries struggle to distinguish the functions of the bass and upper voice? Two centuries of composition in vain—ignored in the schema, but in the analysis probably tacitly assumed again? How can such ambiguities exist in an otherwise so thoroughly systematized theory? In the light of such considerations, one is tempted to call Schenker’s system a tragic constellation in music theory” (Weber-Bockholdt 1996, 170).
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As a first conclusion, it can thus be said that, with regard to the evaluation and practical use of Schenker’s theory, the German-speaking reception of Schenker’s work after 1945 is clearly divided into two camps. What are the reasons for this? Let us first consider four aspects of Schenker’s reception in German-language musicology that are usually mentioned where explanations are sought.
Four Explanations Expulsion and Music-Theoretical Counter-Discourse In 1930 Walter Riezler remarked: “For a while it seemed as if the life’s work of the theorist Heinrich Schenker was threatened with the worst fate that can befall an intellectual creator: to be hushed up” (1930, 502). Even if Riezler’s statement, including the choice of words, aligns with Walter Dahms’s assumption that Schenker’s work was “hushed up” (1923, 511), Riezler cannot be suspected of uncritically following what has been called Schenker’s need to present himself as a misunderstood genius (Cook 2007, 269–70). For he continues: “Today, this danger for Schenker has been overcome: his books and analyses are read and studied, and the depth and peculiarity of this spirit is increasingly recognized” (1930, 502). Even during the early 1930s, however, the reception of Schenker’s work was still taking place in a kind of music-theoretical counter-discourse: Although Schenkerism penetrated the “German-speaking musical academia [more] than the mythology allows,” (Cook 2007, 274) good knowledge of Schenker's mature theory could still be expected only from members of the small circle around Schenker and some of his students. By 1945 most of these Schenkerians had emigrated; transforming the music-theoretical counter-discourse of Schenkerism into an established public one would therefore have required support from musicology and music theory at universities, music academies, and conservatories. Continuity After the Machtergreifung in 1933 and the Anschluss of Austria in 1938, the National Socialists subjected the disciplines of musicology and music theory to extensive restructuring—not always against the will of the musicologists involved (Potter 1998, 88–89). Even before 1933, it was extremely difficult for Jews to obtain a full professorship in musicology (1998, 95–98); after that it was impossible. Nazi careerists took the positions of their banned Jewish colleagues, and musicology curricula were realigned according to Nazi ideology. Even if they were not convinced National Socialists, many musicologists decided against emigration and resistance in favor of adaptation.
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The year 1945 was far from a radical new beginning. Many people remained imprisoned in National Socialist thinking. And more than a few members of the elite, such as entrepreneurs, lawyers, or indeed musicologists, were able to continue their careers with little or no interruption (see Rothkamm and Schipperges 2015). At the same time, the policy of denazification pursued by the victorious powers created a climate in which it hardly seemed possible to publicly declare one’s support for National Socialism (Frei 2018, 274). Many of those who had held National Socialist ideas only a few years earlier now professed the new canon of values. In some cases, however, the persistence of National Socialist beliefs became evident—and had a far-reaching impact on everyday life at certain musicological institutes. The Austrian composer and musicologist Gösta Neuwirth remembers: Today it is no longer quite clear how polarised the situation was. Once, when I came to the [Vienna] Musicological Institute, a colleague was sitting at the table in the library and reading. Under the book he was hiding another one, which he was actually reading. We talk to each other and I ask him: “What are you reading there?” He says, “I am studying Schenker.”—“Why are you covering this up?”—“I have to be careful here, because if anyone sees that I want to read Schenker, that I’m reading a Jew here, then I can forget about studying.” This was the real situation in 1955/56. (Schmusch 2019, 94)6
The continuity of personnel in musicology, however, explains the reluctance towards Schenker only for certain periods and universities, but not for the discipline as a whole over the entire period in question. University musicologists did not form a homo geneous group even in the first years after the end of the war, and over the decades, the discipline dealt with the most diverse social and intellectual currents: Gadamer’s hermeneutics, Adorno’s critical theory, the political ideas of the student movement, and many others. Compared to musicology, music theory was in some respects a special case. At the beginning 1930s, the discipline consisted of numerous diverse voices; it actively pursued theory formation, took up tendencies in the humanities, and maintained a lively inner-disciplinary discourse. During the 12 years from 1933 to 1945, however, it withered into a “discipline without discourse” (Holtmeier 2003, 12), a place of mere musical craftsmanship with little ambition to develop concepts that could survive outside the narrow framework of the local institution at which they had been conceived. Music theory at conservatories and music academies thus did not provide a conducive environment for the scholarly rediscovery, discussion, and dissemination of Schenker’s teachings. 6 Erich Schenk had been formally appointed to the chair of the Institute of Musicology at the University of Vienna in April 1940, and held the position until his retirement in 1971 (see Pape 2000).
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Analysis and Historical Musicology After 1945, musical analysis experienced a period of new flowering: The “enthusiastic young academics, tired of the prevailing method of intellectual history, [saw] it as their historical task” to illuminate the “artistic character of the individual work, its individuality, by proceeding through its compositional technique. . . . After the Nazi regime and the Second World War, they wanted to build up a new methodology, a methodology untouched by the political-ideological mistakes of their fathers’ generation. At its heart was the recognition of the work of art, the key to which lay in a thoroughgoing musical analysis. But analysis meant structural analysis, not a priori and for everyone it was aesthetic interpretation. And this orientation towards the work was accompanied by the ennoblement of the musical avant-garde as a legitimate object of musicological work.” (Brinkmann 2001)
The new significance of analysis, however, had no consequences for Schenkerian analysis: Analyzing New Music required its own analytical tools, and the analysis of tonal music was dominated by the functional theory of Hugo Riemann (in the monistic version of Wilhelm Maler) and the Formenlehre of Arnold Schönberg (as conveyed by Erwin Ratz). Moreover, many continued to find little value in pure structural analysis: they considered it as merely one-dimensional. For them, genuine insight into the work of art required that structural-analytical aspects be related to historical contexts (see also below). At universities, therefore, music theory retained its traditional role as an auxiliary discipline; in fact, it was “often regarded as an almost annoying accessory that could not be completely disregarded, but was only seen as a kind of necessary stage on the path to the shining heights of the real and true musicology, i.e., music history” (Wellek 1948, 159). Aesthetics and Politics As is well known, certain aspects of Schenker's personality and work have often been perceived as problematic, even by fellow scholars such as August Halm (Cook 2007, 158) and students like Oswald Jonas (Rothgeb 2006, 115–16). These aspects included Schenker’s tendency to exalt himself and belittle other views, as well as the ideological and political agenda of his writings: the aesthetics of genius, the political and aesthetic conservatism, and the chauvinist attitude towards non-German nations. Although these aspects did not go unnoticed in his American reception (Babbitt 1952, 264), they were less prominent in the reception of Schenker’s work from the 1950s to the 1970s because, among other reasons, Schenker’s theory was first received via the
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work of Felix Salzer (Schachter 2006).7 In post-war Germany, however, matters of ideology took on greater significance. Some researchers even believe that Schenker’s “often unbearably primitive language, the aggressive tone of Der Tonwille, his extreme German nationalism and his vituperative opposition to New Music were enough, in many eyes, to place him squarely in the Nazi camp. . . . Thanks to the Third Reich, Schenker the politician was able to wipe Schenker the theorist from public awareness in Germany” (Holtmeier 2004, 249; see also Holtmeier 2003, 21). Unquestionably, Holtmeier’s statement has a kernel of truth. As William Drabkin has noted, “Schenker’s ideological position was untenable to a German nation trying to come to terms with the horrors it had recently perpetrated” (2002, 816n8). And of course, there was Michael Mann’s famous dictum that in some cases, Schenker’s prose “could well have come from the pen of the Führer himself ” (1949, 9). That the Nazi label had a decisive influence on Schenker reception after 1945, however, is an overgeneralization that cannot be substantiated by the literature. Not even Schenker’s conservatism necessarily played a prominent role in the reception of his work. Rudolf Frisius, for example, who devoted himself to studying the music of the twentieth and twenty-first century, wrote a remarkably unbiased foreword to Schenker’s Harmonielehre (1978). And Theodor W. Adorno only briefly touched upon “certain follies” and the “vulgar nationalism” “of which [Schenker] was guilty” before turning directly to the topics he preferred to discuss ([1969] 1982, 173). Finally, one should not forget that the critical stance toward Schenker’s theory was, to a not insignificant extent, also due to its German-language representatives: von Cube’s and Federhofer’s rejection of post-tonal music supported the view that Schenker’s theory was necessarily associated with a certain anti-modernist attitude. Open Questions The four explanations given above, as convincing as they may be, leave several questions unanswered: Why, for example, did the meagerness of Schenker’s reception last more than 50 years, extending into the 2000s? Why was Schenker not at least discovered by the “New Music Theory” of the 1970s, whose emphasis on concrete compositional reality seems to align remarkably well with Schenker’s goals (La Motte, Birnstein, Kühn 1972)? And why was it that the English-language reception of Schenker’s work, to which many of the classic objections against Schenker no longer applied, was
7 Needless to say that the relation between music theoretical and ideological aspects of Schenker’s work has been the subject of intense debate in the English-speaking world since about the beginning of the 1980s. See, for example, Schachter (2001).
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sometimes noted in the German-speaking countries (see, for example, Kühn 1978), but had virtually no effect?8 For a sufficiently complex answer to questions like these, the scattered Germanlanguage statements on Schenker would have to be comprehensively reviewed and related to the ramified history of German-language musicology after 1945.9 This cannot be achieved in a single essay. In the following, therefore, only one particular thesis will be pursued: the thesis that the systematicity of Schenker’s analyses—a consequence of his radically autonomy-aesthetic and organicist position—could not be reconciled with certain basic methodological attitudes that had been binding for an important part of German-language historical musicology since about the 1960s.
System Method and Particularity A complete Schenkerian analysis shows a large number of interlinked substructures of different dimensions. Nevertheless, it does not describe a mere “patchwork” (Eybl 1995, 124): firstly, structures emerge from a few basic operations such as Horizonta lisierung and Konsonantmachung; secondly, individual structures are connected to each other by a dense constellation of sub- and superordinations; thirdly, the most comprehensive, logically earliest structure and the smallest, logically latest structures are mediated with each other by a continuous sequence of ever more complex derivatives; and fourthly, many structure types have defined functional roles in the overall structure (conversely, certain areas of the overall structure are selective with respect to the structure types that may appear in them). All in all: complete Schenkerian analyses have the property of systematicity.10 Since the nineteenth century, systems concepts such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s have been criticized in different ways and for different reasons (Krijnen 2008, 26–36). For the criticism of music-theoretical systems concepts, one basic observation 8 Thomas Christensen, for example, believes that Carl Dahlhaus, certainly one of the best-informed German-speaking musicologists of his time, “seemed to have completely ignored a whole generation of nuanced analytical studies that emerged on our side of the Atlantic” (Christensen 2016, 26). 9 Although in recent years the history of German-language musicology in the twentieth century has become a central research topic (see Zoidl 2017, 46–54), there is still much to be done. 10 The concept of systematicity was elaborated by Paul Hoyningen-Huene as a general criterion for the scientificity of the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities and formal sciences. The systematicity of descriptions is an important aspect in this context. Hoyningen-Huene (2013) distinguishes the following “techniques for increasing the systematicity of descriptions . . .: axiomatization . . .; classification, taxonomy, and nomenclature . . . ; periodization . . . ; quantification . . . ; empirical generalization . . . ; and historical descriptions” (40). Which of these techniques have played what role in the development of Schenker's theory would have to be investigated elsewhere.
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above all is decisive: the observation that equating a constellation of sounding events with a music-theoretically defined structure necessarily disregards certain characteristics of this constellation. A number of questions arise from this finding. Which properties of the analyzed pieces are considered—and which are not? How can an analysis address such extramethodical aspects? And how compatible are the results of an analytical method with those of competing methods? The complex of problems that questions like these imply can be presented in a more nuanced way via some arguments that Carl Dahlhaus put forward in a controversy with Hellmut Federhofer and Karl-Otto Plum in 1983–84. Dahlhaus notes that it seems “superfluous and monotonous . . . if Schenker’s method is demonstrated once again in ‘masterpieces’ of the Classical-Romantic tradition” (1983, 83). And he continues: “according to the criteria of modern aesthetics, which sees the essence and substance of a work of art in its individuality, a Schenkerian analysis uses the work as an object to demonstrate the theory, instead of conversely using theory as a mere scaffolding set up around the work, so to speak, in order to feel one’s way towards its particularity, and which is torn down as soon as it has done its service.” (83; see also Puffett 1984). That “a Schenkerian analysis uses the work as an object to demonstrate the theory” is an argument that is as well-worn as it is malicious.11 It assumes Schenker-Analysis to misuse musical works of art for selfish purposes. How does this assumption come about? Dahlhaus identifies Schenker’s analyses with their method-specific characteristics and denies their ability to say anything specific about the pieces to which they are applied. At first this appears to be a mere logical error. That a theory-based and thus limited statement about a composition disregards some properties of that composition does, of course, not mean that it fails to capture any of its properties (Plum 1984, 24). This objection, however, misses the core of the argument. The decisive point lies in Dahlhaus’s idea of particularity. Since every theory, by the very fact that it is a theory, leaves certain aspects of the work in the dark, a methodologically homogeneous analysis must from the outset live with the admission that it has not only ignored aspects of its object, but also decided a priori, on its own, which aspects are involved. Thus, it necessarily fails to do justice to the particularity of the work. Dahlhaus’s critique, therefore, does not revolve around the question of whether Schenker’s theory generates appropriate descriptions of musical works but is rather based on the simple fact that every fully elaborated Schenkerian analysis has a degree 11 Walter Kolneder, for example, writes about Schenker: ”in reading many of his analyses, one often has the impression that the works of our masters gradually became vehicles for the representation of his system” (Kolneder 1959, 71). And 60 years later, Hartmut Fladt characterizes a Schenkerian analysis as follows: “The drastically reduced work, almost completely robbed of its meaning and its tangible statement, became proof of the expressiveness of a system” (Fladt 2019, 322).
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of systematicity that seems to exclude the possibility of relativizing its own relativity.12 Dahlhaus’s unspoken ideal consequently consists in reducing the influence of systematic methods on analysis. This is the meaning of the epistemologically rather assailable notion that one could tear down the theory that has enabled an insight as if it were a scaffold. Dahlhaus knows quite well that the theoretical foundations of an analysis cannot be erased. But if the most diverse information is combined to form a complex picture of the object, he believes, the influence of each of its components is reduced. The greater the analyst’s freedom to configure his analytical instruments individually, the easier it will be for him to draw such a complex picture.13 Physiognomy and Truth Content Every description, according to the basic insight referred to above, hides certain properties of the described object by conceptually identifying certain other properties. Many German-speaking critics of Schenker’s work agree that precisely those characteristics of musical compositions that are left out in Schenkerian graphs are decisive for the artistic character of these compositions. Walter Riezler, for example, wrote in 1930: Through [Schenker’s] attempt to unveil the last original facts from which the work of art has grown, the sensual appearance of the individual work increasingly disappears before his eyes. (503)
And he continues: But . . . all these investigations must start from the ‘Gestalt’ and end with it again. It is not the final result of a ‘diminution’ beginning from the ‘Urlinie ’—any more than the figures in a painting by Michelangelo are ornamental ‘figurations’ of spatial constructions—it is not ‘foreground’ but final content. (508)14 12 Elsewhere, Dahlhaus describes the tendency of certain methods of analysis to reduce “the musical work . . . to the mere exemplification of [its] explanatory scheme” as a consequence of the fact that they follow a “regulative idea” of “complete unity and wholeness” (Dahlhaus 1984, 76). 13 Dora Hanninen has stated that “contextual criteria” (which also cover motivic relations), “rely on basic concepts in music theory such as scale degree, Roman numeral function, . . . and set-class, that in analytical practice are generally understood and used as observation language rather than theoretical terms in their own right” (Hanninen 2001, 364; see also Hanninen 2012, 32–43 and passim). In a certain sense, this statement may explain James Webster’s observation that “Dahlhaus’s primary analytical orientation in Beethoven is that of thematicism.” (Webster 1993, 212): the lighter a method and the more terms can be used in the sense of a “music-theoretical colloquial language” (Dahlhaus 1984, 155), the more easily, it seems, Dahlhaus’s ideal of an analysis appropriate to the object in its particularity can be realized. 14 Riezler demands that the aesthetic content of a work must somehow be represented in the analysis. For Schenker, on the other hand, the aesthetic content is only realized in the course of analytically
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In Theodor W. Adorno’s 1969 lecture “On the Problem of Musical Analysis,” which deals with Schenker among other issues, one section shows surprising similarities to Riezler’s quotation above: In relation to this Fundamental Line all else appears to Schenker as being, so to speak, quite simply fortuitous—a kind of ‘additive’ [Zusatz], as it were—and it is this, I think, that already marks out the limitations of the Schenkerian form of analysis. For, in reducing music to its most generalised structures, what seems to him and to this theory to be merely casual and fortuitous is, in a certain sense, precisely that which is really the essence, the being [das Wesen] of the music. If . . . you examine the difference between the styles of Mozart and of Haydn, then you will not expect to discover this difference in general stylistic models and characteristics of the formal layout. . . . You will have to resort instead to examining small but decisive features—little physiognomic characteristics—in the way the themes themselves are constructed, features which, for Schenker, are of mere secondary importance but which make all the difference and constitute, in fact, the difference between Haydn and Mozart. ([1969] 1982, 174)
The fact that Adorno referred in 1969 to the Urlinie instead of the Ursatz suggests that he was not familiar with Schenker’s later writings or the specific concept of the Ursatz (see Federhofer 2004, 303). It is therefore not unlikely that Adorno acquired his knowledge of Schenker to a significant extent through Riezler’s essay. However, Adorno is not content merely to paraphrase Riezler’s criticism. For, while Riezler argues purely aesthetically, Adorno takes a decisive step here and on the following pages towards the philosophical integration of the argument. The crux of this passage is the expression “little physiognomic characteristics:” just as the appearance of a face in Johann Caspar Lavater’s Physiognomik (1772) is understood as a manifestation of the character of its owner, the musical detail aesthetically embodies the particular character of a personal style —and thus at the same time “the essence, the being of the music.” While the whole can be identified by general terms, at least in certain respects, the singular individual seems to elude definition: Motifs, for example, can be distinguished from one another by means of alphanumeric indices, but their musical individuality is usually not conceptually determined. In this respect, “small features” stand for the non-identical in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics—that which, insofar as it is determined as the other of the identified, is itself not conceptually definable and at once calls for ever new attempts at conceptual penetration (see Figal 2004, 16–17).
informed listening. See, for example, Robert Brünauer’s illuminating response to Riezler (1930).
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Through the physiognomic details, the composition subverts the “most generalized structures” of Schenkerian analysis. However, the non-identical has still another aspect. Since the work, by virtue of its concrete technical characteristics, participates in the historical and social contexts in which it is embedded, analysis should not stop at the description of the mere structure: “Analysis has to do with the surplus [das Mehr] in art” ( Adorno [1969] 1982, 177). Now, the ultimate ‘surplus’ over and beyond the factual level is the truth content, and naturally it is only critique that can discover the truth content. No analysis is of any value if it does not terminate in the truth content of the work, and this, for its part, is mediated through the work’s technical structure. . . . If analysis hits up against technical inconsistency, then such inconsistency is an index of the work’s untruth. ([1969] 1982, 177)
An analysis can only access the truth content if it avoids projecting its own systematics onto the object, and rather becomes completely involved in its specific conditions: Analysis must be immanent . . . , the form has to be followed a priori, so that a composition unfolds itself in its own terms. Or, to put it another way, one has to allow the composition something in advance; that is, one must let it assert itself, in order to be able to enter into its structure analytically. ([1969] 1982, 175)
Harald Kaufmann stated accordingly: “Analytical precision arises in relation to what can be analyzed in each case, not as a predeterminated derivation from a generalized scholarly apparatus” (1969, 9).
In Place of a Summary Since roughly the 1960s, a combination of four convictions has contributed decisively to the rejection of Schenker’s theory in large parts of German-language musicology: firstly, music analysis should penetrate the artistic character of the examined work; secondly, the artistic character encompasses structural as well as aesthetic aspects, thirdly, both structural and aesthetic aspects are inextricably linked with historical and social contexts, and therefore fourthly, a methodologically consistent description of the structure of a work alone cannot adequately capture its artistic character. Where these convictions seemed incompatible with an analytical method, the advantages of systematic procedures such as consistency, complexity and integrativity were abandoned rather than abandoning these convictions. This was also because an obvious solution to the problem of systematicity was considered unacceptable: the solution of describing those aspects of a composition that a particular method does not
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consider using additional systematic methods.15 Actually, this solution raises a number of problems that are by no means trivial in terms of the philosophy of science. In particular, it is unclear how and under what conditions analytical statements in a Schenkerian analysis can be linked with other method-based statements (see Webster 1991; Rings 2011, 37–39; Schwab-Felisch forthcoming). Dahlhaus’s argumentation from the 1980s directly illustrates the problem. On the one hand, Dahlhaus stated that “in order to adequately explain musical context,” one was “forced into an eclecticism that abandons the claim to grasp ‘the whole’ and its inner unity through a single principle as dogmatically one-sided” (1984, 79). On the other hand, he emphasized that “the endeavor to combine the methods of Schenker, Schönberg and Riemann” was “eclectic in its worst sense, because the aesthetic premises underlying the basic categories of ‘Ursatz,’ ‘developing variation’ and ‘harmonic-metric period’ are simply incompatible” (1985, 38–39). Since the problem could not be solved by combining systematic methods, and, on the other hand, it seemed unacceptable to rely on a single systematic method, the only possible decision that remained was to proclaim an eclecticism that dispensed with the consistent application of systematic methods of analysis altogether. A naive observer today might be surprised that Dahlhaus thought in such strictly dichotomous terms. As Schenkerian analysis has shown in the roughly 85 years since Schenker’s death, the questions pursued in an analysis do not have to correspond to the questions that Schenker himself considered most important. In addition, on the basis of responsible epistemological reflection and reconstruction, any analytical technique can be at least partially detached from the aesthetic and philosophical premises on which its development is based (Schwab-Felisch 2018). Even the obligation to follow a normatively prescribed purpose of analysis today no longer seems imperative. Research as a whole appears more like a plural process based on the division of labor, the results of which only emerge from the interplay of specialization and subsequent reintegration across the particular methods. Dahlhaus, as the quotation above shows, argued historically; he saw himself in accordance with a “modern aesthetic that sees the essence and substance of a work of art in its individuality.” The fact, however, that German-language music analysis preferred to resolve the dialectic between system and individual case unilaterally in the direction of the latter indicates a stage in musicology that had, at least to some extent, political reasons. It can be interpreted as a profound reaction to the murderous totalitarianism of the Nazi regime: as a reaction to the experience that the other, the heterogeneous and the different were weeded out and eradicated. 15 A comprehensive picture of the critical discourse on method, which was led in the German-language humanities after 1960, would of course have to take into account Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics as well.
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Part 2: 2000–2021 Around the year 2000, a young generation of German-speaking scholars rediscovered Schenker—partly on their own paths, partly influenced by English-language Schenkerism. Since then, Schenkerian analysis has become an audible voice in the polyphonic music-theoretical discourse of the German-speaking world. The institutions and persons that were crucial to this reassessment will be examined in the first section of this part, while the second section outlines some of the topics that have become influential in the current German-language reception of Schenker.
Countries and Institutions German is the only official language in Liechtenstein, the official language on the state level in Austria and Germany, one of several official languages in Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland, and a regional official language in Italy. Despite this large number of wholly or partially German-speaking countries, this section focuses on Austria and Germany, for the simple reason that almost all educational institutions, publishers and journals relevant for Schenker’s reception in German-speaking Europe are based in these countries. With regard to educational institutions, I distinguish between institutions that primarily aim to teach artistic-practical skills and those that offer a comprehensive range of subjects in the sciences and humanities. The former include music schools, conservatories, music colleges, and music universities;16 the latter are full academic universities.17 For simplicity, I use the general term conservatory when referring to members of the first group (except when referring to a specific institution). Music theory and musicology courses are offered at universities as well as conservatories. In university musicology departments, only musicologists hold professorships; music theorists serve as mid-level academic staff. Conservatories have professorships in both music theory and musicology. The requirements for a professorship, however, differ significantly from one field to the other. Musicologists must submit a second thesis (the so-called Habilitationsschrift) or a series of equivalent scholarly papers after the doctoral thesis. Professorships in music theory, on the other hand, usually do not
16 Selected German as well as all Austrian conservatories or arts colleges have been referred to as universities since about the beginning of the twenty-first century. These universities differ from full universities by restricting their offerings to a specific set of artistic and academic disciplines. 17 This distinction corresponds to a certain extent to the American one between conservatories and universities (see, for example, Rothstein 2002).
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require postdoctoral work and often not even a doctorate. Instead, music theorists often must demonstrate their artistic proficiency as composers.18 Since about the turn of the millennium, music theory at conservatories has been striving to develop into an independent academic discipline including the right to award doctorates. In recent years, however, the successes achieved in this regard have been undermined by various countertrends, so that music theory still does not have the same academic status in German-speaking Europe as it does in the United States. Austrian Conservatories The course sequence Analyse nach Heinrich Schenker (before 2010 called: Lehrgang für Tonsatz nach Heinrich Schenker) at the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien (mdw), (before 1998: Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst), is still the only academic institution in German-speaking Europe exclusively dedicated to teaching Schenkerian analysis. The four-semester curriculum is part of the regular electives offered by mdw’s Department of Musicology and Performance Studies. Students are composers, conductors, and instrumentalists, as well as music theorists and musicologists. In addition to the range of courses, mdw operates an extensive website on Schenkerian analysis (https://www.mdw.ac.at/schenkerlehrgang/). Analyse nach Heinrich Schenker is also unique in that it can be traced back directly to Schenker through an uninterrupted chain of teacher-student relationships. Franz Eibner, who led the course as full professor from 1974–84 (see above, 146), was a student of Oswald Jonas. Peter Barcaba, course director from 1984–94, was a student of Eibner; Martin Eybl (1994–2006) a student of Barcaba; and Patrick Boenke a student of Eybl (2006–present). Martin Eybl has been one of the leading Schenker scholars in German-speaking countries since his dissertation (1995). As an author, editor, conference organizer, and contributing scholar of Schenker Documents Online, he is one of the few scholars to have made significant contributions not only to the German-speaking but also to the English-speaking Schenker discourse. Four other graduates and staff members of the mdw should be mentioned. In addition to his activities as director of the newly created course sequence, Patrick Boenke mainly worked on the reception of Schenker’s Schichtenlehre and its application to the late works of Liszt. Evelyn Fink-Mennel curated the exhibition Rebell und Visionär: Heinrich Schenker in Wien, co-edited the congress report Schenker-Traditionen, and contributed several other publications on Schenker research 18 The professorships for music theory, which are de facto to be found at some universities, are assigned to music education departments. These programs include both practical and theoretical teaching content in their core areas and are therefore offered at both conservatories and universities. To a certain extent, then, they run counter to the simplistic division used here.
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(Eybl, Fink-Mennel 2006). In cooperation with Schenker Documents Online, Marko Deisinger has participated in three research projects on Schenker; he is currently in charge of a fourth. As part of these projects, he has presented two annotated editions of Schenker’s diaries and letters (Deisinger 2007–18; 2012). Numerous other publications attest to his diverse research interests. Finally, Matthias Giesen, a former student of Bernhard Haas (see below) and Martin Eybl, has contributed several reviews of Schenker-related publications.19 Seven other authors working in Austria have published on Schenkerian topics, mainly on matters of reception and theory history or the use of Schenker’s method in folk music research, but also on analytical topics. Particularly noteworthy here are Wolfgang Suppan, who studied with Hellmut Federhofer in Graz and from 1974 worked as a full professor at the Institut für Musikethnologie at the Kunstuniversität Graz, and Sigrun Heinzelmann, who grew up in Germany and completed a dissertation on Ravel employing Schenkerian analysis at City University of New York in 2008. Heinzelmann played a major role in the creation of the 2005 special issue of the Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie on American music theory; she has been both Professor at the Universität Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria and Vice President of the Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie (GMTH) since 2016. German Conservatories Until today it is not possible in Germany to complete a well-founded academic training in Schenkerian analysis. Below the organizational level of a stand-alone Schenker program, however, there are now several opportunities to learn about the Schichtenlehre: be it in workshops and lectures, in individual seminar sessions, or even in fullsemester seminars. As a rule, these activities are limited to a manageable number of individual courses. Further networking and coordination within an institution or even between different institutions rarely occur. Finally, the ways in which Schenker is referred to are quite different, ranging from the explicit teaching of Schenkerian concepts to uncommented Schenkerian coloring of the courses offered. Regardless of these restrictions, Schenker’s presence in academic courses has noticeably increased over the past 25 years. The initial impulse for the current Schenkerism in Germany was probably given by a single person—Bernhard Haas.20 Haas, organist and music theorist, had been in 19 For more detailed information on the named scholars and their publications, see https://mdw. ac.at/schenkerlehrgang/personen.html. 20 Bernhard Haas held a professorship for organ at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Stuttgart since 1994. Since 2012, Haas has been teaching at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater München, succeeding Edgar Krapp.
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contact with Peter Barcaba, then head of the Lehrgang für Tonsatz nach Heinrich Schenker in Vienna, since the early 1990s: I studied with him [Peter Barcaba] in Vienna in the nineties, having read many of Schenker’s books and feeling that I’d make greater progress (at ‘Schenkerizing’) if I were taught by a living person and not just books. Working with him was extremely stimulating. He was able to Schenkerize (analyze) spontaneously and it was fascinating to be there with his musical thinking and experience it directly, to watch how one thought grew out of another and, as a consequence, modified the previous one (Haas 2021, personal communication with the author).
Haas’s interest in Schenker transferred to his school friend Michael Polth, who later studied musicology (with Carl Dahlhaus) and music theory (with Hartmut Fladt) in Berlin. Unlike Haas, who began to publish on Schenker only a few years later, Polth included the Schenkerian perspective in his academic work from an early stage. With his dissertation from 2000 and a series of papers published shortly afterwards (see e.g., Polth 2000b; Polth 2001a; Polth 2002), he became one of the most influential representatives of the new Schenkerian discourse in German-speaking Europe, a discourse in which the conservative convictions of Schenkerians such as von Cube or Federhofer played no role. Many members of Polth’s network of fellow students and friends shared an interest in Schenker. Many also felt uneasy about the current state of music theory: the primacy of historical music theory, the skeptical attitude towards analytical methods, and the almost complete lack of academic infrastructure specifically focused on music theory. Ludwig Holtmeier, pianist, music theorist, and one of the founders of the journal Musik & Ästhetik, expressed this unease in a highly regarded 1997 essay, in which he called for the discipline to “find a connection to the academic discourse and present its research successes to the outside world” (Holtmeier 1997, 134). Holtmeier was not alone in his demand. The emancipation of North American music theory into an independent academic subject, the abundance of English-language specialist publications, and the status of English as the lingua franca for research had made English-language music theory an important point of reference for many European scholars, especially after the web made it much easier to access materials and institutions. However, the reception of North American music theory also gave rise to demands for a renewal of European music theory. Jonathan Cross wrote in 1995: We must enter into a dialogue if our discipline is to continue to renew itself. It is not by chance that nearly all the major developments in theory and analysis since the Second World War have come from the USA . . . : Europe as a whole needs now to wrest back the initiative by engaging with American theory in its own terms. Other-
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wise . . . we run the risk either of stubborn cultural isolationism or of death by stagnation under the continuing colonization of our discipline by the American theory industry. (Cross 1995, 17)
Cross’s statement expressed a widely held sentiment. The Italian Gruppo analisi e teoria musicale (GATM) and the Belgian Société Belge d’Analyse Musicale (SBAM) were both founded in 1989; a number of other European music theory societies followed in the years thereafter, including the Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie (GMTH), based in Germany but also covering the entire German-speaking area. The GMTH, which Ludwig Holtmeier and Michael Polth played a key role in establishing in 2000, has had a positive influence on Schenker’s reception in German-speaking Europe, not through any one-sided lobbying, but by promoting academic communication as a whole. It offered a platform for international music theory and helped elevate the new interest in Schenker from the ruminations of a purely private circle into the visibility of a public academic discourse. Since the founding of the GMTH, several other scholars have published articles on Schenkerian issues, including Folker Froebe, Stefan Rohringer, and Oliver Schwab-Felisch. Some of these authors and their publications will be discussed in more detail in the second section of this part. Austrian Universities A number of Austrian scholars who have published on Schenker have completed their training in whole or in part at full academic universities such as the Universität Wien. Even more: Two Austrian Schenker authors held visiting professorships and/or chair substitutions in the course of their careers, and five others held teaching positions, lectureships, or assistantships at musicological institutes of universities. It is all the more surprising then, that at the time this text was written, all professors and lecturers with a musicological orientation who are currently employed in Austria and have published on Schenker since 2000 are not at full universities, but at music universities.21 Two other authors work in the musicology department at the Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage at the Austrian Academy of Sciences; two more as music journalists in Vienna. German Universities The picture is different in Germany. 16 authors are professors or lecturers in university musicology departments (14 with a focus on musicology, two on music theory), while 15 are employed at conservatories (three with a focus on musicology, 12 on music 21 Specifically, these are a) the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien, b) the Kunstuniversität Graz, and c) the Anton Bruckner Privatuniversität in Linz.
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theory). Three other authors have professorships in other disciplines and six others are either freelance authors, music journalists, or employees of non-university research institutions. As before 2000, the authors with a musicological focus employed by university musicology departments mainly work on issues related to musical philology, historio graphy, cultural studies, or music aesthetics. Even if they address a music theoretical topic, Schenker usually does not form the primary focus of their research. Since appeals to Schenker under these conditions remain tied to issues that are usually not revisited in other texts, most of the authors mentioned have not published more than one text with reference to Schenker. The work of three musicologists employed at a German university, however, was or still is characterized by a substantial interest in Schenker. Hellmut Federhofer, professor in Mainz from 1962, was for many years the only holder of a university chair for musicology in German-speaking Europe who openly followed Schenker. Until his death in 2014, Federhofer contributed numerous important publications on Schenker and the latest developments in Schenkerian analysis. Christoph Hust, who received his doctorate from the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz in 2003, is now Professor of Musicology at the Zentrum für Musik wissenschaft of the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy Leipzig and the Universität Leipzig. Hust has worked on a wide range of topics in historical musicology, but also in many cases on Schenker. As a contributor to Schenker Documents Online, Hust edits “correspondence with performers, including Gerhard & Josef Albersheim, Josef Helmesberger, Moriz Rosenthal, Artur Schnabel; also Otto Erich & Hanna Deutsch, Viktor Zuckerkandl” (https://schenkerdocumentsonline. org/project_information/contributing_scholars.html). The work of the research group around Martin Rohrmeier (Digital and Cognitive Musicology Lab) at the École Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne forms an independent branch of the current productive Schenker reception. Rohrmeier came into contact with Schenker through Polth while still at school and has not since lost interest in the theoretical questions raised by Schenker’s theory. Rohrmeier, who held the Open Topic Professorship for Systematic Musicology with a focus on music cognition at the Technische Universität Dresden from 2014–17, pursues an approach to music cognition determined by syntax theories in the wake of Noam Chomsky as well as by computational models. He has worked on various aspects of cognitive science research on hierarchical relationships and complex musical structures. Even if his list of publications lacks contributions to traditional Schenkerian analysis and the solutions he elaborated are based on a fundamentally different concept of research than that followed by mainstream Schenkerian analysis, his thinking has clearly been shaped by Schenker’s ideas of musical structure.
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Conferences and Workshops European conferences such as the regularly held European Music Analysis Conference (EuroMAC) have had a significant influence on German-language music theory. Contacts made there often led to further activities with mutual invitations to take part in publications and other conferences; sometimes a personal encounter even laid the foundation for planning a new event. The fact that in 2001, 2003, and 2004 three Schenker conferences were held in three European countries certainly had something to do with the mutual stimulation that came with such professional contacts. Above all, however, it shows that in the early 2000s the need for a new engagement with Schenker’s Schichtenlehre was in the air throughout Europe. The series of Schenker conferences started with the Symposium Heinrich Schenker in Utrecht on May 12 and 13, 2001, organized by Michiel Schuijer, who also cofounded the Dutch Society for Music Theory in 1999. Four contributions to the symposium were published in the Tijdschrift voor Muziektheorie (Maas 2001; Meeùs 2001; Schachter 2001; Schwab-Felisch 2001). This symposium was followed on June 13–14 by the international symposium Schenker Traditionen, organized by Martin Eybl and Evelyn Fink-Mennel—the first Schenker-symposium to include both leading Amercian and German-speaking scholars. The proceedings were issued in 2006 (Eybl, Fink-Mennel). Finally, the two-part international symposium Schenkerian Analysis und Musikalische Interpretation / Europäische und amerikanische Traditionen der SchenkerRezeption, organized by Oliver Schwab-Felisch, Michael Polth, and Hartmut Fladt, was held in Berlin, Sauen and Mannheim in 2004. An anthology including contributions from this symposium was published in 2021 (Schwab-Felisch, Polth, Fladt). Unlike the specialized Schenker congresses, the GMTH conferences provide a platform for a wide range of music theory content. The conferences are held annually at a variety of venues around all of German-speaking Europe. Each venue has a local committee that evaluates submissions through an anonymous selection process. As a result, most GMTH conferences since 2000 have had at least one presentation in which Schenker or some aspect of the Schenkerian tradition played a role. Nevertheless, the number of papers with genuinely Schenkerian topics has remained manageable. With an average of 40–60 papers per conference, an average of only two to three papers consider Schenker at all. The 2007 congress in Freiburg was an exception, as it was the only GMTH congress to date to have its own extensive section on Schenkerian analysis.22 22 Established US scholars included Charles Burkhart (2002 Munich), Allen Cadwallader (2004 Cologne), Don Traut, William Marvin and Timothy Jackson (2007 Freiburg), Roger Graybill (2015 Berlin), and Gary S. Karpinsky (2017 Graz).
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Scholars from English-speaking countries were, by the way, not in the majority when it came to papers on Schenkerian topics: If one does not take the nationality of the author as a basis, but rather the location of her or his home university, roughly half of the scholars dealing with Schenkerian topics come from German-speaking countries and a quarter each from the USA and other European countries. Nonetheless, personal encounters with American Schenkerians have strongly influenced the Schenker-reception in the German-speaking world. In particular, Allen Cadwallader should be mentioned here, who for many years has held various workshops and lectures in Europe on an almost annual basis, including in such cities as Ghent (Orpheus Institute), London (City College of London ), and Berlin (TU Berlin and University of the Arts), as well as Freiburg, Vienna, Mannheim, Munich, Salzburg, and Lugano.
Selected Topics Functionality: Basic Concepts In the early 2000s, Bruno Haas, Bernhard Haas, and Michael Polth brought a new perspective to the Schenker discussion, a perspective that in certain aspects also occurs with other authors, but in its specific configuration of themes, concepts, value horizons, and reference discourses sets its own accents and has thus decisively shaped how several subsequent German-language writers have chosen to approach Schenker. The central concept of this perspective is that of functionality: a concept coalescing certain ideas about the relationship between the parts and the whole, the interchange between listeners and the musical artwork, and the possibilities and limits of analysis as a whole. The application, contextualization, and reflection of these ideas have become a notable part of this strand of Schenker reception. Three basic principles of the functionality concept shall be presented below. 1. How a musical constellation is defined depends on its function. Functions result from the relationship of subordinated units to the whole to which they belong as moments or parts (see Haas [Bruno] 2003, 215). Accordingly, functionalist publications repeatedly criticize atomistic approaches. Stefan Rohringer, for example, uses the example of the dissonant fifth in bar 1 of Bach’s Sinfonia No. 9 in F Minor BWV 795 (Rohringer 2010a, 34n; 43–49) to show how sensory-acoustic criteria of sound perception are overruled by musically-contextual ones. The concept of functionality used by German-speaking Schenkerians differs significantly from that of other music theorists. Carl Dahlhaus, for example, specified that the “distinction between what is given and what it means,” which he saw as an essential property of functionality, is shown in the “combining of different chords under the same
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[Riemannian] functional concept” (Dahlhaus 1990, 141). Michael Polth, on the other hand, criticized Riemann, saying he did not determine “the functions of the chords from the context of a composition,” but rather defined “the functions independently of specific pieces on the basis of ‘objective’ circumstances” (Polth 2001b, 322). 2. Functional analysis grounds analytical findings in aesthetic experiences. “For any kind of penetration into a work of art, a deepened awareness and contemplation is necessary which turns to all the effects of the work, especially the most subtle” (Haas [Bernhard] 2003, 256). Such listening reveals a qualitative differentiation through which musical events can sound, for example, “powerful, sad, or like water” (256). Musical meaning precedes technical structural knowledge: There is an “aesthetic” regularity . . . in the meaningful relationships that appear (as sound effects), which may still be partially unknown, but which can be determined through detailed listening to the musical contexts and recorded by showing how any “material ” element arrangements are revealed from the “sense.” (Polth forthcoming)
“Effects” thus form as much the primary approach to the work as the final confirmation of an analysis. This view also shapes the epistemology of functional theory: objectivist approaches that understand structures as a given are rejected, as are trivial constructivist ideas that claim musical perception depends only on the subjective circumstances of the individual listener: Structures do not cause tonal coherence, but rather they indicate its success. In order to be able to recognize structures, the coherence must already be understood. How ever, since coherence does not come about according to rules, it cannot be inferred from the musical structure—as the non-interpretable point of music. It is only the “ interpreting activity” of a listener, i.e., the activity (which cannot be circumvented and cannot be replaced by any methods or rules), which can interpret, understand or feel different things as coherent that is able to judge whether a coordination of tones can actually be interpreted tonally. There is—in the sense of Manfred Frank— no “causation” between the tone-setting and its interpretation, but a relationship of “motivation”. The musical structure cannot dictate its interpretation, but the listener cannot do with his interpretation arbitrarily either. (Polth 2001a, 31)
Accordingly, the following applies: Tonality stabilizes at the moment when the listener and the work come together. Tonality exists when it can function as a form of communication between the listener and the work. (Polth 2001a, 13)
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3. Art and music analysis, as Bruno Haas has shown, are faced with the fundamental problem that general terms are unable to match the peculiarity of individual works of art (Haas 2003, 211). Haas’s concept of function responds to this problem. It frees analysis from the insoluble task of representing individual pieces of music in all their aesthetic aspects. Instead, it is deictic—it determines analysis to point beyond itself to the composition it describes.23 This is not as trivial as it may sound. The crucial point lies in the concept of the whole. The structures into which a functional-deictic analysis decomposes the work become accessible only because the analyst does not limit her- or himself to the proof of subordinate aspects, but rather looks at the entire work (Haas [Bruno] 2003, 216). In turn, knowledge of these structures enables new aesthetic experiences of a similar holistic quality. Whoever listens to a musical work from the perspective of a Schenkerian analysis is open to all the “splendor of its performance” (Haas 2021, 117). Functionality: Theoretical Background Bruno Haas’s concept of functionality is the result of extensive readings of Hegel and Heidegger (Haas [Bruno] 2003). An explicit discussion of these philosophical foundations, however, has not yet taken place among German-speaking music theorists. Instead, the concept of functionality has been specified against the background of various other approaches—approaches that are of particular interest here as they are not represented with equal prominence in the English-language Schenker literature: – Stefan Rohringer analyzes Ernst Cassirer’s concept of function (1923) and concludes that “in his analytics, Schenker is [unknowingly] a contemporary of Cassirer” (Rohringer 2010, 42). – Several authors have dealt with Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory (see, for example, Luhmann 1987). Michael Polth understands tonality as a communication medium in the sense of Luhmann:
Tonality is a medium because, in the period between 1680 and 1900, it represented the form of communication through music. One could say: A composer brings his ideas—even the unique ones—into the form of tonality (i.e. he coordinates the tones in such a way that they can be interpreted according to tonal structures, the individual forms of the medium tonality) and ‘transports’ them in this medium to his listeners, who in turn must have the competence to break down a composition according to tonal structures and thereby understand the composer’s ideas, even the unique ones. (Polth 2001a, 31–32) 23 Haas therefore also speaks of “functional-deictic analysis”. The words “deixis” and “deictic”, used mainly in linguistics, derive from the ancient Greek verb δείκνυμι, “to point”.
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Stefan Rohringer explicitly undertakes to “observe Schenker’s late theory with the help of Luhmann’s systems theory” (Rohringer 2021, 197). According to this, “Schenker’s late interpretation (as present in Der freie Satz) . . . is convincing from the perspective of systems theory in that it turns out to be more of a ‘self-supporting construction.’ What is generated is an ‘emergent reality that cannot be traced back to features that are already present in the object or subject’ (Luhmann 1987a, 658)” (Rohringer 2021, 212). However, Rohringer also emphasizes that “‘functional analysis’ in Bruno Haas and in Niklas Luhmann does not mean the same thing. Rather, the thrust of the two approaches is opposite. Haas focuses on the determination of singular relations in the concrete work, whereas Luhmann is concerned with the equivalence that the ‘given’ can gain with regard to its function” (Rohringer 2016, 213). – Functional-deictic analysis is a holistic theory. Philosophy, however, not only differentiates between atomism and holism, but also discusses distinctions such as those among radical, partial, and moderate holism. Stefan Rohringer reviews selected excerpts from this discussion and uses the resulting findings for an in-depth criticism of Robert Gjerdingen’s theory of musical schemata (Rohringer 2015). – Moritz Hauptmann’s Die Natur der Harmonik und der Metrik (1853) has been considered primarily as a reference point for Hugo Riemann’s harmonic theory. MichaelPolth, however, reads Hauptmann’s “Representation of Musical Logic” as a “discovery of functionality in the sense of Bruno Haas” (Polth 2014, 110); for him, Schenker’s theory appears “as a concretization of Hauptmann’s dialectic” (113). – Hardly any non-musical theory has influenced so many music theories as Gestalt theory, including Ernst Toch’s theory of melody. Michael Polth criticizes Toch from the perspective of functional analysis: Toch’s analyses either show the obvious or lead to inadequate models of the musical context (Polth 2007, 114 and passim). System and History The fact that music theory was marginalized as preparatory study within the framework of historically oriented musicology came to be considered problematic by many German-speaking music theorists in the 2000s. Since about the 1970s, historicist positions had become more and more prevalent in music theory. There was a turn against the pedagogically simplified music theory of the 1950s as well as against the systematic music theories of the early twentieth century (see La Motte, Birnstein, Kühn 1972). Abstraction, generalization, and historical decontextualization were criticized, properties, so it was believed, that led systematic music theories to miss the historical reality of the works as well as their aesthetic dimension (see the first part of this article). Among many scholars, however, this view entailed a historicism that
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tended to regard the fact that a work of music theory was written at the same time as the composition it describes as being a sufficient reason for its analytical relevance. In contrast, philosophically informed discussions about the possibilities and limits of systematic concepts such as Schenker’s seldom took place. Accordingly, since 2000 various authors have grappled with the problematic aspects of the historicist dogma and the widespread skepticism towards theory-based music analysis (see, for example, Rohringer 2010a; 2021; Schwab-Felisch 2004; 2009). Satzmodelle and Schenkerian Analysis The term Satzmodell is understood in quite a few different ways (see for example K aiser 2007; Schwab-Felisch 2007); roughly speaking, it overlaps in a certain way with the terms “musical schema,” “linear intervallic pattern,” and “sequence.” In the 1980s and 90s, the discourse about Satzmodelle was strongly stimulated by Carl Dahlhaus’s habilitation thesis (Dahlhaus [1968] 1990, 94–110; see also Aerts 2007).24 Satzmodelle appeared analytically attractive for three main reasons: first, they are historically authentic; second, thanks to their contrapuntal organization, they illuminate musical relationships that Riemannian theories of harmonic functions cannot adequately describe; and third, due to their local extension, they are of particular importance for aesthetic perception. Based on the three properties above, Eybl (1995) introduced Lineare Modelle as an “alternative to Schenker’s theory of the Urlinie” (147).25 Lineare Modelle are as contrapuntal as Schenkerian structures, but do not lend themselves to Schenker’s concept of an overarching layered structure—a concept that Eybl, referring to certain Dahl hausian arguments, called “arbitrary” (1995, 149) and “superfluous” (151). Instead, they serve as “building blocks” in the “networked piecemeal” that Eybl preferred to see in tonal music (Eybl 1995, 147–51; 2005; Rothgeb 2013; see also Jerrold Levinson’s theory of concatenationism [1997; Huovinen 2013]). Several of the German-language works on Satzmodelle published after 2000 questioned Schenker’s idea of a comprehensive unity of the musical work of art. In the US, Robert Gjerdingen clearly distinguished himself from Schenker, polemicized against 24 To speak of a discourse is, strictly speaking, overstating the case: essentially, these were local teaching traditions at several German-language conservatories (in Hamburg, Berlin, or Stuttgart, for example), teaching traditions without printed textbooks and without significant contact with comparable efforts at other conservatories. – Dahlhaus uses the terms “schema of tonal harmony” (1990, 101) and “formula of tonal harmony” (103) when discussing certain progressions from the viewpoint of tonal harmony, and the terms “compositional formula” (102) or “compositional topos” (103) when referring to similar or even identical progressions from the perspective of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. 25 The term Lineare Modelle (“linear models”) is more or less coextensive with the term Satzmodelle.
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holistic models of eighteenth-century music and presented “il filo,” a concatenationist model of musical form (Gjerdingen 2007, 369–85). Consequently, the more recent German-language discussion of Satzmodelle follows two research interests: elucidating their history (see Froebe 2007; Froebe 2016), and grappling with the concatenationist paradigm. Folker Froebe, for example, argues that Gjerdingen’s “schema concept and the Schenkerian concept of hierarchical organized tonal structures may interlock. . . .” (Froebe 2015, 9). And Stefan Rohringer criticizes Eybl’s concatenationist concept of tonality with reference to the philosophical distinction between substance and function (Rohringer 2010, passim). Criticism of Ideology Martin Eybl’s dissertation (1995) not only criticized Schenker’s ideology, but also related it to his theory and its developmental history. In the German-speaking countries, Eybl’s book has received less attention than it deserves. Criticism of ideology has played an important role in German-language musicology since 2000. Schenker’s impact on the German-speaking world, however, was insufficient for Eybl’s thesis to attract wide attention. Moreover, ideological aspects of Schenker’s work had already been frequently criticized after 1945. Eybl’s book clarified the prevailing Schenker image considerably, but did not fundamentally change it. In 2021, Marko Deisinger examined the gender-political aspects of Schenker’s thinking in a remarkable essay, drawing on Eybl 1995 as well as on current critical debates. From the outset, Deisinger establishes a hierarchy between ideological interests and music-theoretical concepts: the former he understands as the determining, the latter as the determined. From this premise, his thesis that Schenker “instrumentalized music theory for the purpose of enforcing hegemonic masculinity” (Deisinger 2021, 30) follows almost with logical necessity. The contrast with the position of Carl Schachter, who regards Schenker’s theory as essentially motivated by musical considerations (Schachter 2001), could not be greater. Ideology and Rational Reconstruction The assessment of the numerous differences that exist between Schenker’s own political and aesthetic views and those of his followers today is a central question of current critical debates about Schenker. While Schenkerians claim that the Schichtenlehre has developed substantially during the 90 years of its reception, critics argue that Schenker’s ideological convictions cannot be ignored. As Ethan Hein has written: Schenker considered his musical and political ideas to be inseparable, and we should probably take him at his word. Music educators don’t believe themselves to be es-
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pousing white supremacist hegemony (we hope), but you can advance an ideological agenda without intending to, or even being aware of doing so. (Hein 2017)
If one believes that Schenker’s ideology is inextricably inscribed in his theory, from a morally responsible perspective there is little choice today than to reject the Schichtenlehre for current use in music analysis. So, is Hein right? As Schwab-Felisch (2021) argues, this question needs to be answered by a thorough analysis of the theory itself (and not just the history of its development). Such an analysis should differentiate the components of the theory, clarify their respective intra-theoretical functions, examine whether and in what way they appear to be ideologically motivated, and consider whether they can and should be reconstructed or replaced by other ones. Epistemologically responsible discussions of these questions may provide rationally reconstructed versions of Schenkerian concepts. The rationality of such a reconstruction is not determined by absolutely given principles. Rather, it arises from a dialogue between the specificity of the reconstructed theory, the conception of its practical tasks, and the epistemic values that the reconstruction should follow (see also Bühler 2002). The concept of rational reconstruction, which in relation to Schenker was used primarily from the perspective of a scientistic epistemology (Brown 2005), can thus designate a strategy of ideology-critical reception, a strategy that seeks to preserve a (however modified) version of its object for the practice of music analysis. Scientificity While disciplines such as empirical musicology or music cognition in English-speaking countries deal at least partially with certain Schenkerian postulates, an examination of Schenker has played barely any role in the German-speaking systematic musicology. One of the few exceptions is Martin Rohrmeier, who is working on scientific methods of exploring hierarchical musical relationships (see above). Rohrmeier argues that only strict empirical and computational methods can protect music analysis from subjective and cultural biases. Thus, one important research goal of a generative music theory (i.e., a rule-based music theory that is able to [re-]construct musical structures) is to make theoretical problems explicit that lie hidden in traditional music theory (Rohrmeier, Neuwirth forthcoming). Michael Polth, on the other hand, has repeatedly questioned the relevance of empirical methods in music theory (Polth 2000; Polth 2021). In the tradition of hermeneutics and reception aesthetics, he emphasizes that musical works are aimed at experienced listeners. For him, music analysis should reveal the connection between the organization of a piece of music and the “musical sense” that is actually at stake in musical communication (Polth forthcoming).
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Expansion of the Spectrum Like the practice of Schenkerian analysis in the U.S., the German-speaking approach has endeavored to further develop the Schichtenlehre. Bernhard Haas and Veronica Diederen, for example, have used Bach’s compositions to present a method for accurately determining the number and different qualities of structural levels and transformational operations (Haas, Diederen 2008; 2021). Michael Polth formulated a new concept of the interaction of tonality and metrics in Mozart’s sonata movements (Polth 2021). And Stefan Rohringer is currently working on a systematic approach to the study of the formal types “phrase” and “period,” an approach that aims to link traditional theories of form with Schenkerian analysis (Rohringer 2016). Also in German-speaking countries, Schenkerian techniques are sometimes applied to repertoires that lie outside of Schenker’s purview (Rohringer 2001; Boenke 2021). With regard to the analysis of late tonal repertoires, however, the theory of tone fields has been examined more extensively than the Schichtenlehre. This theory, which in some aspects resembles Neo-Riemannian Theory (Polth 2006, 169), originates with the Hungarian conductor Albert Simon, who developed it in numerous analyses and codified it in a manuscript that is still unpublished today. The theory became generally known through Bernhard Haas, who learned about it in private sessions with Simon (Haas 2004), and has also influenced the work of Stefan Rohringer (Rohringer 2004; 2010; 2013; 2017) and Michael Polth (Polth 2011a; 2011b).26 Other Topics Various other topics have been discussed in musicology as well as music theory. Finally, a brief selection from these topics as well as from the related publications shall be given: Schenker reception (Holtmeier 2004; Schwab-Felisch 2005a; 2005b; Boenke 2006; Eybl 2006; Fink-Mennel 2006; Federhofer 2006b; Fink-Mennel 2009; Federhofer [2001] 2016; Wozonig 2018; Deisinger 2019); historical aspects of the Ursatz forms (Rohringer 2013); organicism (Hinrichsen 2000; Borio 2011; Wilfing 2016); musical logic (Borio 2011; Schwab-Felisch 2014; Nowak 2015), non-technical aspects of analytic notation (Niedermüller 2012; Hoeink 2016; Meischein 2019; Haas [Bruno] 2021); Schenker as a music philologist and editor (Urchueguía 2012; Appel 2015; Enßlin 2015; Holzer 2016; Keil 2016); Schenker and matters of music performance (Hust 2007).
26 Further authors dealing with the theory of tone fields are Konstantin Bodamer, Christoph Hust, Fabian Moss, Stefan Nowak, Johannes Schild, Dres Schiltknecht, and Markus Sotirianos.
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Conclusion Over the last 20 years, German-speaking music theory has developed a growing interest in Schenkerian theory. The prejudices of the older generation have slowly disappeared; quite a few German-speaking analysts today employ Schenkerian or quasi-Schenkerian ways of conceptualizing music (even if they don’t use Schenker’s terminology). Despite these positive trends, the Schenker discourse is still lead by only a few participants. Many of them do not have a systematic education in Schenkerian analysis but draw on their own studies as well as on workshops and seminars given by American colleagues. Against the background of American and British Schenkerism, their work often appears remarkably independent. At the same time, it clearly reflects the intellectual contexts in which it was developed: Some authors rely on Hegelian traditions of thinking, others on Luhmann’s theory of social systems, still others on Analytic Philosophy or Music Cognition. The impact of the Schenkerian approach on German speaking music theory as a whole is far from being spectacular. The particular kairos from which the American Schenker reception profited remains unrepeatable. One can be confident, however, that familiarity with Schenkerian analysis will gradually increase in the German-speaking countries so that it can consolidate and expand its place within the plural system of contemporary approaches to music theory.
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11 Heinrich Schenker and August Halm PATR ICK BOENK E
That I agree with him [Heinrich Schenker] in terms of general attitude is easily deduced from what has been said. . . . In terms of thinking, I find 1 him on the whole to be the opposite of me. (Halm [1917‒18] 1978, 273)
Introduction The German theorist, author, composer, conductor, and music teacher August Halm (1869–1929) was one of the correspondents with whom Heinrich Schenker maintained an intensive and regular exchange. Approximately fifty letters, drafts of letters, and postcards are preserved from the end of 1916 to 1927.2 In addition, numerous diary entries, beginning in 1914, testify to Schenker’s continuing interest in Halm’s writings.3 The correspondence documents a cordial exchange that is mutually respectful and trusting. Schenker and Halm exchanged their latest publications, shared plans for forthcoming projects and also talked about more private matters, such as personal attitudes toward European politics or problems of everyday life as a consequence of World War I and devastating inflation. At times, they also had music aesthetical discussions about genius in music, trends in contemporary composition, and special issues of improvisation and music analysis. In addition, Halm regularly sent Schenker his latest compositions in the hopes that he would receive a qualified assessment. 1 All translations are my own, except for those drawn from texts published in English. 2 The correspondence between Schenker and Halm is available on the platform Schenker Documents Online. Federhofer (1985, 133–49; 1988) and Rothfarb (2009, 34–40) have already commented on the correspondence. In general, Rothfarb’s seminal monograph on Halm (2009) contains a wealth of information on the subject. See also Cook (2007) for Schenker’s socio-cultural background, which is also reflected in his letters to Halm. 3 For Schenker’s diaries, see also Schenker Documents Online.
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Halm not only read Schenker’s publications with great interest and attention, he also distinguished himself as a competent reviewer of them and thus made a sizeable contribution to the dissemination of Schenker’s theoretical ideas. Together with Walter Riezler’s 1930 criticism of the concept of the Urlinie, Halm’s comments on Schenker are revealing as documents of early Schenker reception during the interwar period. As Lee A. Rothfarb observes (2009, 34), the correspondence proves that Halm was familiar with all of Schenker’s main works: Harmonielehre (1906), the two volumes of Kontrapunkt (1910 and 1922), the monograph on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (1912), the critical editions of Beethoven’s late piano sonatas (1913–20), the periodical Der Tonwille (1921–24) and the first two volumes of the yearbook Das Meisterwerk in der Musik (1925 and 1926). Halm’s profound interest in Schenker’s theoretical considerations is reflected in two smaller contributions and many text passages scattered throughout Halm’s publications of the 1920s. As early as 1917, Halm wrote a short introductory article about Schenker (Halm [1917–18] 1978), focusing principally on the critical editions (Erläuterungsausgaben) of Beethoven’s late piano sonatas that had been published (Opp. 109, 110, and 111). Three years later, he reviewed Schenker’s Harmonielehre and the first volume of Kontrapunkt (Halm 1920), both of which he had only briefly mentioned in his 1917 article. In the afterword to the second edition of his Bruckner monograph, published in 1923, Halm commented on Schenker’s negative view toward Bruckner’s symphonic music ([1914] 1923, 243–46). In Einführung in die Musik of 1926 and the Beethoven monograph of 1927, Halm made critical comments on Schenker’s analytical approach based on the idea of the Urlinie (1926, 73–77; 1927, 140–41). Halm also referred to Schenker in smaller contributions in various other contexts. In the mid-1920s, Schenker and Halm engaged in a heated dispute expressed in highly detailed letters.4 At its core, the controversy revolved around differing aesthetic judgements. In short, Halm expressed reservations about Beethoven’s sonata compositions, raised objections to Johannes Brahms, highly esteemed as “the last master” by Schenker (Drabkin 2005, 132), and at the same time called for the reevaluation of Anton Bruckner’s music, which Schenker had heavily criticized.5 In addition to these composers, disagreements were expressed about the aesthetic value of works by Felix Mendelssohn and Hector Berlioz. These profound differences in value judgement were also linked to a discussion of analytical method that centered on Schenker’s gradually evolving idea of the Urlinie.6 This article traces this debate in the broader context of 4 The relevant letters were exchanged from about the end of 1923 to mid-1924. 5 Rothfarb (2005) deals with the controversy between Schenker and Halm, focusing on their different assessments of the music of Bruckner and Brahms. 6 Köhler (1996a) discusses the dispute over methods at the beginning of the twentieth century on the basis of analytical comments by Schenker and Halm on Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3.
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the writings of Schenker and Halm and identifies differences in positions and arguments. After identifying commonalities in the theorists’ general attitudes, the article outlines Halm’s criticism of Schenker’s analytical approach against the background of his own music aesthetical considerations. Finally, I discuss Schenker’s and Halm’s conflicting assessments of the value of the music of Bruckner and demonstrate the fundamental opposition of their analytical perspectives (using Bach as an example).
Common Positions Halm’s and Schenker’s opposing views should not hide the fact that Schenker and Halm were of the same opinion on a range of issues, three of which are in focus in the following section. First, both theorists observed, as Lee Rothfarb expresses, “not only the decline of compositional technique but also the degeneration of professional music criticism, music-educational conviction, aesthetic values and, with those convictions and values, the corruption of public understanding and appreciation of the revered German musical canon” (Rothfarb 2002, 936). Both Schenker and Halm tried to counteract this negative development through missionary commitment, on the one hand through education—Schenker earned his living in Vienna as a private teacher, while Halm became an influential advocate of the progressive educational movement in Germany—and on the other hand through extensive publication. Both men were active outside academia, but they followed different paths in spreading their ideas. While Schenker wrote for a highly educated readership, Halm’s books and smaller contributions in popular art and educational journals targeted a wider audience of non-professional music lovers. Second, Schenker and Halm rejected psychological, narrative, and affective interpretations of music that were popularized in the first decades of the twentieth century by authors such as Hermann Kretzschmar and Paul Bekker. Instead of taking hermeneutical approaches to music analysis, Schenker and Halm focused on, as Schenker describes in his first volume of Kontrapunkt from 1910, the “absolute character of the world of tone,” which meant “that music is emancipated from every external obligation, whether it be [the expression of] words, the stage, or the narrative aspect of any kind of program” (Schenker [1910] 2001, 15). For Rudolf Schäfke (who describes Schenker and Halm together with Ernst Kurth as the main proponents of a newly emerging school of “energetic” thought), it is only consistent that Schenker places counterpoint at the center of his music theory (Schäfke [1934] 1964, 400). As Schenker argues, only contrapuntal theory “teaches the most characteristic effect of tones—one might say, the proprieties of their movement—and with utmost certainty liberates the student of art from the delusion that tones must
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signify something external and objective in addition to their absolute effect” (Schenker [1910] 2001, 14). For similar reasons, Halm devoted himself intensively to the “abstract musical cosmos” of Bach’s fugue compositions and rediscovered them as an “antipole to all expressive music [Ausdrucksmusik]” (Schäfke [1934] 1964, 402–03). As Rafael Köhler stresses, this attitude must not be confused with a rejection of musical expression in general. Halm was also concerned with questions of musical expression, but for him musical expression was conveyed solely through the movement and gestural quality of music (Köhler 1996b, 185). Finally, both Schenker and Halm took a decidedly anti-historical view of the development of music. In an unpublished pamphlet about the decline of compositional art, Schenker argues against any idea of steady progress in the history of composition and states: “Of course, every time has its art, but not all times are worth the same” (Drabkin 2005, 133). And Halm, in a fictional conversation about the current state and future of music, voices a conservative opinion countering the progressive “that which is good and proven in art will not wear off. What actually wears off are imperfections or initially astonishing, captivating peculiarities, but not the lawful” (Halm [1924–26] 1978, 319).7 As Christa Brüstle observes, the tendency to view the “nonsimultaneous simultaneously, to see the tradition in the present and in the present the future conveyed,” was a defining principle of Halm’s music aesthetical view (1998, 25). This principle manifested itself above all in Halm’s efforts to unite the “good and proven” in the masterpieces of Bach, Beethoven and Bruckner under the term “culture of music.”
Halm’s Objections to Schenker’s Analytical Approach In his early article of 1917, Halm describes Schenker’s “strong belief in genius” as the main difference in their attitudes (Halm [1917‒18] 1978, 273). A decade later, in view of the concept of the Urlinie Schenker had since elaborated, Halm accuses Schenker of placing such great importance on the “hidden processes” he had uncovered that he “regards their presence or absence as the very mark of genius and non-genius” (Halm 1927, 140).8 In response to Schenker’s 1922 article “The Art of Listening” (Schenker [1922] 2004), Halm writes to Schenker in November 1923 that he is deeply impressed by Schenker’s analysis of the beginning of Bach’s Prelude in F# minor (WTC I), but that he “would not hold as valid deriving a final decision,” that is, a value judgement from Schenker’s analytical revelations (SDO November 6‒10, 1923). And with regard to his own analyses, Halm, in a letter to Schenker in April 1924, points out the provi7 The fictional conversation also appears in Halm (1926, 319–34). 8 See also Halm (1926, 75).
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sional nature of value judgements and assures him that he is “constantly aware that yet other weights can be tossed on to the scales,” that their “rise and fall is not definitive” (SDO April 7, April 14, and May 6, 1924). Halm’s mention of “other weights” also alludes to an aesthetic distinction that he had set out in his 1913 book Von zwei Kulturen der Musik and that, according to Halm’s criticism, Schenker had not sufficiently considered. As Halm puts it retrospectively (in his Beethoven monograph of 1927), the main purpose of his 1913 writing was to distinguish between two so-called “cultures of music”—on the one hand a “monistic, continuous” and organically developed music, and on the other hand a “dramatically, dualistically, dialectically oriented music”—in which “two fundamentally different wills” would be expressed (Halm 1927, 99). Halm associates the first, monistic culture with the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and above all with his fugues. He considers Beethoven’s sonatas ideal and typical examples of the second, dualistic culture. According to Halm, these two cultures are in an antithetical relationship. The fugue is monistic and uniform, since it is mainly based on one subject, and the sonata dualistic and contrary, since it uses two or more contrasting themes. The fugue develops continuously in an “uninterrupted flow of music” (Halm 1913, 9), while the sonata appears discontinuous or even torn, which gives it a dramatic quality. The fugue subject and its continuous express a kind of “endless melody” (Halm 1913, 21), while the sonata’s themes tend towards melodic shortness of breath due to its periodic phrase structure. The fugue is organically developed, since its subject—a self-contained thematic organism with a wealth of inner relationships—affects both its own melodic continuation and the shaping of additional contrapuntal voices. In contrast, the sonata’s thematic material builds on de-individualized motifs. The sonata is therefore far less attractive for its individual themes than for its large-scale development, in which every musical event assumes “a function in the whole” (Halm 1913, 33). As Alexander Rehding summarizes, “fugal form is engendered by its theme, while sonata in turn engenders its themes in the service of the form” (Rehding 2001, 150). Due to its reliance on one subject, fugal form is limited in its extent. Sonata form, on the other hand, emerges dialectically by pairing opposites. It therefore has the greater potential to expand its formal limits.9 In light of these antithetical perspectives on Bach and Beethoven, Halm also distinguishes between two aesthetic qualities of music, “corporeality” (Körperlichkeit) and 9 These fundamental differences in compositional style, Halm discusses in two in-depth analyses in his 1913 book Von zwei Kulturen der Musik. As examples he chooses Bach’s B!-minor Fugue from WTC II (with focus on the subject; 207–20), and the first movement of Beethoven’s “Tempest” Sonata Op. 31, No. 2 (38–81). Several authors have discussed these analyses at length. See Rothfarb (2009, 97–107); Rehding (2001); and Köhler (1996b, 201–03 and 207–10). Kelly (2008) provides an English translation of Halm’s book.
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“spirituality” (Geistigkeit). Although Halm frequently used both terms in his writings, he never gives a precise definition. As Lee Rothfarb observes, a theme or a passage from a piece achieves corporeality, if its “dynamic course . . . is clearly manifest in the aural immediacy of its rhythmic and thematic gestures.” In contrast, when its dynamic course “is concealed or musically too subtle to be readily noticed, it exemplifies . . . spirituality, . . . which resides in between the notes and occurs, so to speak, ‘subterraneously’” (Rothfarb 2005, 124).10 For Halm, Bach’s compositions, with their clearly contoured, sculpted themes, and rhythmic conciseness, fulfilled the quality of corporeality. Beethoven’s sonata compositions, on the other hand, with their ‘degenerated’ motifs in the service of a large-scale form, achieved spirituality, but lost their quality of corporeality, which Halm felt to be a deficiency.11 With this dichotomy in mind, Halm’s description of Bruckner (Halm [1914] 1923, 97) as a “synthesizer par excellence among composers of sonata form” has two meanings. It portrays Bruckner as a creator of coherent large-scale form, and it recognizes him as the first master composer to solve an aesthetical problem that Halm regarded as dialectical—to mediate between Bach’s and Beethoven’s cultures of music with their different qualities of corporeality and spirituality and to engender “saturated themes” in the service of a large-scale form ([1914] 1923, 27). These considerations form the conceptual framework of Halm’s criticism of Schenker’s analytical approach. As Halm notes in his Beethoven monograph (1927, 140–41), Schenker considers “the otherwise usual music-historical distinctions to be subordinate.” It means little to Schenker “whether a composer belongs to the classical or the romantic period, but [it means] everything whether or not he was granted the grace of the Urlinie.” And for this reason, Schenker will also consider Halm’s distinction between different cultures of music “as insignificant or even as erroneous, since he knows, . . . among the great masters, that continuity is guaranteed and deeply justified by the Urlinie.” For Halm, there is nothing wrong with Schenker’s analytical approach as long as it “sharpens our senses for observation.” But if “Bach’s music . . . is more uniform, less or not at all fractured by contrasts, nor heated, and if it is also demonstrably more thematically uniform and organically developed [gewächshafter] than that of Beethoven, how could one then deny that it has at least a strong surplus of uniformity, for it would also have the hidden unity of the Urlinie in common with Beethoven’s.” Halm concludes his argument with the remark that one should not “obscure perceptible differences through a theory.” 10 As Rothfarb (2005, 125) also emphasizes, Halms’s use of the corporeality-spirituality opposition was related to his theological educational background. 11 On this point, Halm notes (1927, 139): “Nobody should try to persuade me that a useful, formal and efficient motif or theme for the whole is good just because of its efficiency. No, but certainly there are also thematic, melodic values, and not only usefulness for a higher unity.”
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In the end, Halm declares Schenker’s approach to be inadequate and even dispensable, since it fails to explain the fundamental differences in compositional style that are at the centre of Halm’s music aesthetical view. Schenker never responded to these objections. He merely told Halm that he considers his talk of corporeality an argument driven by mere “feeling” (SDO April 3–4, 1924). What he actually thought about Halm’s concept of cultures can be seen in a diary entry from March 1914. In reference to Halm’s book of 1913, Schenker notes that “most of what Halm says ultimately boils down to hollow aesthetics” (SDO March 19, 1914). To some extent Halm argues similarly to Walter Riezler some years later in his already mentioned criticism of the Urlinie. Riezler speaks of a problem of exaggeration in Schenker’s analytical approach. Due to Schenker’s increasingly refined efforts to unveil the “fundamental truths [Urtatsachen]” of an artwork, its “sensual manifestation [sinnliche Erscheinung]” threatens to drift out of sight, such that at the end “nothing remains but the constructive system” of the Urlinie (Riezler 1930, 503). For Riezler, therefore, all analytical efforts must start from this sensual manifestation and ultimately lead back to it (Riezler 1930, 508). Halm addresses a similar point in a somewhat ambiguous and only contextually accessible passage of a letter to Schenker in April 1924: ‘Foreground music’—a good expression which, depending on the findings, I would surely also accept for my music with much modesty as well as some pride. That is, I have long since believed that the foreground, or surface, has been neglected at the expense of the background and foundation, corporeality at the expense of spirituality. You counter: everything is merely a body and therein lies the quality of genius. Granted, but certainly not, therefore, on that account beauty. That is [also] something! (SDO April 7, April 14, and May 6, 1924.)
Besides the fact that Halm very mistakenly, if not erroneously, combines Schenker’s spatial notions of foreground and background with his own aesthetic distinction between corporeality and spirituality,12 the passage contains two critical subtexts. First as Rothfarb observes, like Riezler, Halm was skeptical of Schenker’s “claims of a deep12 Rothfarb, who translated Halm’s letter into English, notes that Halm did not use Schenker’s original terms Vordergrund and Hintergrund, but nominalizations of the adjectives vordergründlich and hintergründlich, which are not proper German. Halm’s original wording is: “‘Vordergrundmusik’ – ein guter Ausdruck, den ich, je nach Befund, wohl auch für meine Musik akzeptieren würde mit viel Bescheidenheit sowohl als mit etwas Stolz, d.h.: ich glaube schon lang, daß das Vordergründliche oder Oberflächige über dem Hinter- u[nd] Untergründlichen, oder die Körperlichkeit über dem Geistigen vernachlässigt worden ist. Sie sagen dagegen: alles ist nur ein Körper, u[nd] darin liegt gerade die Genialität. Zugegeben: aber darum doch noch nicht eo ipso die Schönheit—die ist auch Etwas!”
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lying . . . theoretical progenitor, and about the emphasis on it at the expense of the aural immediacy of the foreground” (Rothfarb 2005, 122–23). Second, as we have seen, Halm alludes to problematic traits in the works of Beethoven and Brahms. According to Halm, Brahms in particular cultivated the ‘spiritual’ principle of the sonata at the expense of a significant loss of corporeality in his music.13 In a previous letter to Schenker, Halm criticizes the “gesture” and “the lacking corporeality” in the opening theme of Brahms’ String Quartet Op. 51, No. 1, and confesses with regard to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 that “all arts, even the whole art of voice-leading, do not replace for me what I miss here [corporeality]—do not befriend me when something repels me” (SDO February 1–6, 1924). In this connection, the neologism of “foreground music” outlines an aesthetic ideal that Halm—as a reaction to the development of Austrian and German composition history—wanted to realize in his own musical works. Halm’s remark that for Schenker everything is “merely a body,” also applies to a previous letter, in which Schenker had spoken about his idea of an all-embracing “art of figuration,” in which the musical foreground, “arising from the middleground and background [Urgrund], is all in all itself figure before the primal intervals” of the background (SDO April 3–4, 1924). In difference to the corporeality-spirituality opposition, Halm at this point means a body in the anatomical sense.14 This becomes very clear in Halm’s Einführung in die Musik of 1926 where he asks, also in connection with Schenker’s analytical approach: Why should “skeletons or the muscles of a music body [Musik-Körper] be revealed, since they are covered by their appearance after all; indeed, even more so: since this covering is essential to art?” (Halm 1926, 76). Halm has to admit that anatomical studies reveal a “kind of beauty” and that they have a value in itself to observe the “growth of manifold phenomena from a few fundamental laws [Urforderungen].” Yet for him, the ‘physiognomy’ of the foreground remains the main objective of aesthetic consideration. And in accordance with Riezler, Halm is convinced that the “beauty” of a musical artwork can only be revealed in the attentive analysis of its sensual manifestation.
The Case for Bruckner Schenker’s and Halm’s assessments were perhaps furthest apart with regard to the aesthetic value of Anton Bruckner’s music. While Halm, in his enthusiasm for Bruckner, went as far as to refer to a “religious streak” in his portrayal of the composer (Halm 13 In this sense, Halm’s remark that Brahms “was a victim of sonata form and its sovereignty” must be understood. See Halm’s handwritten letter to Schenker (SDO March 18, 1917). 14 With reference to Bruckner, Schenker himself draws a parallel to anatomy in a letter to Halm (SDO April 3–4, 1924). The corresponding lines will be quoted later in the section “The Case for Bruckner.”
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[1914] 1923, 246), Schenker did not spare even the sharpest criticism of his own former teacher.15 Schenker expressed his criticism of Bruckner in shorter articles from the 1890s as well as in scattered remarks in later publications. Hellmut Federhofer collected and commented on many of these sources (Federhofer 1982), including relevant letters Schenker exchanged with Karl Grunsky and Halm.16 According to Martin Eybl, Schenker’s criticism of Bruckner focuses primarily on two areas: deficiencies in musical form and weaknesses in counterpoint (Eybl 1992, 137). As a composer of symphonies and masses, Bruckner was particularly hard hit by these objections. In Schenker’s opinion, Bruckner was incapable of creating coherence over long and even short distances and his musical thoughts resembled a disjointed juxtaposition of individual “moments of inspiration” (Schenker [1896] 1990, 201). Furthermore, in Schenker’s view, Bruckner’s arrangement of these thoughts also lacked logical order and inner necessity. Schenker views Bruckner’s symphonic movements, with the exception of the Scherzo, as “buildings with grandiose isolated cells, each of which does the composer every credit. But you can clearly feel [when listening] that you are just wandering from one isolated cell to another” (Schenker [1893] 1990, 60–61). Regarding counterpoint, Schenker criticizes Bruckner’s “rattling mechanics” in contrapuntal voice leading and fugal composition (Schenker [1896] 1990, 199). And more generally, he accuses Bruckner of mistakenly separating “freedom of creation” from the basic rule of counterpoint. In Schenker’s eyes, Bruckner could not imagine how “countless innovations” emerge from the meaning of the rule—innovations that however “free they might seem to be, still reside within the rule” (Schenker [1896] 1990, 199). On the contrary, Schenker concedes that Bruckner had admirable musical ideas, “but the question of his deployment of musical motives is of secondary consideration beside the more important issues of synthesis and the art of prolongation” (Schenker [1923] 2004, 213). The “impact and splendour of the individual thought,” so Schenker argues, “counteracts synthesis.” A thematic group suffers “if its parts are not mutually dependent” and if the individual elements “are pursued too vehemently as an end in themselves, instead of maintaining a balance between being an end in itself and devotion to the whole” (Drabkin 2005, 214). In his 1896 article on Bruckner, Schenker compares the composition of a musical thought with the formulation of a sentence in language. In a sentence words follow on from each other to reveal the full meaning of an idea, while Bruckner’s musical thoughts lack this inner orientation of their individual words (Schenker [1896] 1990, 201). Three decades later, in the second volume of Das Meisterwerk in der Musik, Schenker draws a similar comparison in order to expose a malady of his time, the 15 Schenker was a student of Bruckner’s at the end of the 1880s. 16 For a selection of Schenker’s remarks about Bruckner see also Jonas (1937).
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inability of even trained listeners to follow distant connections in music. Schenker emphasizes the relevance of linear progressions for tonal coherence: “The conceptual unity of a linear progression signifies a conceptual tension between the beginning and the end of the progression: the primary note is to be retained until the point at which the concluding note appears. This tension alone engenders musical coherence. In other words, the linear progression is the sole vehicle of coherence, of synthesis” (Schenker [1926] 2014a, 1). These observations are followed by the aforementioned comparison. The ability to perceive a similar tension would be equally important for understanding a sentence in natural language. In this comparison, Schenker most likely has his eye not on language in general, but on German grammar in particular.17 Schenker’s “conceptual tension” refers to the logical connection between the subject and the sentence objects, which can be ‘prolonged’ in German by inserting and nesting subordinate clauses. In doing so, nested structures of different depths can be created. This possibility of extending a basic sentence structure by inserting subordinate clauses reflects Schenker’s more recently developed idea of musical growth from within by enriching a structural framework with subordinated diminutions. It is clear that in 1896 Schenker could not yet have had such an understanding of tonal structure. However, since he, regardless of any later developments of his theory, held on to his criticism of Bruckner for decades (see Laufer 1997, 211), it does not seem unreasonable to read his remarks of 1926 as an application of his current theory to a previously only vaguely formulated assumption. By asserting that Bruckner’s thoughts lacked a conceptual tension, that the composer, as Schenker notes in 1923 in Der Tonwille ([1923] 2004, 213), “could not even . . . hear the beginning and end of a motion as an entity,” Schenker formulates his main objection to Bruckner’s compositions, namely, that their tonal coherence is constituted fundamentally differently than Schenker’s “immutable laws of music.”18 In the correspondence, Schenker affirms his criticism of Bruckner. In response to Halm’s question about Bruckner’s improvisation abilities (SDO February 1–6, 1924), Schenker replies in April 1924 that Bruckner “was too much a foreground-designer. More accurately, he knew only one dimension, a space of at most 20 measures, even that viewed merely two-dimensionally. That space did not arise for him from a depth, where space links to space, belonging together, like bones, muscles, joints of my body. For him, it stood for itself ” (SDO April 3–4, 1924). To give Halm an impression of his thinking, Schenker reports on an experience from his days as a student of Bruckner. One day the composer played Schenker a passage, presumably from the Seventh Symphony, and asked whether the intended escalation was already sufficient or still needed a continuation. Schenker was appalled that Bruckner obviously expected an 17 I thank Martin Eybl for this valuable clue he gave me in a personal conversation. 18 See the subtitle of Der Tonwille.
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answer without considering the broader context of the passage. “According to what,” Schenker asks, “could the listener have oriented himself, and according to what did he [Bruckner] orient himself if he could ask that way?” (SDO April 3–4, 1924). Halm replied to Schenker’s accusation that Bruckner’s music lacked synthesis, with several counterarguments. In a letter to Schenker of November 1923, he writes: “Supposing that Bruckner does not possess the Urlinie, I would still leave open whether that is a fault, and accordingly a deficiency in his music, or whether it is the necessary obverse of his virtues—to which I would hold now as before” (SDO November 6–10, 1923). In the second edition of the Bruckner monograph, Halm further notes Bruckner’s composing was presumably based on fundamentally different principles than those of classical composers. Therefore “Schenker finds Bruckner to be lacking in synthesis possibly out of inner necessity, possibly only because he has adapted himself completely to the compositional style of the classicists” (Halm [1914] 1923, 244). Halm continues: Bruckner used the “diminution technique, the art of melodically meaningful, thematically illuminated figuration, without completely renouncing it, . . . but much less so.” Bruckner “does not think at all in terms of figurations, or only seldomly; and in any case he does not replace the (incidentally not everywhere) meaningful figurations of the classicists with meaningless and empty ones.” In response to Schenker’s report of Bruckner’s teaching, Halm considers the possibility that Bruckner’s passage from the Seventh Symphony is simply a “wonderful musical image” (SDO April 7, April 14, and May 6, 1924). Bruckner’s emphasis on detail over its integration into the whole is precisely what had to happen in the era following the Classicists—that is, composing “music purely of the present” and regaining “innocence,” which for Halm means above all re-achieving corporeality. And finally, in Einführung in die Musik, Halm summarizes: If Bruckner’s music lacks the Urlinie, this would prove its “dispensability,” just as surely as one can conclude from Schenker’s writings “that even non-geniuses [Brahms] have the Urlinie” (Halm 1926, 75).
Opposing Perspectives on Form When Halm writes in the late 1910s that he finds Schenker in “terms of thinking . . . to be the opposite” of him, he gives as reasons Schenker’s “strong belief in genius,” his devastating and polemically imbued value judgments, his occasionally exaggerated deepening into musical details, and his “esoteric attitude” that only allows him to address his theory to “knowing and capable” musicians (Halm [1917–18] 1978, 273–74). When Halm responded to Schenker (November 1923), he again notes that Schenker and he “would be outright opponents in narrower but important technical areas” (SDO November 6–10, 1923); he means here all of Schenker’s analytical approach, the refinement of which he could have witnessed in recent years.
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Rothfarb’s conclusion about these differences (drawn in a discussion of Bach’s C-major Prelude) is that Schenker’s and Halm’s different arguments are rooted in “contrasting analytical criteria and priorities, leading to different musical tastes in repertoire (Brahms versus Bruckner), as well as to different reasons for appreciating and admiring the same repertoire (Bach, Beethoven)” (Rothfarb 2009, 59). Furthermore, in the mid-1920s Schenker and Halm had developed opposed and even conflicting analytical perspectives on form. This would explain why Halm was initially enthusiastic about Schenker’s ideas at the end of the 1910s, but ultimately criticized them, as revealed in his later publications from 1926 and 1927.19 In the following section, Schenker’s and Halm’s opposing formal perspectives are demonstrated in the context of a Bach fugue. In the second volume of Meisterwerk (1926), Schenker published a comprehensive analysis of Bach’s Fugue in C minor from WTC I (Schenker [1926] 2014b).20 Halm also made analytical remarks about this piece in his Einführung in die Musik (Halm 1926, 259–65).21 Schenker’s in-depth analysis of the fugue’s overall context reflects his thorough and systematic approach that Halm so admired.22 In contrast to Schenker, Halm’s analytical comments do not strive for completeness, but illuminate intriguing details of Bach’s foreground design. Halm’s remarks are also included in a book chapter entitled “Die musikalische Erscheinung” (The Musical Apparition), which deals with different aspects of fugue composition using a large number of examples from The Well-Tempered Clavier. Schenker’s statement that Bach’s fugal subjects are mostly “self-contained entities” (Schenker [1926] 2014b, 34) coincides with Halm’s conviction that the fugue is “basically governed by one law” (Halm 1913, 32), and that this law is precisely its subject, a thematic organism rich in inner relationships. By attempting to derive the subject as well as both countersubjects from a primordial harmonic setting (Schenker [1926] 2014b, 34), Schenker pursues his principle idea of demonstrating their organic coherence in both the harmonic (vertical) and voice-leading dimensions. Undoubtedly, Halm must have agreed in particular with Schenker’s demonstration of linear coherence between the subject and its continuation as the first counter-subject, since Halm had made very similar arguments about Bach’s Fugue in B! minor from Book II of WTC (Halm 1913, 211–12). Schenker points out that the sixteenth-note run in bar 3 “bears a much greater relation to the subject, creating the impression that the latter continues beyond e!1” to finally lead down to the tonic c1 (See Example 11.1, 112). At 19 See also Köhler (1996a, 172). 20 Schenker mentions his analysis in a handwritten letter to Halm (SDO July 11, 1927). 21 In a handwritten postcard, Schenker thanks Halm for sending the book. See (SDO January 22, 1927). 22 See for example Halm’s handwritten letter to Schenker (SDO July 24 and August 19, 1922).
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the same time, only the initial note of the run (c2) would bring the neighbor note (c2‒ d 2‒c2) opened by the subject to a satisfactory completion (Schenker [1926] 2014b, 36). The subject is a self-contained thematic entity that remains perceptible as such even as it also shapes the countersubjects. This dialectic of subject and contrapuntal continuation is for Halm, as for Schenker, at the heart of Bach’s culture of fugal composition and its organically developed form. Schenker’s approach to the overall context strictly follows the idea of subordinating all details of the piece to a general framework. As the progenitor of the fugue, Schenker assumes an Urlinie that consists of two 5‒1 descents (bars 1‒9 and 9‒20) completed by the octave-progression 8‒1 (bars 20‒29). The first and last descents span harmonically stable parts in the tonic, the first of which is labeled an exposition. The second fifth-progression, on the other hand, takes place in connection with the deeper-level harmonic progression I‒III‒V‒I. Schenker therefore considers this second fifth-progression to be the primal Urlinie-Zug and imagines the Kopfton g2 in bar 3 to be “mentally retained as 5 until the g2 [appears] in bar 9” (Schenker [1926] 2014b, 39n17). Finally, the concluding octave-progression “simply functions as an emphatic confirmation of the reiterated I” (Schenker [1926] 2014b, 32–33). According to Schenker, the “overriding unity of these [linear] progressions transcends the alternation of so-called episodes and fugal entries” (43), while the tripartite Urlinie is finally compensated by the “unified composing-out” of the tonic triad (32). By emphasizing the second fifth-progression and combining it with an elementary step progression, Schenker’s structural framework resembles an Ursatz, the final stage of his theory.23 In contrast, it is precisely the alternation of fugal entries and episodes of different design that form the starting point for Halm’s considerations. As he puts it in a preliminary remark, his analyses aim to recognize the “richness of [compositional] species and means” by which Bach creates a dynamic course of form that ultimately culminates in a conclusive end (Halm 1926, 236). With reference to the C-minor fugue, Halm notes that in this case the episodes give the piece dynamic “shape” and “growth” in content (265), 24 whereas the main purpose of the fugal entries is to set up the harmonic framework, that is, Schenker’s step progression I‒III‒V‒I. Halm, therefore, in his brief comments on the piece, is mainly concerned with the episode’s design. According to him, the fugue consists of five episodes that are arranged symmetrically around the 23 One could object to Schenker’s reading that the assignment of foreground events to the Urlinie appears to be somewhat arbitrary. In particular, Schenker does not answer the question what it means when the beginning of a structural descent coincides once with a reiteration of the subject, and once with an episode, and subsequent fugal entries and episodes without recognizable consequence mark or prolong individual notes of the Urlinie, but then also encourage its melodic progression. In his criticism of Schenker’s analysis, Adolf Nowak (2015, 227) even states that the Urlinie does not reveal anything about the relationship of fugal entries and episodes. 24 In view of the brevity of Halm’s analytical comments, page numbers are given for quotations only.
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middle one. The fourth episode (bars 17–19) corresponds to the first (bars 5–6), since both operate with melodic sequences of the subject’s head motif. In contrast, the beginning of the fifth episode (bars 22–26) refers to the second (bars 9–10), as the head motif is imitated in the harmonic setting of falling fifths. Halm also points out that the later episodes represent elaborations of their original forms and are divided into two halves. Halm’s analysis then focuses on the formal function and meaning of the middle episode as well as the extended episodes 4 and 5. Example 11.2 (113) illustrates the beginnings of episodes 1, 3, and 4, as well as the second part of episode 5. As Halm observes, episode 4 (bars 17–18) primarily functions as an intensification that prepares for the crucial harmonic event: the final return to C minor (bar 20). Therefore, Bach not only extends the two-voice structure of episode 1 (bars 5–6) to a threevoice setting, but also presents the subject’s head-motif and its melodic counterpart in a new relationship based on the technique of double counterpoint at the twelfth. As a consequence, consonant sixths in the intervallic framework are changed into dissonant sevenths. The additional third voice, running in parallel tenths, stresses the upwardly moving sequence and provokes cross-relations that lead to a maximal increase in tension. In comparison, the last return of that same sequence in the second half of episode 5 (Example 11.2, bars 25–26) has a completely different meaning due to significant changesin foreground design. The “harmonic drive” of preceding presentations, expressed in chromatic voice leading, is ultimately transformed into “melodic energy” in the harmonic framework of a prolonged V (Halm 1926, 263–64). By reversing the direction of the head motif ’s final notes (bars 25–26), the modified motif in itself “takes on more of the conflicting character of the subject” (263) and thus functions as a preparation for the final statement of the subject (bars 26–28) before the closing pedal point. It is precisely on the question of formal function of episode 3 that Schenker and Halm are furthest apart in their analysis of the form. Although episode 3 (Example 11.2, bars 13–14) does not relate to the subject, for Halm it is the most important of all episodes. On the one hand episode 3 separates the first two episodes from their later iterations and thus confirms the fugue’s symmetrical layout, on the other hand it also underlines the two decisive harmonic events in the course of form: the move to major III in the first part and the subsequent return to minor I in the second. In contrast to Halm, it would be inconceivable for Schenker to assign particular significance to episode 3, since that would obscure the “higher connective function” of the Urlinie’s linear progressions (Schenker [1926] 2014b, 43). According to Schenker, the second fifth-progression “drives e!2 [bars 11–13] onward to d 2–c2 (2‒1), and the bass seeks to conclude the large arpeggiation with V–I” (40). Thus, viewed from a larger perspective, episode 3 functions to avoid the deeper-level parallel octaves that would have resulted in the progression of III (bar 13) to the applied dominant of V (bar 16) by “the bass’s duplication of the Urlinie” (40).
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As we have seen, the formal perspectives that Schenker and Halm had developed in the mid-1920s differ fundamentally. The more Schenker refined his theory and aimed to subordinate all musical details to a general principle, the more his analytical approach developed characteristics of a deductive method (Köhler 1996a, 170 and 174); such characteristics even influenced Schenker in the 1930s as he presented the final stage of his theory in Der freie Satz (1935). There Schenker put his general idea of the Ursatz at the beginning of the volume in order to gradually move to the details of the surface and foreground. The more Schenker pursued the hierarchization of tonal relationships and developed a synchronic view on the overall form, the more the direction of organic growth shifted, as Ruth Solie observes, from the “perceptual progress of the [individual] piece” to “its conceptual progress from background to foreground” (Solie 1980, 153). Halm’s analytical eye, however, remained strictly focused on the perceptual progress of the individual piece. For him, as Rafael Köhler emphasizes, the “true nature of music as an art of movement [Bewegungskunst]” reveals itself precisely in its “temporality” (Köhler 1996b, 198). Halm therefore focuses on the dynamic processes in music as well as on the consequentiality of musical events.25 His analyses are primarily driven by the sensual manifestations and temporal arrangements of foreground events, which contribute to the dynamic development of musical form. Both Schenker and Halm were aware of these fundamental differences in formal perspective, but they maintained the hope that in the service of the common cause, that is, in the fight against the cultural decline of their time, they could come closer together on conceptual and technical issues. With reference to Halm’s Einführung in die Musik that contains Halm’s considerations on Bach’s C-minor fugue, Schenker writes to Halm in January 1927: “Each time I see a work of yours, the feeling comes over me that we two, despite all, would find ourselves in close accord if only we could first speak with one another (instead of writing)” (SDO January 22, 1927). Unfortunately Schenker and Halm never met in person.
Works Cited Brüstle, Christa. 1998. Anton Bruckner und die Nachwelt. Zur Rezeptionsgeschichte des Komponisten in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart: M & P Verlag für Wissenschaft und Forschung. Cook, Nicholas. 2007. The Schenker Project. Culture, Race, and Music Theory in Fin-desiècle Vienna. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
25 Halm’s concept of formal dynamics and musical logic is discussed at length in Rothfarb (2009, 48–71) and also in Rothfarb (1996).
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Drabkin, William. 2005. “Über den Niedergang der Kompositionskunst: Eine technisch-kritische Untersuchung.” Music Analysis 24, no. 1–2: 131–232.
Eybl, Martin. 1992. “Grandiose Isolierzellen und rasselnde Fugenmechanik—Zu Schenkers Kritik an seinem Lehrer Bruckner.” In Bruckner Symposion. Anton Bruckner als Schüler und Lehrer, edited by Othmar Wessely, 137–45. Linz: Anton Bruckner Institut. Federhofer, Hellmut. 1982. “Heinrich Schenkers Bruckner-Verständnis.” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 39, no. 3: 198–217.
_______. 1985. Heinrich Schenker. Nach Tagebüchern und Briefen in der Oswald Jonas Memorial Collection, University of California, Riverside. Hildesheim: Olms.
_______. 1988. “Anton Bruckner im Briefwechsel von August Halm (1869‒1929)— Heinrich Schenker (1868‒1935).” In Anton Bruckner. Studien zu Werk und Wirkung. Walter Wiora zum 30. Dezember 1986, edited by Christoph-Hellmut Mahling, 33‒40. Tutzing: Hans Schneider. _______. 1990, ed. Heinrich Schenker als Essayist und Kritiker. Gesammelte Aufsätze, Rezensionen und kleinere Berichte aus den Jahren 1891–1901. Hildesheim: Olms. Halm, August. 1913. Von zwei Kulturen der Musik. Munich: Georg Müller.
_______. (1914) 1923. Die Symphonie Anton Bruckners. 2nd ed. Munich: Georg Müller.
_______. (1917–18) 1978. “Heinrich Schenker.” In Von Form und Sinn der Musik. Gesammelte Aufsätze, edited by Siegfried Schmalzriedt, 271–74. Wiesbaden: Breitkopf und Härtel. _______. 1920. “Heinrich Schenkers ‘Neue musikalische Theorien und Phantasien.’” Der Merker 11, nos. 17 and 21: 414–17 and 505–07.
_______. (1924–26) 1978. “Neutöner und Altgläubiger. Ein Gespräch.” In Von Form und Sinn der Musik. Gesammelte Aufsätze, edited by Siegfried Schmalzriedt, 319– 27. Wiesbaden: Breitkopf und Härtel. _______. 1926. Einführung in die Musik. Berlin: Deutsche Buch-Gemeinschaft. _______. 1927. Beethoven. Berlin: Max Hesse.
_______. 1978. Von Form und Sinn der Musik. Gesammelte Aufsätze. Edited by Siegfried Schmalzriedt. Wiesbaden: Breitkopf und Härtel. Jonas, Oswald, ed. 1937. “Heinrich Schenker: Über Anton Bruckner.” Der Dreiklang 7: 166–76.
Kelly, Laura Lynn. 2008. “August Halm’s ‘Von zwei Kulturen der Musik’: A Translation and Introductory Essay.” PhD diss., The University of Texas at Austin.
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Köhler, Rafael. 1996a. “Linie und Urlinie. Zur Methodendiskussion in der energetischen Musiktheorie.” In Zur Geschichte der musikalischen Analyse, edited by Gernot Gruber, 157–75. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag. _______. 1996b. Natur und Geist. Energetische Form in der Musiktheorie. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner. Laufer, Edward. 1997. “Some Aspects of Prolongation Procedures in the Ninth Symphony (Scherzo and Adagio).” In Bruckner Studies, edited by Timothy L. Jackson and Paul Hawkshaw, 209–55. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nowak, Adolf. 2015. Musikalische Logik. Prinzipien und Modelle musikalischen Denkens in ihren geschichtlichen Kontexten. Hildesheim: Olms. Rehding, Alexander. 2001. “August Halm’s Two Cultures as Nature.” In Music Theory and Natural Order from the Renaissance to the Early Twentieth Century, edited by Suzannah Clark and Alexander Rehding, 142–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Riezler, Walter. 1930. “Die ‘Urlinie.’” Die Musik 22, no. 7, 502–10. Rothfarb, Lee A. 1996. “Beethoven’s Formal Dynamics: August Halm’s Phenomenological Perspective.” Beethoven Forum 5: 65–84. _______. 2002. “Energetics.” In The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, edited by Thomas Christensen, 927–55. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. _______. 2005. “August Halm on Body and Spirit in Music.” 19th-Century Music 29, no. 2: 121–41. _______. 2009. August Halm. A Critical and Creative Life in Music. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. Schäfke, Rudolf. (1934) 1964. Geschichte der Musikästhetik in Umrissen. 2nd ed. Tutzing: Hans Schneider. Schenker Documents Online. Accessed December 4, 2019. _______. March 19, 1914. Diary entry by Schenker. Transcribed by Marko Deisin ger.Translated by William Drabkin. http://www.schenkerdocumentsonline.org/ documents/diaries/OJ-01-14_1914-03/r0023.html. _______. March 18, 1917. Handwritten letter from Halm to Schenker. Transcribed and translated by Lee Rothfarb. http://www.schenkerdocumentsonline.org/ documents/correspondence/OJ-11-35-4.html.
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_______. July 24 and August 19, 1922. Handwritten letter from Halm to Schenker. Transcribed and translated by Lee Rothfarb. http://www.schenkerdocuments online.org/documents/correspondence/OJ-11-35-20.html. _______. November 6–10, 1923. Handwritten letter from Halm to Schenker. Transcribed and translated by Lee Rothfarb. http://www.schenkerdocumentsonline. org/documents/correspondence/OC-12-7-9.html. _______. February 1–6, 1924. Handwritten letter from Halm to Schenker. Transcribed and translated by Lee Rothfarb. http://www.schenkerdocumentsonline. org/documents/correspondence/OC-12-10-12.html. _______. April 3–4, 1924. Handwritten letter from Schenker to Halm. Transcribed by Ian Bent and Lee Rothfarb. Translated by Lee Rothfarb. http://www.schenker documentsonline.org/documents/correspondence/DLA-69.930-12.html. _______. April 7, April 14, and May 6, 1924. Handwritten letter from Halm to Schenker. Transcribed and translated by Lee Rothfarb. http://www.schenkerdocuments online.org/documents/correspondence/OC-12-15-17.html. _______. January 22, 1927. Handwritten postcard from Schenker to Halm. Transcribed and translated by Lee Rothfarb and Ian Bent. http://www.schenker documentsonline.org/documents/correspondence/DLA-69.930-14.html). _______. July 11, 1927. Handwritten letter from Schenker to Halm. Transcribed by Ian Bent and Lee Rothfarb. Translated by Lee Rothfarb. http://www.schenker documentsonline.org/documents/correspondence/DLA-69.930-15.html. Schenker, Heinrich. (1893) 1990. “Anton Bruckner.” In Heinrich Schenker als Essayist und Kritiker. Gesammelte Aufsätze, Rezensionen und kleinere Berichte aus den Jahren 1891–1901, edited by Hellmut Federhofer, 57–61. Hildesheim: Olms. _______. (1896) 1990. “Anton Bruckner.” In Heinrich Schenker als Essayist und Kritiker. Gesammelte Aufsätze, Rezensionen und kleinere Berichte aus den Jahren 1891–1901, edited by Hellmut Federhofer, 197–205. Hildesheim: Olms. _______. (1910) 2001. Counterpoint (Kontrapunkt). Vol. 1. Translated by John Rothgeb and Jürgen Thym. Edited by John Rothgeb. Ann Arbor: Musicalia Press. _______. (1922) 2004. “The Art of Listening.” In Der Tonwille, Vol. 1. Translated by Robert Snarrenberg, 118–20. Oxford: Oxford University Press. _______. (1923) 2004. “Miscellanea.” In Der Tonwille, Vol. 1. Translated by Joseph Lubben, 210–25. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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_______. (1926) 1996. The Masterwork in Music: A Yearbook (Das Meisterwerk in der Musik. Ein Jahrbuch). Vol. 2. Translated by Ian Bent et al. Edited by William Drabkin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
_______. (1926) 2014a. “Further Consideration of the Urlinie: II.” In The Masterwork in Music. Vol. 2. Translated by John Rothgeb, 1–22. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.
_______. (1926) 2014b. “The Organic Nature of Fugue, as Demonstrated in the C minor Fugue from Bach’s Well-tempered Clavier, Book 1.” In The Masterwork in Music. Vol. 2. Translated by Hedi Siegel, 31–54. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. _______. (1935) 1979. Free Composition. Edited and translated by Ernst Oster. New York: Longman. _______. 2004. Der Tonwille. Pamphlets in Witness of the Immutable Laws of Music. Vol. 1. Translated by Ian Bent et al. Edited by William Drabkin. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Solie, Ruth A. 1980. “The Living Work: Organicism and Musical Analysis.” 19thCentury Music 4, no. 2: 147–56.
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Part IV: Cultural Studies
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12 Musical Justice and Tonal Inequality in the Theory of Heinrich Schenker WAY NE A LPER N
Jus suum cuique tribuere Institutes of Justinian
The unequal allocation of structural weights among tones in Heinrich Schenker’s theory of music is often condemned as reflecting an unjust conception of society itself. In conjunction with his antidemocratic social and political polemics, Schenker is controversially cast as an authoritarian Germanist whose advocacy of the structural superiority of certain notes over others parallels a comparable philosophy of selective entitlement elevating certain people over others in a manner contrary to civic values of equality and fairness in a democratic society (Ewell 2019; 2020; see also Jackson, et al. 2020).1 Contrary to this widespread perception, however, Schenkerian theory portrays a musical microcosm of a lawful society based upon a venerable conception of justice. It admittedly does not treat all tones equally, but it justly and equitably weighs them on an analytical scale in accordance with consistently applied criteria in accordance with their specific context and circumstances. Each note receives its proportionate structural due in relation to its contribution to the whole. To allocate them all the exact same weight would be unmusical, untrue, and unjust. Schenker’s motto, semper idem se non eodem modo, “always the same, but not in the same way,” conveys the centrality of justice to his analytic approach: all notes are treated to equal justice, but equal justice requires that different notes be treated differently. 1 Disclaimer: Nothing herein means, nor should it be construed either explicitly or implicitly to mean, that Schenker’s personal views on race or culture are equitable or just.
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Aesthetic Justice The selective disposition of structural value in Schenkerian analysis constitutes a legitimate form of “aesthetic justice” to invoke Schenker’s own term. Schenker specifically refers to the principle of melodic fluency (fließender Gesang2) as a kind of “compensating aesthetic justice (ausgleichende ästhetische Gerechtigkeit) vis-à-vis the overall shape, within which each individual tone is a constituent part of the whole as well as an end in itself ” (Schenker [1910] 1987, 94).3 He thus regards aesthetic or musical justice as a matter of reconciliation or balance between the individual tone and the collective order of the musical whole. He notably describes this as ausgleichend— compensatory or proportionate, i.e., adjudicated on the relative basis of comparative merit or value, rather than absolute equality or structural equivalency. Schenker’s practice of aesthetic justice is grounded in a well-established philosophy of law embodied in a famous maxim found in the Institutes of Justinian—jus suum cuique tribuere—to give each his due (Justinian [533] 1913; 2002, I.1.4, 3). According to Justinian’s definition, justice constitutes a specific assessment of each person’s particular due vis-à-vis other members of the society as a whole. The priority is fairness or equity (aequitas), rather than sameness or equality (aequalitatem). The Institutes of Justinian are part of the Corpus Juris Civilis, the massive Byzantine codification of ten centuries of Roman law compiled by Tribonian at Emperor Justinian’s directive in the sixth century. Also known as the Pandects (Pandectae), this is the sacra scriptura of the European legal tradition and the most influential body of law the world has ever known. Its classic definition of justice on the very first page of the Institutes as giving each his due is attributed to Ulpian (Domitius Ulpianus), one of the greatest early Roman jurists (160–228 A. D.) and derives from the Greeks. The Institutes are an abridgement of the Digest of Justinian, the most important part of the Corpus Juris Civilis, which also states, “justice is the constant and enduring will to give each his due” ( Justitia est constans et perpetua voluntas jus suum cuique tribuere) (Justinian [533] 1998, I.1.10). The Institutes are considered “one of the basic textbooks of Western civilization, arguably the single most influential introduction to social thought” (Kelley 1984, 648). Designed as a handbook for law students like Schenker, they constituted the foundation of all continental legal education for centuries, including at the University of Vienna where Schenker studied law from 1884–88. 2 In this text, single words from a German-language source are always quoted in uninflected form. 3 The complete German passage is “Im ‘ fließenden Gesang’ finden wir somit eine Art ausgleichender ästhetischer Gerechtigkeit gegenüber dem Gesamtgebilde von Tönen, innerhalb dessen jeder einzelne Ton ebensosehr Mittel zum Gesamtzweck als auch Selbstzweck ist.” (Schenker [1910] 1987, 94; trans. Morgan 2014, 89–90).
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Schenker undoubtedly was familiar with this definition of justice in the Institutes of Justinian. During the course of his legal education, he took a course Roman Legal History (Römische Rechtsgeschichte) with Roman law scholar and the Dean of the Viennese Law Faculty, Adolf Exner (1841–91). Exner lectured on Roman law for two hours a day from 11 am to 1 pm, four days a week (except Thursday) in Hall 33 of the University of Vienna Faculty of Law during Schenker’s first semester of law school in the fall of 1884 (University of Vienna 1884). Exner likely taught Schenker Roman law from what shortly became his influential Grundriss zu Vorlesungen über Geschichte und Institutionen des Römischen Rechts (Plan for Lectures on the History and Institutions of Roman Law) (Exner 1891).4 Schenker also took no less than five more courses on Roman law after that— Roman Family Law taught by Friedrich Maassen (1823–1900), a prominent member of the Supreme Court of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and noted Roman law scholar; Roman Estates Law taught by Franz Hofmann (1845–97), co-author of the most important nineteenth-century treatise on Austrian Civil Law, Commentar zum Österreichischen Allgemeinen Bürgerlichen Gesetzbuch (Commentary on Austrian General Civil Law) (Hofmann and Pfaff 1877–78); Roman Civil Procedure and Roman Property Law taught by Gustav Demelius (1831–91), yet another preeminent Pandectic scholar of Roman law and creator of the novel concept of “legal fictions,” and finally, Roman Contract Law once again with Adolf Exner, Dean of the Law Faculty. Schenker’s acquaintance with the classic notion of proportional justice in the Institutes of Justinian is corroborated by his letter to Max Kalbeck, the noted Brahms scholar, in 1889. Describing his concurrent legal and musical studies as he prepared for his doctoral exams, Schenker wrote Kalbeck, “Late in the evening whenever I put down the divine ‘Roman Law’ (das göttliche Römische Recht), I permit myself the purest pleasure of a little musical thinking. Every evening yields an idea” (Schenker [1889] 1985; 2001). He signs the letter “Stud. iur.,” the abbreviation for Studiosus iuris, meaning “law student” or more precisely, “student of jurisprudence.” Schenker’s distinctive characterization of Roman law as “divine” (göttlich) replicates the celestial description of jurisprudence as “the knowledge of things divine and human” ( jurisprudentia est divinarum atque humanarum) on the very same first page of Justinian’s Institutes as “to give each his due” ( jus suum cuique tribuere) (Justinian [533] 1913; 2002, I.1.4, 3). 4 Schenker also likely studied Bernhard Windscheid’s ubiquitous Roman law treatise, Lehrbuch des Pandektenrechts (Textbook on the Pandects) (Windscheid 1862–70). Both this and Exner’s own textbook drew heavily from the largest and most important studies of Roman law ever written, Friedrich Carl von Savigny’s monumental eight-volume System des heutigen römischen Rechts ( System of Modern Roman Law) (Savigny [1840–49] 1867; 1993) and his seven-volume Geschichte des römischen Rechts im Mittelalter (The History of Roman Law During the Middle Ages) (Savigny [1814] 1929).
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Justice under this view constitutes a well-attuned equilibrium instead of equality of forces, based not upon similar outcomes, but upon similar treatment. It involves procedural fairness instead of substantive equality, entailing a discriminating adjudication of individual merit and entitlement, as opposed to arbitrarily treating all cases the same. True justice therefore paradoxically mandates selective or relative inequality dictating unequal outcomes in accordance with particular circumstances, whereas absolute or uniform equality would be equal but therefore unjust (Walzer 1984; Nozick 1977). Citing Jean-Paul Laffitte’s aptly titled Le Paradoxe de l’Egalité (The Paradox of Equality) (Laffitte [1887] 2018) for this paradoxical relationship between justice and equality, the nineteenth-century French jurist Léon Duguit explains: True equality means equal treatment for that which is equal and unequal treatment for that which is unequal. It would be treating inequalities equally if the same obligationswere imposed on all, and that would not be equality. (Duguit [1901] 1968, 301)
Reconciling this fundamental tension between justice and equality was a central concern of the German jurisprudence Schenker encountered during his legal education at the University of Vienna. This was particularly so in his study of Legal Philosophy with Georg Jellinek, the most prominent jurist on the Viennese law faculty.
Schenker’s Legal Education Schenker had far more formal training in law than he did in music. He studied jurisprudence for four years from 1884–88 during the formative intellectual period of his youth at the second oldest law school in Central Europe founded in 1365. Schenker was among a small group of handpicked young men cultivated and groomed by the Austrian state to become an intellectual aristocracy, a meritocracy of learning compri singits elite Intelligentsia. Acting on behalf of Emperor Franz Joseph, the Minister of Worship and Education Count Leo Thun-Hohenstein (1811–88) overhauled the Austrian legal curriculum on the model of the more progressive German training duringhis sweeping mid-century educational reforms in the aftermath of the social and political upheavals of 1848 (Aichner and Mazohl 2017). As the principle architect of Schenker’s legal curriculum, Thun-Hohenstein’s ideological and educational objectives were vigorously promoted by the President of the Imperial Supreme Court of Justice Josef Unger (1828–1913). Thun-Hohenstein and Unger introduced modern German legal scholarship, the most highly respected in the world, into the previously antiquated and insulated Viennese program (Reimann
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1993). In many respects, the Austrian curriculum became even more rigorous than other German law schools. Schenker’s four-year study of law in Austria contrasted with German training, as well as Anglo-American training, which were only threeyear programs. Following a long tradition in law, especially among Jews barred from legal practice until the Austro-Hungarian Constitution of 1867, Schenker concentrated on the theoretical study of jurisprudence (Rechtstheorie) rather than the professional practice of law (Rechtspraxis) (Kobler 1970). Continental legal education has always been more abstract and conceptual than the vocational orientation of Anglo-American law schools. Particularly in the nineteenth century, its focus was upon civil science, legal wisdom, and the development of erudition and character (Bildung) rather than upon applied legal skills as a trade or profession. Law was taught as a cultural institution and social process, emphasizing its rhetorical and analytic methodology, and its inherent potential for systemic organization (Freund 1891–92; Raynolds 1902; Pollock [1918] 1969). Schenker’s law school transcript (Meldungsbuch) is a crucial archival record evidencing his legal studies (University of Vienna 1888).5 It lists every course he took and the professor he studied with over this four-year period. The Meldungsbuch establishes that this was by no means a perfunctory exercise in pedantic formalities, but an intensiveand demanding intellectual endeavor. Schenker undertook a comprehensive curriculum of over thirty courses taught by the foremost jurisprudential scholars of his day spanning legal philosophy, legal methodology, legal history, legal ethics, legal procedure, canon law, international law, Roman, German, and Austrian contract law, property law, estates law, statistics, economics, and finance. He sustained an intensive schedule of one- and two-hour lectures five and often six days a week over four years, after which he successfully passed a rigorous battery of state and university exams covering a broad range of complex legal subjects (University of Vienna 1884–88). This process required that “an enormous mass of doctrine must be learned by heart and retained in memory” (Radin 1937, 336).6 5 Hedi Siegel first informed me of Schenker’s law school transcript (Meldungsbuch) in the Oster Collection around 1994. J. Michael Reisman, my jurisprudence professor at Yale Law School in 1976, confirmed its historical significance. Given my dual background in music and law, like Schenker himself, I was able to draw reasonable inferences and correlations. As the rediscovery of Justinian’s Digest lying on a dusty shelf in a library in Pisa long after it was written altered the course of legal history, my personal discovery of this hitherto neglected document changed the course of my scholarship and opened this untapped channel of Schenkerian research (see Alpern 1999a; 1999b; 2013; 2014). My comprehensive treatise entitled Schenkerian Jurisprudence is forthcoming. 6 Schenker’s Meldungsbuch does not include grades and there are no written exams or papers by Schenker as Viennese law students at that time were not required to write a thesis.
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Schenker’s early grasp of jural concepts, his natural legal proclivities, and his stoic determination to complete his legal education were demonstrated at the outset by his successful passage of rigorous intermediate examinations (Zwischenexamen) after his first year of law school in 1885. Distinctive to the University of Vienna but not Germaniclaw schools elsewhere, these threshold exams were designed as challenging hurdles to winnow out uncommitted and unpromising law students unable to meet the high standards expected of a Viennese jurist. Half the students invariably failed and either had to make up a year or drop out, unlike Schenker, who passed through unscathed (Schweinburg 1945). Schenker’s completion of his curriculum in 1888 was certified by his award of the Absolutorium, confirming his passage of all courses during his four-year tenure. He then successfully passed a series of three comprehensive state examinations (Staats prüfungen)—the first on legal history, including Roman, German, Austrian, and canon law (Rechtshistorische Staatsprüfung), the second on substantive and procedural law administered in Austrian civil and criminal courts (Judicielle Staatsprüfung), and the third and most demanding on legal and political theory, public and administrative law, and economics (Staatswissenschaftliche Staatsprüfung) (Reiter 2007, Lentze 1966, Schweinburg 1945, Walz 1909, Lewinski 1908, Raynolds 1902). The Staatsprüfungen were administered by a prestigious commission of high- ranking government officials, eminent judges, and appointed academic deputies of the Austrian state. According to one commentator, “there are, in fact, no severer legal examinations anywhere in the world” (Walz 1909, 2). Schenker was publicly interrogated both individually and collectively with other students for a period of several hours during each exam to satisfy the official requirements of the state. To earn the academic title of Doctor of Law from the University of Vienna, however, he also then had to pass a further series of even more challenging oral examinations called Rigo rosum for their academic “rigor.” These were conducted in private by the law faculty itself representing the university as an autonomous institution. Schenker passed his three oral exams on May 15, 1889, July 10, 1889, and January 8, 1890 (University of Vienna 1890; Chiang 1996, 42–43). He testified to their rigorousnature in a letter to Ludwig Bösendorfer, the piano manufacturer and member of the Board of Directors of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, also his piano teacher, explaining that he “had passed the most grueling of the examinations (das schwierigste Rigorosum) for the doctorate” (Schenker [1889/1890] 2009). Unlike his earlier letter to Kalbeck which he had signed as Studiosus iuris or “Law Student,” Schenker signed this letter to Bösendorfer as Doctorand juris or “Doctoral Student of Law,” indicating his academic progress. After officially receiving his degree on February 1, 1890, and for the rest of his life, Schenker proudly referred to himself as Dr. juris ( Jurist Doctor or Jurisprudentiae Doctor), a Doctor of Law (not music), the prestigious professional title he diligently earned in his youth (Federhofer 1985, 5).
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Schenker’s Law Professors Schenker’s law professors comprised a preeminent body of the most distinguished Viennese legal scholars, jurists, statesmen, and practitioners of the day, carefully selected by Count Thun-Hohenstein on behalf of the Emperor (University of Vienna 1884–88, Hermann 1884, Reiter 2006). Along with the subjects they taught to Schenker, these included Lujo Brentano (Public Finance), Gustav Demelius (Roman Civil Procedure and Roman Property Law), Adolf Exner (Roman Legal History and Roman Contract Law), Gustav Gross (Economics), Karl Grünhut (Commercial Law), Franz Hofmann (Civil Law, Austrian Estates Law, and Roman Estates Law), Karl Inama-Sternegg (Statistical Analysis), Georg Jellinek (Legal Philosophy and International Law), Wenzel Lustkandl (Administrative Law), Friedrich Maassen (Roman Family Law), Salomon Mayer (Criminal Procedure), Anton Menger (Dispute Resolution), Leopold Pfaff (Contract Law, Family Law, and Property Law), Emil Schrutka (Civil Procedure), Heinrich Siegel (German Legal History), Johann Tomaschek(Legal Methodology and German Private Law), Wilhelm Wahlberg (Criminal Law), Heinrich Zeissberg (Austrian History and History of Middle Ages), Josef Zhishman (Canon Law), and Robert Zimmermann (Practical Philosophy) (see Hermann 1884; University of Vienna 1884–88; University of Vienna 1888; ReiterZatloukal [1997] 2006). These intellectual mandarins constituted an aristocratic caste of secular clergy— “German bearers of culture” steeped in “the moral impact of learning [and] its effect upon the whole person,” specifically appointed by the Austrian state for “the transfer of cultural and spiritual values” to promising law students like Schenker (Ringer 1990, 3, 104, 109). Their officially designated purpose was the “training of [the] technically best qualified, ideologically drilled civil servants” in order to create a new intellectual elite, “appropriately trained, who would then play an active role in the development of the state as a whole” (Reiter 2007, 8; Aichner and Mazohl 2017, 99). During this period of intensive civic indoctrination, Schenker was inculcated with the social and political ideas and values of the most prestigious Austrian legal scholars of his time.
The Juridification of Music Although Schenker never practiced law and likely never intended to do so, he nonetheless emerged from this juridical baptism with substantial legal knowledge and a juridical cast of mind ( juristischer Sinn). He developed a legal consciousness (Rechtsbewusstsein)and a lawyerly temperament. Schenker became a musikalischer Rechtswissenschaftler—a musical jurist learned in the law.
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The powerful German law professors he studied under for four years fulfilled their ideological task and taught him well. As the focus and object of their doctrinal mission, Schenker, like them, was not democratic, but he was liberal. And like them, he prioritized justice over equality. The product and beneficiary of intensive juridical training, faithful to the political and philosophical goals of the Austrian Ministry of Worship and Education and to the Emperor himself, Schenker became a member of Austria’s elite Intelligentsia. Loyal to the distinguished scholars who implemented these objectives and implanted these ideas, to the venerable jurists he diligently studied, indeed to the very law itself, Schenker ultimately treated the tonal citizens of his own musical state unequally, yet he always treated them justly. Echoes of Schenker’s jurisprudential inculcation and legal mindset can be d iscerned in his pervasive jural imagery, legalistic turns of phrase, argumentative r hetorical style, and reductive methodology. His early publication, Der Tonwille (The Will of the Tones), is explicitly subtitled Vierteljahrschrift zum Zeugnis unwandelbarer Gesetze der Tonkunst (Pamphlets /Quarterly Publication in Witness of the Immutable Laws of Music) (Schenker [1921–23] 2004–05). Schenker promulgates a plethora of musical laws, such as the Law of the Passing Note (Schenker [1926] 1996, 10); Law of Retention(10); Law of Modulation (43); Law of Obligatory Register (50); Law of Development(Schenker [1930] 1997, 171; Law of the Fifth (Schenker [1935] 1979, 12); and the Law of Repetition (99) — comprising nearly seventy-five pieces of musical legislation. Referencesto justice (Gerechtigkeit) in particular permeate his work, e.g., “justice is done” (Schenker [1926] 1996, 57); “doing justice” (Schenker [1922] 1987, 175); “full justice” (Schenker [1910] 1987, xxxii); “grave injustice” (Schenker [1910] 1984, 61); “crying injustice” (Schenker [1908] 1976, 5). A deeper and more profound legal residue, however, lies in the background beneath these more accessible affinities on the surface, through Schenker’s juridification of music itself. Schenker encountered in his study of law an autonomous, hierarchical ordering mechanism for regulating complex relationships within a dynamic field of interaction. He discovered a model for creative system-building integrating theoretical ideas with practical procedures in the context of a normative structural framework. This intensive legal training implanted the seed of a template that could be, and ultimately was, extrapolated from a human construct to a musical construct, from a society of citizens to a society of tones. Schenker’s legalistic approach to music reconstituted critical jural concepts and processes he encountered during this critically formative stage of his development. He gradually came to view tonality as a micro-legal system in its own right, a hierarchical network of normative prescriptions and rules of conduct, balancing the competing needs for collective order with creative freedom through the compensating principle of aesthetic justice. Schenker cast musical relationships (Tonverhältnisse) as legal relationships (Rechtsverhältnisse) and tonal order (Tonordnung) as
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civic order (Rechtsordnung). The dialectic between the state and the individual was transmogrified into the dialectic between tonality and the tone. Social justice became musical justice. Music became juridified.
Jellinek and German Jurisprudence Schenker’s most important studies were in Legal Philosophy (Rechtsphilosophie) with Georg Jellinek (1851–1911), his most influential law professor, during his fourth semester of law school in the spring of 1886. Jellinek delivered hour-long lectures from 11 a.m. to 12 noon, four days a week (except Thursday) in Hall no. 29 of the University of Vienna Faculty of Law (University of Vienna, 1884–88).7 The leading Austrian proponent of the German School of Historical Jurisprudence and method of Legal Science founded by the towering Friedrich Carl von Savigny at the University of Berlin (1779–1861), Jellinek is recognized as one of the most significant German jurists of the nineteenth century.
Georg Jellinek (1851–1911) 7 Schenker also attended Jellinek’s hour-long lectures in the Law of Nations (Völkerrecht), i.e., International Law, from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, plus two hour-long lectures from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. on Thursdays in Hall no. 23 of the Vienna Faculty of Law during his seventh semester in the fall of 1887. Jellinek’s intellectual contribution in International Law is also historically significant (see Bernstorff 2012; Paz 2013, 137–56). Its relevance to Schenkerian theory lies in demonstrating the hierarchical level of law as uncodified systemic norms between nations rather than between individuals acting within them.
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Jellinek was a pioneer of the modern theory of constitutional law (Staatsrechtslehre) whose dominant concern was the reconciliation of the interests of society with the interests of the individual through a system of normative relationships balancing order (Ordnung) with freedom (Freiheit) — the “metaphysic of history,” as he called it, being a timeless battle between these two polarities (Jellinek 1900, 262; see also Kelly 2004; Kersten 2000). He regarded the clarification of “the legal position of the individual in the state” and “understanding the position which state assures to the individual” through delimitation of “the true boundaries between the individual and the community” (die richtigen Grenzen zwischen dem Ich und der Gesamtheit) to be “the highest problem that thoughtful consideration of human society has to solve” (Jellinek [1895] 1901; 1979, 98).8 Jellinek practiced the reductive analytic method of German Legal Science initiated by Savigny, stripping away the variegated features of the legal foreground to distill a substrata of “ideal types” (Idealtypen) or prototypical “forms of the state” embedded beneath the surface structuring this fundamental dichotomy between order and freedom in the background (Jellinek 1900, 34ff).9 Jellinek’s taxonomy of “ideal types”, recurring prototypes against which empirical instantiations are evaluated through a process of reductive analysis has transparent affinities with Schenker’s own reductive analytic methodology and taxonomy of normative musical types defined by the Ursatz and its myriad musical manifestations. Jellinek and his juridical colleagues on the Viennese law faculty sought to reconcile the hierarchical forces of conservatism entrenched in Austria and Germany with the popular forces of democracy sweeping Western Europe. German legal scholars were deeply shaken by the tumultuous events across the Rhine and their tremors across their banks in the democratic upheavals of 1848 (Stolleis 2001). They recoiled at the collapse of social order and what they perceived as unconstrained egalitarianism in the aftermath of the French Revolution in favor of greater hierarchical social structure, saving the German people from the rampant convulsions of “the West.”10 8 The prominent jurist Roscoe Pound summarizes this dichotomy, “How were the two ideas, external coercion by the force of politically organized society and individual freedom of action, to be reconciled? This question furnishes the clue [to] the formulas of law set forth by philosophers and jurists during the period of the German historical school” (Pound [1959] 1970 II: 56). 9 Sociologist Max Weber, who studied jurisprudence, appropriated his friend Jellinek’s “ideal type” as an analytic tool, which he defined as a “logical construction which furnish[es] a standard in terms of which actual forms of social organization can be classified and compared” (Weber [1922] 1980, 14, 52). 10 Like many German intellectuals, Schenker did not consider Germany and Austria as part of the West, but as “central European nations” between the West (England, France, Italy) and the East (Russia). “Note the distinction, crucial to Schenker, between ‘Western’ (im Westen—to which Germany does not belong) and ‘Occidental’ (abendländisch—to which it does belong)” (Bent, in Schenker [1930] 1997, 72n. 16).
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Austrian Foreign Minister Klemens von Metternich, the dominant political figure in Austro-German politics and European diplomacy during the conservative Biedermeier period of restoration from the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to the “German Revolution” of 1848, vehemently summed up the prevailing Germanic distrust of egalitarianism (Gleichheit) as “the disease which must be cured, the volcano which must be extinguished, the gangrene which must be burned out with the hot iron, the hydra with jaws open to swallow up the social order” (Metternich [1880] 1970, in Hazen [1910] 1988, 21–22).11 As a student of law in this ideological crucible, Schenker was not exempt from this pervasive apprehension of democracy, comparing the French Revolution to Rameau’s musical inversion, i.e., “lower shall become upper, and upper lower!” (Schenker [1930] 1997, 4). He saw bittersweet irony that the Jacobins’ populist cry for égalité culminated in the guillotine, which he indignantly referred to as the French “Temple of Reason” and “finest product of philistinism” (Schenker [1921–23] 2004–05, I: 9). The period between 1848 and 1919 during Schenker’s legal education focused politically and jurisprudentially around the tension between democratic pluralism and individual freedom on one hand, versus monarchical centricism and social solidarity on the other, and the process of their gradual mediation through emerging constitutionalism. Reflecting a widespread German response to both French and English populism, Jellinek sought to reconcile autonomy with authority, amelioratingperceived excesses of democracy without succumbing to authoritarianism through limited state control. Jellinek’s jurisprudential agenda sought to bridge the gap between Kant’s idealization of the individual and Hegel’s idealization of the collective, by discovering an empirical and conceptual foundation for their synthesis through the science of law. He postulated two jural prototypes at ideological extremes representing the Scylla of excessive order and the Charybdis of excessive freedom, both of which unacceptably led to tyranny. At one pole was the centralized state of Caesar’s ancient Rome, which he considered too authoritarian and nothing more than “tyranny by a minority of one.” At the other pole was the opposing prototype of egalitarian democracy, which he considered too free and constituted “tyranny of the majority” (Jellinek [1898] 1912, 16–17, 20, 39–40). The first succumbed to over-regulation under the sovereignty of the state, the second to under-regulation under the sovereignty of the people. One aggrandized public duties over private rights, the other private rights over public duties. Authoritarianism, Jellinek contended, was the exaggeration of law, and democracy the degeneration of law. Caesarism became tyranny and populism became anarchy; the first culminated in the crucifix, the second in the guillotine. The Ger11 See Robespierre [1790] 1950, VI; 643; [1775] 2007). Edmund Burke’s castigating Reflections on the Revolution in France inspired conservative German jurists (See Burke [1790] 2009). Even in France, Benjamin Constant condemned egalitarian excesses (Constant [1815] 2001).
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man solution lay neither in the “the whim of the despot” nor the “will of the people” (Kriegel 1995, 115).12
Special German Path The unique destiny of the Germanic legal spirit (Rechtsgeist) for Jellinek and his colleagueson the Viennese law faculty who instructed Schenker was to steer a middle course between these opposing polarities of order and freedom, a “special German path” (deutscher Sonderweg) mediating between the “falsehood of extremes” through the rule of a higher law in the background (MacDonell [1914] 1997, 190). One of the keys unlocking the door to this special German path lay in the notion of justice as equilibrium rather than equality, proportional rather than identical, calibrated rather than absolute, where the members of society, in Schenker’s words, are treated “always the same, but not always in the same way.” Always treating people equally in Jellinek’s view not only subverted the traditional social hierarchy but abrogated a higher jurisprudential principle which he called “minorityconsciousness” (Minoritätsgefühl) that protected the rights and virtues of minorities by giving equal recognition to innate human traits, differences, and achievements. Jellinek’s notion of “minority consciousness” dictated that political influence is therefore justly allocated on the selective basis of proportional merit, not absolute equality, and that votes should accordingly be “weighed, not counted” (gewogen, nicht gezählt) (Jellinek [1898] 1912, 5–6). Jellinek believed that egalitarianism inevitably led to “universal leveling” (allgemeine Nivellirung), a superficial flattening of cultural depth and diversity, where individual and subcultural distinctions are abrogated and ignored so that everything and everyone essentially becomes the same (32). What geologists affirm of the hills, that in the course of time they will crumble and sink their summits to the ground, is also true of society. . . . We hope and believe that society will ultimately discover and realize this principle, which alone is sufficient to keep it from desolate intellectual and moral flats and bogs: the recognition of the rights of minorities. (Jellinek [1898] 1912, 32–34) 12 Jellinek compared this polarity to the opposing political philosophies of Hobbes versus Rousseau, rejecting one’s capitulation to order and the other’s capitulation to freedom, in favor of a more moderate position akin to Locke’s advocacy of limited political authority safeguarding limited individual freedom (Jellinek [1891] 1970. See also Hobbes [1651] 2001; Rousseau [1755] 1985; Locke [1690] 1988). Jellinek’s German jurisprudence contradicted the prevailing English egalitarianism of Bentham and Mill, although his liberal protection of individual and minority rights, particularly regarding religious freedom, resonates with American Revolutionary thought, which he praised (Jellinek [1895] 1901; 1979; Mill [1859] 1985).
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According to Jellinek, “every democratic state has a tendency to exalt the bare majority as the sole decisive factor, [but] pure majority rule portends nothing but oppression and tyranny.” While democracy outwardly proclaimed the rights of individuals and minorities, the tyranny of the majority “ruthlessly trampled upon the minorities opposing it” (32). The fatal defect of democracy which “threatens all civilization” for Jellinek was its erroneous premise of social homogeneity, which was empirically false in the heterogeneous cultural mélange of the balkanized Austro-Hungarian state (22–23). The whole idea of majority decisions depends on the prevailing conception of the domestic unity of the people. . . . Where this unity does not exist, the majority principle, founded on the mere counting of heads, cannot be carried on.” (Jellinek [1898] 1912, 32–34)
The Habsburg Empire during this era lacked such unity and was far from homo geneous. It not only combined a larger number of different nationalities and ethnicities than any other state but presented a stark conflict between a sophisticated German minority and an unsophisticated Slavic majority. Established by the 1867 Compromise (Ausgleich) the year before Schenker’s birth, the dual Empire’s population included a minority of twelve million German-speaking Austrians versus a collective majority of ten million Hungarians, five million Poles, and untold masses of Czechs, Slovaks, Rumanians, Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Ukrainians, Italians, Jews, and gypsies. There were gross inequalities between different groups in this historically fragmented society, generating constant ethnic, political, economic, and social conflicts (Jellinek [1898] 1912, 32–33; Zohn 1977, 32). The role of law in such a highly pluralistic society for Jellinek was to balance its inherent tensions by establishing a dynamic equilibrium of unequal forces, rather than the gross imposition of artificial uniformity and equality. The democratic idea of majority rule based on sheer numerical tabulation, he contended, was “no other than a form of brute force” (Jellinek [1898] 1912, 29). “That two should as a matter of course be worth more than one,” Jellinek argued, “ran counter to the strong feeling of individuality which especially distinguished the Germanic nations” (germanischer Individualismus) (5). Given the radical heterogeneity of Habsburg society, a proper legal system ought to be based upon a selective and calibrated principle of just proportionality (Verhältnismässigkeit) according to merit and circumstance.
Teutonic Rechtsstaat Jellinek and the other Germanist legal scholars at the University of Vienna believed the ideal paradigm for the resolution of this fundamental dichotomy between or-
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der and freedom resided in the medieval Teutonic kingdom or original Germanic state (der germanische Staat), which they contended was a Rechtsstaat, a “law-state” based on the transcendent rule of law. Unlike the excessive authoritarianism of the Roman Ordnungsstaat or the excessive populism of the democratic Volksstaat, the Teutonic Rechtsstaat was predicated on “nicht der Fürst, nicht das Volk,” but rather upon Gesetzlichkeit or the sovereignty of law itself (Jellinek [1891] 1970, 22). The corpus Germanorum of the Dark Ages was considered the historical cradle of limited state control through a higher inviolable fundamental law (Urgesetz) imposing constitutional checks and balances upon the will of the ruler.13 The Rechtsstaat principle (Rechtsstaatsprinzip) permeated all aspects of German jurisprudence during Schenker’s legal education. Valorized as a utopian synthesis of ordered freedom, a perfect equilibrium between authority and autonomy, the Gothic Rechtsstaat born in the Black Forest became the late nineteenth-century Austro- Germanic liberal movement’s historical precedent and prescriptive model for a limited sovereign constrained by the higher rule of law in the form of a constitutional monarchy (Krieger, 1972; Neumann, 1986; Böckenförde, 1991). The notion of justice as proportional rather than equal, equitably calibrated to reflect particular contexts and circumstances, was a central component of German Rechtsstaatlichkeit. Like Schenkerian practice, it provided a structural framework and procedural mechanism for fair adjudication while still preserving essential discernment and discretion. It constituted a partial ordering of the judicial process, allowing for autonomy within authority, and freedom within constraint, safeguarding its integrity by guiding adjudicatory proceedings without dictating their outcome.
13 The Rechtsstaat idea played a crucial role in nineteenth and early twentieth-century German and Austrian law and political science as a uniquely Germanic reconciliation (deutscher Sonderweg) of Roman and German jurisprudence throughout the heated debate (Kodifikationsstreit) and d rafting of the German Civil Code (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch or BGB) from 1874 to 1896, culminating in its promulgation in 1900. After World War One, the Rechtsstaatsprinzip was incorporated as A rticle 1 of the 1920 Austrian Constitution and together with the Legalitätsprinizip of Article 18 establishedthe constitutional rule of law. It continued to remain dominant until the end of the Weimar Republic in 1933, when the National Socialist regime dismantled all that the Rechts staat stood for. Nazi jurists during the Third Reich considered the Führerstaat of the national sozialistischer Staat, the most lawless regime the world has ever known, to be the true epitome of the Teutonic Rechtsstaat, the lawful state. They called it der deutsche Rechtsstaat Adolf Hitlers, in contrast to the anarchical Nichtrechtsstaat of the Bolsheviks and the ineffectual Gesetzesstaat of the democratic West. Following World War Two, the provisions of the 1920 Austrian Constitution, revised in 1929, were incorporated into the 1945 Constitution currently in effect. The Rechts staatsprinzip remains the foundation of Austrian jurisprudence today (Jones [1940] 1970, 282–84; Böckenförde, 1991, 59–60; Foster 2003, 110).
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Classical Theory of Justice The concept of equitable versus equal justice, allocating to each his proportional due rather than the identical same, has a venerable jurisprudential pedigree dating back to the Greeks (Jones 1956, Vlastos 1984). Plato and Aristotle both describe these two contrasting forms of justice, the first entailing a proportional or “geometric” equality, i.e., an equality of ratios, and the second an absolute or “arithmetic” equality, i.e., an equality of numbers. According to Plato’s Laws, an equal disposition of benefits and rewards, or of detriments and punishments, is unjust because it “assign[s] a kind of equality indiscriminately to equals and unequal alike” (Plato 1961b. VIII 558c, 786): [A]ll settlers should further enter our colony [Athens] with equal means of every kind. But since this cannot be, but one arrival will bring more property and another less, [reference] may be had to a man’s due qualifications—not only of personal and ancestral virtue or of bodily strength and comeliness, but of enjoyment of means or lack of them, [with] honors and offices apportioned fairly by a rule of proportional, though unequal, distribution. (Plato 1961a. V 744b–c, 1328)
Absolute equality for Plato is therefore not only unjust, but not even true equality: Indeed, equal treatment of the unequal ends in inequality when not qualified by due proportion . . . [T]he true and best equality [in contrast] assigns more to the greater and less to the lesser, adapting its gifts to the real character of either. . . . In particular, it deals proportionately with either party, even awarding a greater share to those of greater worth, and to their opposites in trained goodness such share as is fit, [based on the] justice we explained to be a true and real equality, meted out to various unequals. (Plato 1961a. V 757b–c, 1337)
Aristotle affirms Plato’s position, addressing the paradoxical dichotomy between justice and equality in Nicomachean Ethics, where A and B represent two opposing parties and C and D their just yet unequal shares: The just, then, is a species of the proportionate . . . proportion is equality of ratios, and involves four terms . . . . The just, too, involves at least four terms, and the ratio between one pair is the same as that between the other pair; for there is a similar distinction between the persons and between the things. As the term A, then, is to B, so will C be to D [A:B = C:D] and therefore, alternando, as A is to C, B will be to D [A:C = B:D]. Therefore also the whole is in the same ratio to the whole [A+C = B+D] . . . . The conjunction, then, of [person] A with [share] C and of [person] B with [share] D is what is just, [for] it is in geometrical proportion [that] the whole is to the whole as either part is to the corresponding part. This, then, is what the
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just is—the proportional; the unjust is what violates the proportion. (Aristotle 1941, 1131a30–1131b23, 1006–7; see also Weinrib 1995, 62)
Aristotle compares the fairness and desirability of proportional justice versus absolute equality. In the case of equality: one term becomes too great, the other too small, as indeed happens in practice; for the man who acts unjustly has too much, and the man who is unjustly treated too little, of what is good. In the case of evil, the reverse is true; for the lesser evil is reckoned a good in comparison with the greater evil, since the lesser evil is rather to be chosen than the greater, and what is worthy of choice is good, and what is worthier of choice a greater good. (1006–7)
Platonic and Aristotelian justice thus does not treat all people absolutely equal, but rather only proportionately so, by dividing “the distributive honor or reward into parts which are to one another as are the merits of persons who are to participate” (1007n. 4). Tacitus describes a similar approach to governance based on selective merit among the ancient Germanic tribes. The early Teutons in the Germania made collective decisions on the basis of individual merit. People were “listened to in order of age, birth, glory in war, or eloquence, with the prestige which belongs to their counsel, rather than with any prescriptive right to command” (Tacitus [98 C. E.] 1996, 149). Thomas Aquinas advocates this same formulation of justice as equity rather than equality in his Summa Theologica based upon a calibrated calculation of conditions and circumstances.14 [L]aw is framed as a rule or measure of human acts. Now, a measure ought to be homogeneous with that which it measures, as is said in Meta. ix. For different things are measured by different measures. Hence, laws also should be imposed on men according to their condition (leges imponantur hominibus secundum eorum conditionem). (Aquinas [1265–73] 1485; 1993, Q 96.2.3, 315–16, Q 90.1.1, 119, 70)
German Theory of Justice Rudolf von Jhering (1818–92) was the foremost German legal scholar in Schenker’s time, and the most important jurist in German legal history second only to Savigny. 14 Schenker no doubt was familiar with Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, a seminal medieval treatise affirming Aristotle’s classical approach to justice. Schenker took two courses in canon law (Kirchen recht) with Joseph Zhismann, a leading canon law expert, during his third and fourth semesters of law school in 1885–86. At that time and for the preceding millennium, the jus canonicus or ecclesiastical law of the church paralleling the jus civile or secular law of the state, played an important role in legal scholarship, practice, and education, especially in Catholic Austria.
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Even of greater influence than Georg Jellinek, Jhering followed this jurisprudential heritage by distinguishing between these two species of equality: arithmetic or absolute equality versus geometric or proportionate equality. The first kind, he notes, is “an external, absolute, arithmetical equality which would assign every participant exactly the same share as the next one,” while the second is “an internal, relative, geometricalequality which measures every share in accordance with each one’s contribution” (Jhering [1877–83] 1999, 277). It is only the second species, proportional equality, which is truly just according to Jhering, since it alone takes into consideration the particular differences and circumstances which inevitably exist between those who are being judged. Outcomes are quantitatively unequal, yet qualitatively equal insofar as they are in equal proportion to their relative context. Punishing the perpetrator of a light offense and a serious offense in the same way, he points out, would be equal but unjust. Since justice requires the punishment to fit the crime, each case must be treated differently according to one’s due. Similarly, the law for children, he notes, is not the same as the law for adults, because children and adults must be judged differently. Absolute equality for Jhering is simply a roughshod, mechanical equality disregarding individual identity and differentiation, an arbitrary equalization for the sake of uniformity: From the former we arrive at an external, mechanical equality, which measures all by the same standard — small and great, rich and poor, children and adults, wise and foolish; and which, by treating the unequal as equal, in reality brings about the greatestinequality . . . . Under such conditions society cannot exist. It would mean practically to deny the differences which actually are and must be within it. . . . . The law is unjust which imposes the same burdens upon the poor as upon the rich; for then it ignores the difference in the ability to perform. The law is unjust which inflicts the same punishment for a light offense as for a heavy one; for then it disregards the proportion between crime and punishment. (Jhering [1877–83] 1999, 278–79)
Only proportional equality, not absolute equality, may truly be fair and just, says J hering, because true justice: can only be relative, viz., commensurateness between capacity to perform and the act imposed; between the problem and the means for its resolution; between merit and reward; between guilt and punishment, [in each case] measured according to the particularity of the conditions. This is the basis of the concept of true justice. (278–79)
Hegel draws a similar distinction between equality and justice in his Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (Elements of the Philosophy of Right). “It is false to maintain that
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justice requires [equality]” he says. “Particularity, in fact, is the very condition to which inequality is appropriate and in which equality would be contrary to right (Hegel [1821] 1991, 81).
Modern Theory of Justice The influential British legal philosopher H. L. A. Hart endorses this conception of proportional justice in The Concept of Law, one of the most influential book on jurisprudence in the twentieth century, affirming that “treat like cases alike, and different cases differently is a central element in the idea of justice” (Hart 1961, 155). The indiscriminate imposition of equality ignores the second of these basic precepts. Indeed, for Hart, treating inequalities equally is itself unequal, and therefore unjust. Inequality is not unjust unless it is arbitrary, and arbitrary equality is unjust. According to the distinguished American legal philosopher, John Rawls, author of Justice as Fairness, absolute equality not only undermines justice, but individuality and diversity as well (Rawls 2001). Contemporary legal scholars sometimes label these two opposing concepts of justice as distributive versus corrective justice (Nozick 1977; Weinrib 1995). Distributive justice is predicated upon a geometric equality of ratios, whereas corrective justice is predicated upon an arithmetic equality of quantities. Policy justifications for distributive benefits are generally characterized as to each according to his due consistent with Justinian’s timeless formulation. Affirmative action in this sense, i.e., disparate treatment based upon relative need or inferior status, but also conversely upon relative merit or superior status, is a form of distributive justice because in both instances it yields unequal allocations or outcomes based upon circumstantial considerations. Taxes in a just system, for example, are levied unequally based upon relative income and ability to pay. A law imposing taxes equally without regard to other factors would be unjust.15 Distributive justice divides a benefit or burden in accordance with some criterion . . . . The criterion determines the parties’ comparative merit for a particular d istribution. The greater a particular party’s merit under the criterion of distribution, the larger the party’s share in the thing being distributed. Thus distributive justice corresponds to a mathematical operation in which a series of equal ratios align comparative shares with comparative merit. (Weinrib 1995, 62)
Contemporary justice is often portrayed a form of procedural fair play. Instead of specifying a particular outcome, justice as fairness insures that whatever outcome emerges is just. The unequal outcome of a baseball game, for example, is accepted as 15 Marx’s dictum “to each according to his needs” echoes Justinian’s maxim “to give each his due.”
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fair by everyone, win or lose, because it is based upon the equal and consistent application of a fixed set of rules (Rawls, 2001). Distributive or proportional justice entailing unequal allocation of benefits or burdens based on established criteria and procedures is applicable to the fair and rational operation of any dynamic system of interaction, social, athletic — or musical. Justice is often symbolized by Lady Justice, the blindfolded Roman goddess Justitia balancing the scales of justice in one hand and wielding a sword in the other. The familiar scales of justice do not balance one claim against another, requiring equality between them. They balance the evidence against the verdict within a single case. Justice doesn’t require two verdicts to be equal, but that the verdict in each case be commensurate with the evidence in that case. Only if the evidence itself is the same in both cases must the decisions be equal. Justice is not rendered blindly to the evidence, but blindly to the adjudicatory process itself. It requires all verdicts to be equal not in terms of their weight, but in terms of their weighing. Litigants do not leave court with the same outcome, but with a fair outcome for each. Equal justice is tailored justice, not one size fits all. In that sense, justice demands inequality, for equality would be unjust. All those accused are entitled to equal justice, but not equal sentences. No one would expect different crimes to deserve the same punishment. The perpetrator of a lesser offense receives a hierarchically lesser punishment; a thief does not get a life sentence. Yet in each case, Justice blindly wields her sword to implement justice equally and objectively, regardless of the outcome. Judgments may seem stern or callous, and even hierarchically unequal due to hierarchically unequal circumstances, yet Justitia requires they nonetheless must all equally be implemented.
Tonality and Cognition Although equality may be politically correct, it is musically and cognitively incorrect. The notes in a tonal composition inherently possess different structural weights because of the hierarchical nature of tonality and the nature of cognition itself. “The structure of tonal music is,” as Carl Schachter accurately observes, “to a considerable extent and in various ways, hierarchical” (Schachter 2001, 13). To analyze tonality properly, Schenker asserts, one must “perceive the weight of the scale-steps (Stufen gewichte) [and] the special effect of these steps on the particular diminutions” (Schenker [1925] 1994, 23). Beyond Schenker, the hierarchical tree-structure of tonal grammar and syntax itself dictates cognitive processing and differentiation on multiple levels of abstraction (Koelsch 2013; Lerdahl and Jackendoff [1983] 1996). Our brains are hardwired to perceive tonal music hierarchically. We can’t help it; we do not and cannot hear notes
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equally, each possessing the identical weight or value, even if we wanted to or wish we could, for whatever reason, ideological or aesthetic. Given the intrinsic nature of tonality and cognition, some tonal citizens are by definition more important musically than others, though each is valued in playing its own particular role. If Schenker treats notes unequally, we do too. The hierarchical nature of tonal music is precisely what differentiates it from atonal music, where all twelve chromatic tones are indeed equal. Schoenberg’s notes are released from the a priori tonal matrix to relate freely only to one another. WhereasSchenker’s notes, like Jellinek’s votes, are “weighed, not counted” according to e valuative principles of aesthetic justice, Schoenberg’s emancipation proclamation casting off the systemic inequalities of tonality constitutes “one note, one vote” (Babbitt 2003, 467; see also Adorno 1992).16
Schenkerian Theory as a System of Musical Adjudication Schenkerian theory is a calibrated and proportional system of musical adjudication designed to recognize and reconcile structural differences inherent in the tonal system itself. It prioritizes procedural equality over substantive equality through a gradation of structural values based on tonal function, weight, and merit. It celebrates musical distinction and diversity rather than artificially glossing them over in the name of uniformity, what Schenker called “monotonous égalité ” (Schenker [1921–23] 2004–05, I: 130), that for some may be more politically palatable, but is nonetheless less accurate. Schenkerian analysis honors each note’s uniqueness rather than ignoring it, recognizing what makes it different, whereas treating all notes as musical equals would be to flatten them out and eviscerate their individuality. Music would become all foreground, a mere surface, without the richness of hierarchical structure or cognitive depth. Schenkerian theory transposes the template of nineteenth-century German jurisprudence to a musical state governed by the operation of law. The Ursatz configuration is the musical manifestation of a constitutional monarchy where hierarchical 16 “The question,” asked Milton Babbitt, “was whether ‘twelve-tone music’ was or was not ‘democratic.’ The initial vote was ‘Yes,’ for wasn’t each note in the ‘row’ created free and equal? One note, one vote!” (Babbitt 2003, 467; see also Adorno 1992). I am grateful to William Rothstein for bringing Babbitt’s metaphor to my attention. From an opposing Schenkerian perspective, however, in the transition from free atonality to serialism in the aftermath of World War I, when Schenker himself lost faith in the future of tonality, Schoenberg swung convulsively from one Jellinekian pole to the other. Derailed from the special German Sonderweg of moderation between order and freedom, he lunged from the chaos of chromaticism into the shackles of serialism. Without tonality g uiding though not dictating musical interactions, the Scylla of free atonality led to the Charybdis of dodecaphonic totalization. Jellinek’s pendulum swung from one extreme to the other.
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levels of tonal administration (Schichten) emanate progressively from a constitutional Grundgesetz or Grundnorm at the highest level of jurisdiction. This parallels the administrative hierarchy (Stufenbau) of the multi-tiered, federalized bureaucracy of the Austrian state (See Kelsen [1934] 1989). Freedom is balanced with order by permitting prolongational creativity in unrestricted areas between normative lawful constraints. The unequal distribution of powers and functions in the Schenkerian state mirrors the unequal distribution of powers and functions in the Austrian state. Political weight translates into musical weight based upon consistently applied adjudicatory procedures and evidentiary criteria of aesthetic justice. As in the heterogeneous Habsburg society itself, the acoustical citizens of Schenker’s heterogeneous musical society are not faceless interchangeable units, but distinct individuals possessing unique personalities and characteristics. They follow the tendency of human groups to stratify and exercise varying degrees of structural influence reflecting their relative weight and authority. It is thus “a contradiction,” says Schenker, “to maintain that all scale tones between C and c have real independence or, to use a current but certainly musically unsuitable expression, ‘equal rights’ (Gleichberechtigung)” (Schenker [1935] 1979, 13n. 3). It would likewise “be erroneous,” he contends, “to read all degrees in the foreground without discriminating between them, as though they were all of equal significance and origin” (111–12). In fact, he says, “not all triads have the same weight and importance” (Schenker [1906] 1954, 152). Actually, quoting Justinian’s dictum jus suum cuique tribuere, Schenker says Beethoven “metes out to each individual tone the measure of justice to which it is due,” instead of deafly treating them all the same (Schenker [1920] 1972, 59, 72; [1912] 1992, 60). Like his law professors, Schenker rejected the arithmetic equality of musical citizens and eschewed the democracy of numbers. Equality among notes in music, as among individuals in society — especially in the late nineteenth-century AustroHungarian mix — was empirically false for Schenker just as it was for Jellinek. It undermined musical justice just as it did social justice based on individual merit and relative circumstances: It is time that Germans freed themselves from the illusion that all men and all nations are equal. This is no truer than to say that all ants, mushrooms, rocks, etc. are equal. Were they all equal, then the state would surely need to revoke equality and assign unequal tasks and duties to individuals. (Schenker [1921–23] 2004–05, I: 17)
Jellinek’s notion of “minority consciousness” (Minoritätsgefühl) dictating that sociopolitical influence should be “weighed” on the selective basis of proportion (Verhältnis) is a central tenet of Schenker’s analytic practice. The musical significance of Schenker’s notes, paralleling Jellinek’s votes, is determined by their respective rating or individual
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evaluation (Bewertung) of their comparative structural weight (Gewicht) in accordance with an a priori and consistently applied adjudicatory schema. The greater the merit, the greater the weight. Yet although notes do not receive the same hierarchical allocation, they are nonetheless all treated the same in the allocation process itself. Relative to the prevailing criteria of structural analysis, equally applied to all, the desert-based entitlement of each note is nonetheless proportionately equal. Just as individual voices in Jellinek’s legal process are weighed not counted (gewogen nicht gezählt), each tone in Schenker’s analytic process is selectively weighed on the scales of musical justice. The significance of each note is not determined by counting up the number of its occurrences, its register, duration, or amplitude, but only by its just deserts according to uniform standards of structural value. Schenker’s system is just in that it is scrupulously tailored and proportional. His distributive criteria are independent of any particular composition or composer, and applicable to all notes such that the relative allocation of structural priority is procedurally fair, supported by evidence, contextualized, and just. Following in the celebrated footsteps of Justinian, Plato, Aristotle, Tacitus, Aquinas, Hegel, Jhering, and Jellinek, endorsed by modern authorities such as Hart, Rawls, Nozick, and Weinrib, Schenker affirms justice over equality, selectivity over sameness, valuation over equation, individuality over uniformity, and minority rights against the sway of conformity. Schenker ultimately achieves an equilibrium between structural order and prolongational freedom in the same way Jellinek did. Jellinek’s “intervening spaces” of autonomy (Zwischenräume) “between those rules with which the state surrounds the individual” (Jellinek [1895] 1901, 1979, 97) are equivalent to Schenker’s inter vallic spaces (Tonräume) in the interstices of the porous musical matrix defined by the nodal points (Knotenpunkte) and Stufen (scale-steps) of the Ursatz.17 These circumscribed gaps within the legal and musical edifice serve as intermittent buffer zones or moderating pockets of localized freedom in between the compulsory yet self-limiting mandates of social and musical order. They represent “the free sphere (Freiheitssphäre) of the individual emancipated from the bonds of the state” (gesellschaftsfreie Sphäre des Individuums), says Jellinek, demarking an antecedent and legally safeguarded condition of autonomy (Rechtsschutz) within the lawful boundaries (Grenzen) of a larger collective order (Jellinek [1895] 1901, 1979, 197; [1898] 1912, 34).18 17 Schenker’s concept of nodal points (Knotenpunkten) has received insufficient scholarly attention. Alan Dodson delivered an enlightening paper entitled “Schenker’s Nodal Points and the ‘Higher Requirement of Tonality’” at the 2020 Joint Annual Meeting of the Society for Music Theory and American Musicological Society, Virtual Conference. 18 The spatialization of law and music through Jellinek’s intervening spaces (Zwischenräume) and Schenker’s tonal spaces (Tonräume) evokes the etymology of the English and German words for law as something physically “laid” or “set” down to provide structural order. “Law” comes from lag, lagh, or lah, meaning something that “lays” or is “laid” down like a “log” to demark undivided areas
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Justice and Judaism Schenker’s prioritization of justice is characteristically Jewish. According to Schachter, he “saw a direct connection between his theory of the Ursatz and the Jewish religion [and] perceived in music the image of a world charged with the grandeur of God” (Schachter 2001, 6, 11). Schenker’s writing is laced with Judaic imagery and references. He sometimes explicitly identifies the laws of music with the law of God (Rothstein 1990, 195), and depicts himself as a musical Moses, a tonal lawgiver (musikalischer Gesetzgeber) delivering the “monotheistic doctrine of art from a Mount Sinai” (Schenker [1935] 1979, 5; Snarrenberg 1997, 154). He characterizes the Ursatz as a monotheistic doctrine of music, thereby equating it with Judaism, and states, “in the cosmos the single cause is God; in music the only cause is the Ursatz” (Federhofer 1985, 320; Ringer 1993, 20). The musical authority of the Ursatz as the supreme law for Schenker ultimately derives not just from its sovereignty, but its sanctity. As a secular but believing Jew, Schenker was knowledgeable about his tradition, trained in its teachings, assimilative yet proud of his Jewish identity and heritage, and to some extent even observant. It would be erroneous to conclude that he was not religious, reverent, or uninfluenced by Jewish education and theology, as well as Yiddish culture, simply because he was secular. Even secular Jews (Maskilim) retained a Yiddishe Kop or Jewish mentality and were far more familiar with their religion than secular American Jews today (Alpern 2014). Justice in particular is a central concern in Judaism, “a transcendent demand, freighted with divine concern” (Heschel 1962, 198). The repetition of the word “justice” in Deuteronomy 16:20 — “Justice, justice shall you pursue” — “brings out with the greatest possible emphasis the supreme duty of even-handed justice to all. [I]n the eyes of the Prophets, justice was a Divine, irresistible force” (Hertz 1975, 820). The Hebrew name of God as Elohim itself denotes the divine attribute of justice, and “the very idea of ‘law’ [in] the Jewish legal system is founded upon justice” (Elon 1994, I: 175).19 The dialectic between justice and equality at the heart of Schenkerian analysis parallels the dialectic between the Old and New Testaments, sacred pillars of Western civilization with the secular pillars of Greece and Rome. An “eye for an eye and of land. Gesetz similarly means that which is laid or “set” down (from the German verb setzen), again like a boundary marker providing definition, regularity, and stability (Wieacker [1952] 1967; 2003). 19 Jellinek’s jurisprudence has theological affinities as well, since “God’s law in society was not natural equality, but natural inequality” (Allen 1946, 16). The son of a prominent rabbi and Kabbalah scholar, Adolf Jellinek, founder of the Leopoldstädter Temple in Vienna, Jellinek was barred from professorship at Vienna as a Jew but eventually achieved greater success at Heidelberg (Paz 2013, 137–56).
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a tooth for a tooth” in Leviticus 24:20 expresses the same principle of just deserts in Justinian’s maxim, “each according to his due.” The taker of an eye loses an eye, the taker of a tooth loses a tooth. They don’t lose the same thing. The equality is with themselves, not with each other. Their only similarity is they each get what they deserve. The God of Schenker’s Old Testament is a god of justice whereas the God of the New Testament is a god of equality. The divine hand is the unforgiving act of judgment, not the nonjudgmental act of forgiving. The supreme agenda is about distinguishing and differentiating, separation not inclusion, restrictive particularity rather than universal equality. Its method is law, not love; its moral is accountability not acquiescence. One doesn’t turn the other cheek more compassionately, but glares more critically, and more talmudically. Schenkerian analysis in this broadly biblical sense is significantly Jewish.
Schenkerian Justice Schenker learned during a formative and impressionable period of his life that true justice is calibrated rather than uniform, grounded in equity rather than equality, judiciously weighing and allocating to each his just deserts. The classic precept of justitia set forth on the very first page of Justinian’s Institutes that Schenker studied in his youth, jus suum cuique tribuere — to give each his due — is a fitting jurisprudential corollary to his own chosen motto, “always the same, but not in the same way” (semper idem se non eodem modo). Differences cases are judged “always the same,” i.e., pursuant to the same established procedures and evaluative criteria, but “not in the same way,” i.e., not with the same outcome. This is unequal, but it is just. For Schenker, it is not the virtue of equality, but the virtue of justice that is the fundamental principle of music. His practice of musical justice implements the theory of social justice he discovered in law school, transferring it from a society of people to a society of tones. Thus, Schenker proclaims, “one may transform the proud words of the Emperor, justitia regnorum fundamentum [justice is the fundamental principle of imperial rule] into the equally proud words of the artist, justitia artis fundamentum [justice is the fundamental principle of art]” (Schenker [1921–23] 2004–05, II: 136). Schenkerian analysis, like a legal trial, is a process of deliberation, discernment, discrimination, and decision governed by a systematic body of evidentiary rules and historical precedents. Schenkerian practitioners are musical judges, adjudicators of aesthetic justice. They must honor the equal integrity and autonomy of individual notes as tonal citizens on the musical surface, but necessarily recognize their disparate and unequal structural positions, functions, and weights beneath that surface in the music as a whole. They must grapple with the tension between equality and justice.
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Schenkerian analysis imposes the difficult task, like that facing a judge, of making hard choices (Auslese) between competing claims and opposing outcomes, which can only be meaningful where the parties are not equal and the choice therefore doesn’t matter. In music as in law, choice matters. From a higher perspective, beyond sound and score, Schenker beckons us to confront the uneasy tension between justice and equality not just in music, but in society as well, among other dichotomies such as authority versus autonomy, coherence versus creativity, and order versus freedom. We pursue their reconciliation, an ideal coincidentia oppositorum or conjunction of incompatibles (Jung [1955–56] 1989, 380), so we might bring them more closely together, side by side, both this and that, and through them perhaps even ourselves, on some higher level of transcendence. This for Schenker is the analyst’s noblest calling, and music’s supreme mission. 20 A lthough he demotes the ideal of equality in this critical process as ultimately inconsistent with the discriminating differences and subtle asymmetries of tonality, honoring the i rreducible plurality of things instead, whatever else has and might be said about Schenker the man, at least Schenker the theorist, the most praised and scorned musical thinker of our time, this musikalischer Rechtswissenschaftler, embraced and applied the lofty ideal of justice for all—justitia omnibus—in accordance with an ancient and venerable tradition of law.
Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. (1963) 1992. “Vers une musique informelle.” In Quasi una Fantasia. Edited and translated by Rodney Livingstone, 269–322. Paris: Gallimard. London: Verso. Aichner, Christof and Brigitte Mazohl. 2017. The Thun-Hohenstein University Reforms, 1849–1860. Vienna: Böhlau. Allen, Carleton. 1946. Law in the Making. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Alpern, Wayne. 1999a. “Music Theory as a Mode of Law: The Case of Heinrich Schenker, Esq.” Cardozo Law Review 20, no. 5–6: 1459–511.
_______. 1999b. “Schenkerian Jurisprudence.” Paper delivered at the Third Inter national Schenkerian Symposium. Mannes College of Music, New York City. _______. 2013. “The Triad of the True, The Good, and the Beautiful: Schenker’s Moralization of Music and His Legal Studies with Robert Zimmermann and
20 The most valuable non-musical secondary sources contributing to this study, and to the elucidation of Schenker’s education in jurisprudence as a humanistic and intellectual tradition are Wieacker ([1952] 1967; 2003), Kelley (1990), and Berman (1983).
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Georg Jellinek.” In Essays from the Fourth International Schenker Symposium, Vol. 2, edited by L. Poundie Burstein et al., 7–48. Hildescheim: Georg Olms Verlag. _______. 2014. “Schenkerian Yiddishkeit.” Paper delivered at the Joint Annual Meeting of the Society for Music Theory and American Musicological Society, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Anon. (undated) 1975. The Pentateuch and Haftorahs. Edited by J. H. Hertz. London: Soncino Press. Aquinas, Thomas. (1485)1993. Summa Theologica. Excerpts edited and translated by R. J. Henle in The Treatise on Law. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame. Aristotle. (335–323 B. C. E.) 1941. Ethica Nicomachea. Translated by W. D. Ross as Nicomachean Ethics. In The Basic Works of Aristotle, edited by Richard McKeon, 927–1112. New York: Random House. Babbitt, Milton. (1999) 2003. “My Vienna Triangle at Washington Square, Revisited and Dilated.” In The Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt, edited by Stephen Peles et al., 466–87. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bent, Ian, et al., ed. Schenker Documents Online [SDO]: The Correspondence, Diaries, and Lessonbooks of Heinrich Schenker. https://schenkerdocumentsonline.org/index. html. Berman, Harold J. 1983. Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bernstorff, Jochen von. 2012. “Georg Jellinek and the Origins of Liberal Consti tutionalism in International Law.” Goettingen Journal of International Law 4, no. 3: 659–75. Böckenförde, Ernst-Wolfgang. 1991. “Entstehung und Wandel des Rechtsstaats begriffs” in Staat, Verfassung, Demokratie: Studien zur Verfassungstheorie und zum Verfassungsrecht. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Edited and translated by J. A. Underwood as “The Origin and Development of the Concept of the Rechtsstaat” in State, Society, and Liberty: Studies in Political Theory and Constitutional Law. New York: Berg. Burke, Edmund. (1790) 2009. Reflections on the Revolution in France. London: D odsley. Edited by Leslie Mitchell. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chiang, Yu-Ring. 1996. “Heinrich Schenkers Wiener Gedenkstätten: Gedanken zu seinem sechzigsten Todesjahr.” Mitteilungen der Österreichischen Gesellschaft für Musikwissenschaft 30: 41–51.
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Constant, Benjamin. (1815) 2001. Principes de politique applicables à tous les gouvernements représentatifs (Political Principles Applicable to all Representative Governments). Paris: Eymery. Berlin: De Gruyter. Dodson, Alan. 2020. “Schenker’s Nodal Points and the ‘Higher Requirement of Tonality.’” Paper delivered at the Joint Annual Meeting of the Society for Music Theory and American Musicological Society, Virtual Conference. Duguit, Léon. (1901–03) 1968. “L’ État: Le Droit Objectif et al Loi Positive.” In Études de Droit Public. Paris: Fontemoing. Edited and translated by Mrs. Franklin W. Scott and Joseph Chamberlain as “Theory of Objective Law Anterior to the State” in Modern French Legal Philosophy, edited by John H. Wigmore, et al., 238–344. New York: Augustus Kelley, Rothman Reprint. Elon, Menachem. 1994. “Legal Reasoning (Sevarah).” In Jewish Law: History, Sources, Principles, Vol. 2, Ch. 24, 987–1014. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society. Ewell, Philip. 2019. “Music Theory’s White Racial Frame.” Plenary Paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Music Theory, Columbus, Ohio. _______. 2020. “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame.” Music Theory Online 26, no. 2. Exner, Adolf. 1891. Grundriss zu Vorlesungen über Geschichte und Institutionen des Römischen Rechts (Plan for Lectures on the History and Institutions of Roman Law). Vienna: Manz. Federhofer, Hellmut. 1985. Heinrich Schenker: Nach Tagebüchen und Briefen in der Oswald Jonas Memorial Collection, University of California, Riverside. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag. Foster, Nigel. 2003. Austrian Legal System and Laws. London: Cavendish Publishing. Freund, Ernest. 1891–92. “The Study of Law in Germany.” The Counsellor 1: 131–35. Hart, H. L. A. 1961. The Concept of Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hazen, Charles Downer. (1910) 2018. Europe Since 1815. New York: Henry Holt. Reprinted London: Forgotten Books. Hegel, G. W. F. (1821) 1991. Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Berlin: Nicolai. Edited by Allen Wood. Translated by H. B. Nisbet as Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hermann, L., ed. 1884. Taschenbuch des Gesammten Studienwesens an den Hochschulen zu Wien: Die rechts- und staatswissenschaftliche oder jurisdische Facultät (Pocket Book of
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_______. [Ulpian]. (533) 1913; 2002. The Institutes of Justinian. Edited and translated by J. B. Moyle. London: Oxford University Press. Reprinted Union: Lawbook Exchange. Kelley, Donald R. 1984. “Gaius Noster: Substructures of Western Social Thought.” In History, Law, and the Human Sciences: Medieval and Renaissance Perspectives, 619–48. London: Variorum. _______. 1990. The Human Measure: Social Thought in the Western Legal Tradition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Kelly, Duncan. 2004. “Revisiting the Rights of Man: Georg Jellinek on Rights and the State.” Law and History Review 22, no. 3: 493–529. Kelsen, Hans. (1934) 1989. Reine Rechtslehre. Leipzig: Deuticke. Edited and translated by Max Knight as Pure Theory of Law. Gloucester: Peter Smith. Kersten, Jens. 2000. Georg Jellinek und die klassische Staatslehre (Georg Jellinek and the Classical Theory of the State). Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck. Kobler, Franz. 1970. “The Contribution of Austrian Jews to Jurisprudence.” In The Jews of Austria: Essays on their Life, History, and Destruction, edited by Josef Fraenkel, 25–40. London: Vallentine. Koelsch, Stefan. 2013. Brain and Music. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. Kriegel, Blandine. (1979) 1995. L’Etat et les esclaves. Paris: Calmann-Levy. Edited and translated by Marc LePain and Jeffrey Cohen as The State and the Rule of Law. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Laffitte, Jean-Paul. (1887) 2018. Le paradoxe de l’egalité (The Paradox of Equality). Paris: Hachette. London: Forgotten Books. Lentze, Hans. 1966. “Austrian Law Schools and Legal History.” In Essays in Legal History in Honor of Felix Frankfurter, edited by Morris Forkosch, 159–74. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Lerdahl, Fred and Jackendoff, Ray. (1983) 1996. A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, with a new Preface. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Lewinski, Karl von. 1908. “The Education of The German Lawyer.” Proceedings of the Section of Legal Education. Report of the 31st Annual Meeting of the American Bar Association 33: 814–27. Locke, John. (1690) 1988. Second Treatise of Government, an Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil-Government. London: Churchill. Two Treatises of Government. Edited by Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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MacDonell, John and Edward Manson. (1914) 1997. Great Jurists of the World. Boston: Little Brown. Reprinted Union: Lawbook Exchange. Metternich, Klemens von. (1880) 1970. The Memoirs of Prince Metternich 1773–1815. Edited by Prince Richard Metternich. Translated by Mrs. Alexander Napier. London: Richard Bentley & Son. Reprinted New York: Howard Fertig. Mill, John Stuart. (1859) 1985. On Liberty. London: Penguin Books. Morgan, Robert. 2014. Becoming Heinrich Schenker: Music Theory and Ideology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Neumann, Franz. 1986. The Rule of Law: Political Theory and the Legal System in Modern Society. Leamington Spa: Berg. Nozick, Robert. 1977. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books. Paz, Reut Yael. 2013. A Gateway between a Distant God and a Cruel World: The Contribution of Jewish German-Speaking Scholars to International Law. Leiden: Brill-Nijhoff. Plato. (399–387 B. C. E.) 1961a. Laws. Translated by A. E. Taylor in The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton: Princeton University Press. _______. (399–387 B. C. E.) 1961b. Republic. Translated by A. E. Taylor in The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pollock, Frederick. (1918) 1969. Introduction to The Progress of Continental Law in the Nineteenth Century. Edited by John H. Wigmore, et al. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. Reprinted New York: Augustus Kelley, Rothman Reprint. Pound, Roscoe. (1959) 1970. Jurisprudence, 5 vols. St. Paul: West Publishing Co. Reprinted Union: Lawbook Exchange. Radin, Max. 1937. “Legal Profession and Legal Education.” In Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences IX, edited by Edwin R. A. Seligman, 334–40. New York: Macmillan. Rawls, John. 2001. Justice as Fairness. Edited by Erin Kelly. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Raynolds, Edward. 1902. “Legal Education in Germany.” Yale Law Journal 12, no. 1: 31–34. Reimann, Mathias. 1993. “A Career in Itself: The German Professoriate as a Model for American Academia.” In The Reception of Continental Ideas in the Common Law
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World, 1820–1920, edited by Mathias Reimann, 166–202. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Reiter-Zatloukal, Ilse. (1997) 2006. Juristische Fakultät und Rechtsstudium an der Universität Wien, 1365–1997. Ein Überblick. V. 1848–1918 (Legal Faculty and Legal Education at the University of Vienna, 1365–1997, An Overview, 1848–1918). Vienna: University of Vienna. _______. 2007. JuristInnenausbildung an der Wiener Universität: Ein historischer Überblick (Legal Education at the University of Vienna, A Historical Overview). Vienna: University of Vienna. Ringer, Alexander. 1993. Arnold Schoenberg: The Composer as Jew. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robespierre, Maximilien. (1775) 2007. La terreur et la vertu. Paris. Edited and translated by John Howe as Robespierre: Virtue and Terror. London: Verso. _______. (1790) 1950. Discours sur l’organisation des gardes nationales (On the Organization of the National Guard). In Oeuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, Tome VI. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Rothgeb, John. 2001. “Book Review of Federhofer’s Schenker.” Journal of Music Theory 45, no. 1: 151–62. Rothstein, William. 1990. “The Americanization of Heinrich Schenker.” In Schenker Studies, edited by Hedi Siegel, 193–203. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. (1755) 1985. Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes. Amsterdam: Marc Michel Rey. Edited and translated by Maurice Cranston as A Discourse on Inequality. London: Penguin. Savigny, Friedrich Carl von. (1814) 1929. Geschichte des römischen Rechts im Mittelalter, 7 vols. Heidelberg: Mohr. Vol. 1. Edited and translated by Elias Cathcart as The History of Roman Law During the Middle Ages. Edinburgh: Black. _______. (1840–49) 1867; 1993. System des heutigen römischen Rechts, 8 vols. (Berlin: Veit). Vol. 1 edited and translated by William Holloway as System of Modern Roman Law. Madras: J. Higgenbotham. Reprinted Westport: Hyperion Press. Schachter, Carl. 2001. “Elephants, Crocodiles, and Beethoven: Schenker’s Politics and the Pedagogy of Schenkerian Analysis.” Theory and Practice 26: 1–19. Schenker, Heinrich. (1889) 1985; 2001. Handwritten Letter from Heinrich Schenker to Max Kalbeck. Excerpt in Hellmut Federhofer, Heinrich Schenker: Nach Tagebüchern und Briefen in der Oswald Jonas Memorial Collection, University of California,
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Riverside, 8–9. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag. Translated by John Rothgeb in “Book Review of Federhofer’s Schenker.” Journal of Music Theory 45, no. 1: 151–62.
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Wieacker, Franz. 1952; 1967; 2003. Privaterechtsgeschichte der Neuzeit, unter besonderer Berucksichtigung der deutschen Entwicklung. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Edited and translated by Tony Weir as A History of Private Law in Europe: With Particular Reference to Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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13 Race, Nation, and Jewish Identity in the Thought of Heinrich Schenker BA R RY W IENER
It would be better to present the Teutons with my monotheistic music teaching as the Old Testament was presented to the whole world: after 2,000 years the successors to the Teutons may disavow Schenker as they disavow Rabbi Jesus,1 but meanwhile the teaching has made its effect and spread throughout the world, and ultimately the defiance of the Teutons will only be ridiculous. Heinrich Schenker (SDO December 21, 1933, letter to Jonas)
When the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933, Heinrich Schenker’s world disintegrated. He reacted with a characteristic combination of despair and defiance. Schenker depicted himself as the prophet of a musical religion analogous to his own Jewish beliefs, condemned the German people, and predicted the inevitable triumph of his ideas: a triumph that would parallel the worldwide spread of the Christianity that the Nazis had disavowed. Schenker simultaneously portrayed Jesus Christ as a Jew—“Rabbi Jesus”—employing the discourse of German-Jewish scholars who had reclaimed Jesus’s Jewish identity in order to defend Judaism (Heschel 1998; Erlewine 2014). Schenker’s words clearly demonstrate that his Jewish identity was deeply entangled with his musical theories. Yet, in recent decades, many scholars have focused instead on Schenker’s vociferous support for German nationalism and concomitant vilification of Germany’s political rivals, comparing his views to Nazi ideology (Mann 1949; Schachter 2001; Deisinger 2010; Hust 2010; Ewell 2020a). The debate about
Thanks to Leon Botstein, Martin Eybl, and Carol Baron for their helpful comments on previous versions of this article. 1 Schenker refers to the German Christian movement, which sought to dejudaize the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany. See Heschel (2008) and Steigmann-Gall (2003).
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Schenker’s political views has now been renewed within a new context: the quest to create an “anti-racist” music theory. At this turning point in the history of the discipline, a thorough review of the subject of Schenker’s politics is timely. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Germans employed both their cultural achievements and the discourse of race as weapons to justify national unification and state building. At the same time, they disparaged Jews, both physically and spiritually, as defective racial “others” who threatened the German nation. In the multiethnic Dual Monarchy, just as in Germany, antisemitism became an increasingly serious problem during the final decades of the nineteenth century. In response, Heinrich Schenker— a Jew from provincial Galicia who settled in Vienna as a teenager—embraced German nationalism and German culture. Like many Jews, Schenker attempted to justify his participation in German cultural life by asserting a commonality between German and Jewish identities. In Schenker’s lifetime, the language of race was ubiquitous. Because it was common parlance, it was employed by all thinkers along a Left-Right spectrum, not only those who were explicit proponents of racist ideas and politics in our present-day understanding of these terms. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Europeans often used the ideology of race in a manner not easily transferable to the present-day American context, synthesizing biological, cultural, and political concepts. Elazar Barkan has noted the sweeping nature of the concept of race in Europe at that time: “The term ‘race’ had a far wider meaning than at present, being used to refer to any geographical, religious, class-based or color-based grouping. Although sanctioned by science, its scientific usage was multiple, ambiguous and at times selfcontradictory” (Barkan 1992, 2). “The driving force behind racial differentiation was nationalism. . . . The increasing number of racial categories around this time reflected an eagerness to use primordial affinities as modes of justification for nationalism sanctioned by the growing repute of biology and evolution theory” (Barkan 1992, 17). When the pseudo-science of race developed in the nineteenth century, Jews became stigmatized in ways that augmented their degraded status in Christian theology. Jewish writers quickly responded to their now “scientifically” determined denigration. In his novel Coningsby (1845), Benjamin Disraeli, the son of an English convert to Christianity, was one of the first to counter the doctrine of the supremacy of the Germanic peoples2 and the inferiority of the Jews: “At this moment, in spite of centuries, of tens of centuries, of degradation, the Jewish mind exercises a vast influence on the 2 “The discourse of Anglo-Saxonism was widely diffused in the first half of the nineteenth century. The author of The English and Their Origins, writing in 1866, noted that there were few educated Englishmen who had not been taught as children that ‘the English nation is a nation of almost pure Teutonic blood,’ that its constitution, customs, wealth, and empire were the necessary result of ‘the arrival, in three vessels, of certain German warriors’ centuries earlier” (Endelman 1996, 30).
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affairs of Europe. I speak not of their laws, which you still obey; of their literature, with which your minds are saturated; but of the living Hebrew intellect” (Disraeli 1845, 200–201). A generation later, anthropologist Joseph Jacobs (1854–1916) became a central figure in the effort to shape a Jewish scientific discourse that challenged theories of Jewish racial degeneracy (Efron 1994, 59). While Jacobs was crafting his response to scientific antisemitism, W. E. B. Du Bois performed a similar service for black Americans as a sociologist, historian, and polemicist. David Levering Lewis reminds us that “the vocabulary of Du Bois’s generation resounded with the racialisms of de Gobineau or Drumont, Galton, Carlyle, or Bishop Stubbs” (Lewis 2009, 108). In his 1897 speech, “The Conservation of Races,” Du Bois asserted that “the history of the world is the history, not of individuals, but of groups, not of nations, but of races, and he who ignores or seeks to override the race idea in human history ignores and overrides the central thought of all history” (Du Bois 1986, 817; Lewis 2009, 121–23). Du Bois was born four months before Heinrich Schenker. Under the circumstances, we might expect that Schenker would have used the language of scientific racism to validate his Jewish identity, in a manner comparable to the strategy employed by Du Bois. Instead, Schenker created a narrative designed to articulate his place as a Jew in German culture. After the Nazi accession to power in Germany, in despair as his world was destroyed, Schenker proclaimed the spiritual and intellectual superiority of the Jews to the degenerate Germans, and asserted that the world of culture was a meritocracy open to all, regardless of race, religion, or national origin.3
Schenker, Race, and Culture In the early decades of the twentieth century, Jean Sibelius and Ernest Bloch both benefited from the manner in which they were pigeonholed by use of the ubiquitous terminology of race. For example, the American critic Paul Rosenfeld wrote, “For all his personal accomplishment, his cultural position, [Sibelius] is still the Finnish peasant, preserving intact within himself the racial inheritance” (Rosenfeld 1920, 247). As Sibelius’s fame grew, his supposedly quintessential musical expression of the “Nordic spirit” was, paradoxically, often linked with the work of Jewish composer Ernest Bloch (1880–1959). In 1917, an unsigned New York Times article maintained, “[I]n his music Mr. Bloch avows that he wishes to give expression to the Jewish racial spirit, as well as to his own individuality” (NYT, 1917). Sibelius’s great champion Olin Downes employed similar language. In 1931, he described Bartók’s String Quartet No. 4 as “a distillation from racial sources. It is strong, passionate, stark in its strength, stripped to the bone” (Downes 1931). Despite his use of racialized language, however, Downes 3 “Music is accessible to all races and creeds alike” (Schenker 1979, xxiii).
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proved himself to be an ideological liberal. He vigorously and repeatedly denounced the cultural policies of the Nazis after they took power in Germany in March 1933 (Downes 1933). By employing the language of race, Schenker adhered to the conventions of his day. Yet this did not reflect a belief in the strict doctrines of biological racism, as employed by racial theorists in Europe and America during the first third of the twentieth century. Schenker firmly rejected the concept of inherent biological differences among human population groups—a concept that would have been threatening to him as a Viennese Jew, continuously forced to negotiate the challenges posed by racial anti semitism both personally and professionally—and rarely used the rhetoric of racial science. In Schenker Documents Online, a search for Schenker’s use of the term “race” yields fifty hits, three of which have an entirely different meaning: “race course” (SDO November [17?] 1911), “in a race” (SDO July 10, 1931), “ideas race ahead” (SDO August 30, 1914). Sixteen hits are for the “human race,” while on six occasions, Schenker refers to his own group, the Jews, once as an “alien race.” There are four references to the “Slavic race,” three to the “German race,” one to the “depraved [English] race,” and one to the “Anglo-Saxon race.” Schenker rarely used the terms “black” and “white” as modifiers for races. In SDO, a search for “black” yields one hundred forty hits, but many of these are descriptions by the editors. There are many instances in the editorial descriptions and Schenker’s writings of such terms as “black ink,” “black-edged [writing paper],” “black material,” and “black market.” A search for “black coffee” yields sixty-two hits, more than one third of the total. There are no references to the “black race,” and only one reference to the “white race” in thousands of pages of documents (SDO August 20, 1914). In the “literature” supplement to his edition of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata, Op. 111 (1916), Schenker acknowledged the biological definition of race, only to turn it against the so-called “superior races,” castigating the “white Frenchman” and “white Englishman” (Schenker 2015, 21). Schenker’s specification that he derived his terminology from the German General Staff clearly indicates his intention to stigmatize “whites” in his damnation of both nations, not the people of color who served in the British and French armies. Leon Botstein has suggested that Schenker responded to antisemitism by “question[ing] the idea of race as a category of explanation” (Botstein 2002, 244). Schenker generally employed the term “race,” not as a biological category, but as a synonym for “nation.” In addition, he connected the concept of “nation” to language and culture, rather than ethnicity or religion. Schenker’s ideology recalls the theories of Völkerpsychologie developed in the second half of the nineteenth century by assimilated German-Jewish scholars Heymann Steinthal (1823–99) and Moritz Lazarus (1824–1903) (Bunzl 2003; Benes 2008; Berek 2020). Steinthal and Lazarus
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emphasized the centrality of language in the definition of the national, and stressed the importance of Geist and Bildung (the German concept of self-cultivation) as the basis for participation in German culture (Bunzl 2003, 76). According to Shulamit Volkov, Lazarus “first formulated what later became the principles of Jewish existence in Germany” (Volkov 2006, 257). Matti Bunzl similarly suggests that Völkerpsychologie reflected the struggle for German-Jewish emancipation (Bunzl 2003, 51; Kalmar 2002). While Steinthal and Lazarus separated the biological and cultural in their scientific paradigm, they measured the languages and cultures of other peoples by parochially German standards.4 They left the door open for cultural improvement through Bildung, however (Bunzl 2003, 85). The ideas of Steinthal and Lazarus were eventually rejected by German academics in favor of a völkisch ideology (Bunzl 2003, 80; Weingart 1989) but strongly influenced Franz Boas, a German Jew who settled in the United States and had a major influence on the development of a politically progressive American anthropology in the first half of the twentieth century (Bunzl 2003, 81–85; Kalmar 1987; Blackhawk and Wilner 2018). Schenker described German as “the one true language,” the “most exalted of all languages” (Schenker 2004b, 11). Carl Schorske identified the doctrine of German cultural superiority to which Schenker adhered as characteristic of Austrian liberalism (see Judson 1996), the fruit of a progressive ideology to create political cohesion among the many nationalities within the Habsburg Empire: “Those of German nationality would serve as tutor and teacher to bring up the subject peoples, rather than keep them ignorant bondsmen as the feudals had done. Thus nationality itself would ultimately serve as a principle of popular cohesion in a multinational state” (Schorske 1980, 117; see also Brodbeck 2014, 154–55). Schenker’s cultural politics had a specifically Jewish resonance within the Viennese context. The Jews of the Empire perceived German language and culture as a portal to modern society, while fearing the hostility of the Empire’s other nationalities. As a people without a territory of their own, they depended on the imperial government to safeguard their civil and political rights. In “The Mission of German Genius,” Schenker defined his praise of the Germans as contingent on their appreciation for their language and culture, rather than on their supposed biological superiority: It is time that Germans freed themselves from the illusion that all men and all nations are equal. . . . Let Germans be alive to the superior quality of their human propagating soil [Menschenhumus]; let them appreciate that if they were all to 4 “To be sure, Völkerpsychologie was committed to pluralism; but it was hardly relativistic. . . . While each Volk needed to be understood on its own terms, some people were simply more accomplished than others. Lazarus and Steinthal, of course, were particularly interested in those Volksgeister that had accomplished the most, since other peoples would be able to learn from them” (Bunzl 2003, 84).
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become self-betrayers, traitors . . . if all German literature were extinguished and replaced by foreign, and all Germans succumbed to total loss of self-respect, and altogether forsook their language . . . on the day that these things came to pass, Germany as the nation of Luther, Leibniz, Goethe, Schiller, Kant, of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, would set like the sun, would sink like a spiritual Himalayan mountain range into eternity, irretrievable and unattainable by the other nations! (Schenker 2004b, 17) (italics added)
Schenker presented a similar argument in The Masterwork in Music 3: “Another German poet of our day wrote: ‘We ceased to be Germans, the moment we stopped experiencing our language as a life-force’—that goes for German music, too. May it be granted to the German nation . . . to protect its two languages, the language of words and the language of tones” (Schenker 2014, 9). Recent critiques of Schenker have seized on his use of the term Menschenhumus to link him to Nazi racial ideology (Ewell 2020a, [4.4.5]; see also Cook 2007, 141), recalling Botstein’s complaint about German musicologists who make “no distinction . . . between Nazi racism and the extreme ‘Teutonic’ nationalism of Jewish ‘better Germans’” (Holtmeier 2004, 249; see also Botstein 2002). In fact, the word was employed by German writers with liberal as well as conservative views. For example, Jewish novelist Jakob Wassermann (1873–1934) used it to describe a prerequisite for liberalization of social attitudes and legal restrictions regarding marriage and sexuality (Leydecker 2006, 94). Austrian musicologist Martin Eybl has denied that Schenker’s use of the word was motivated by biological racism. Rather, Eybl has focused on Schenker’s belief in German cultural superiority, citing his inclusion of the Pole Chopin among the great German masters: “At no point does Schenker attempt to explain the superiority of Germanness [Deutschtum] genetically. The fact that the German people can be defined by language and culture forms the open and nebulous prerequisite for Schenker’s German nationalism, which allows, for example, ‘Friedrich’ Chopin to be included in the ‘series of great German masters.’”5 Schenker praised Chopin’s music for its Germanic qualities: “[E]ven though they [Chopin’s works] have not arisen directly from Germanness, they are certainly directly indebted to it” (Schenker 2004b, 20).6 In the second draft of a long 1931 letter to Furtwängler, Schenker discussed the concept of Humus in terms that show it to be, in his usage, a function of education, rather than the expression of a racist ideology: 5 “An keiner Stelle unternimmt Schenker den Versuch, die Vorzüge des Deutschtums genetisch zu erklären. Daß das deutsche Volk durch Sprache und Kultur definiert werden könne, bildet die offene wie nebulöse Voraussetzung für Schenkers Deutschnationalismus, die es etwa erlaubt, auch ‘Friedrich’ Chopin in die ‘Reihe der großen deutschen Meister’ aufzunehmen” (Eybl 1995, 25–26). 6 Schenker was not entirely wrong. Chopin’s teacher Elsner based his pedagogy on German models. See Goldberg (2008, 117–18).
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So, for example, nothing would be simpler than to begin as early as the lowest school classes with ear-training [Hören-Lehren] for third-, fourth-, and octave linear progressions in folksong, chorale melodies, in small exercises, in [Jan Ladislav] Dussek, [Muzio] Clementi, and others. This would be equivalent to the method whereby language is taught in schools on the basis of grammatical concepts and relationships. Thousands of children, who are otherwise lost to music, could be won over anew to it in this way and form the artistic humus [Kunst-Humus] that you seek. (SDO November 11–16, 1931, letter to Furtwängler) (italics added)
Schenker’s arguments are comparable to those of art critic Albert Dresdner, who had suggested in 1919 that fundamental artistic skills be inculcated through the educational system (Steinweis 1993, 335; Attfield 2017, 30–31). Proposals of this kind, including Walter Gropius’s program for the Bauhaus (Attfield 2017, 31), expressed a natural impulse to make plans for national renewal after World War I, not beholden to the political Left or Right. On November 18, 1914, a few months after the outbreak of World War I, Schenker composed a diary entry in which he employed “race” and “nation” as synonyms, while defining national identity in purely linguistic terms. Although he belittled Germany’s enemies, he simultaneously pleaded for the acknowledgement of universal human values that transcend any particularism: The behavior of nations large and small in today’s world demonstrates that what we call nation, stock, or race is classified more according to mothers and wet-nurses [in other words, those responsible for the transmission of language], and not according to the best fathers and sons. . . . What should mother tongue signify when real questions of humanity stand in the foreground? . . . Is not the inner character of a person more decisive than the mother tongue? When asking whether a person carries within him a significant meaning in his life, mustn’t the question of his mother tongue be silenced? And yet, just the most external factor has become the banner of warring stocks, nations, and races. Thus, people arrive at the grotesque result that they are not waging war for important assets, but almost only to prove that one mother tongue is better and more beautiful than another. (SDO November 18, 1914) (italics added)7
Schenker the Jew Given the obstacles to Jewish professional advancement in both Germany and the Dual Monarchy, most of Schenker’s German and Austrian Jewish contemporaries in 7 For a discussion of music and language politics in late nineteenth-century Vienna, see Brodbeck (2014).
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the music world converted to Christianity, including Mahler, Schoenberg,8 Klemperer, Bruno Walter, Guido Adler (Botstein 2009, 163), Ernst Kurth, Egon Wellesz, and Schenker’s friend Otto Erich Deutsch.9 In sharp contrast, Schenker’s Jewishness was the strongest component of his personal identity. He distinguished his ethnic and religious Jewish self-definition from his cultural and political allegiances as a German-speaking citizen of the Dual Monarchy, and, after its collapse, the Austrian Republic. Schenker obtained the rudiments of a Jewish education at the Brzeżany (Galicia, now Ukraine) Gymnasium before he came to Vienna to pursue his university studies (Rothfarb 2018, 28–32). As a Jewish resident of Vienna, he paid annual dues to the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde, Wien, the organization that governed the affairs of the Viennese Jewish community. Schenker noted his discharge of this duty in numerous diary entries between 1919 and 1934 (SDO Israelitische Kultusgemeinde). At times, Schenker proudly asserted his Jewishness. In a 1918 diary entry, he argued for Judaism’s superiority over Christianity: “[Hermann] Bahr in the Neues Wiener Journal has praised the spiritual direction the Jews have been going in; he is more right than he imagines: it is actually about the effect of the Holy Scriptures, which makes the entire [Jewish] race spiritually minded, as if it had remained even now Orthodox in its entirety; this effect is stronger than the entire ideology of Christianity—as reality shows” (SDO February 10, 1918). In 1925, Schenker wrote aggressively, “There are no grounds for someone to demean oneself for being a Jew, so long as the account between [the Jews and] the peoples of the West and East is not properly settled” (SDO November 1, 1925). In 1928, Schenker echoed Disraeli’s defensive remarks about Jewish distinction, proclaiming, “[T]he Jews are an aristocratic race, head for head kings and queens” (SDO January 30, 1928). Unlike German-Jewish assimilationists (Wistrich 1989, 82–83; Aschheim 1982), the Galician-born Schenker expressed a kinship with the Eastern European Jews from whom he stemmed. In 1932, he enthusiastically described Sholem Asch’s Von den Vätern, a portrait of traditional Jewish shtetl life, as “documentary” evidence that could serve as a source for the battle against antisemitism (Reiter 2015, 291–94): “Sholem Asch’s Von den Vätern—the first novella, ‘Der Herr Salomon,’ I read with enchantment; it is poetry and document at the same time. The Jews need the documentary evidence [to defend themselves] against the world; no other people does!” (SDO January 21, 1932). Given his conservative politics, Schenker roundly criticized Jewish political liberals in both Germany and Austria after World War I. He accused many German8 In 1933, however, Schoenberg publicly affirmed his adherence to Judaism. See Neher (1990, 13– 14). 9 Otto Erich Deutsch (1883–1967), Austrian musicologist of Jewish origin. See Silverman (2012, 123).
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Jewish intellectuals of treacherously embracing a spurious internationalism and supporting the punitive conditions that the Allies imposed on Germany and Austria in the postwar peace treaties. In particular, during the early 1920s, Schenker complained repeatedly about the hostility of his publisher, Emil Hertzka of Universal Edition, to the harsh political polemics in Der Tonwille, due to Hertzka’s “pacifist, cosmopolitan” convictions (SDO undated [June 17, 1922], postcard to Moriz Violin; SDO June 4, 1922; Schenker 2004a, v–viii). In 1923, Schenker summarized the contents of a letter from pianist Moriz Violin, a friend who shared his views: “From Floriz [Violin]: in light of the Jewish activities, he admits to being a Jewish enemy of the Jews; correctly notes: The Jews top the list as Germany’s enemies” (SDO June 4, 1923; Ewell 2020b). In 1925, Schenker explicitly articulated this idea: “I repeat that, alongside the German people, the Jewish people—not, of course, the urban intellectuals [die städtischen Intellektuellen], who have no place here—still remain outstanding in every respect” (SDO November 1, 1925) (italics added).10 Like his remarks about Sholem Asch, Schenker’s comments about German Jews underline his simultaneous pride and defensiveness about his Jewishness. Schenker’s diary entries and correspondence document his anxieties about his stigmatization, both personal and legal, as a member of the “Jewish race.” For example, in 1921, the Austrian government chose to define the terms of the Treaty of St. Germain, the peace treaty between Austria and the Allies, in such a way as to exclude Jews from Austrian citizenship, reclassifying the term “race” as a biological rather than cultural/national category. Following foreign pressure, an April 1922 court ruling negated this interpretation (Pauley 1992, 86–88). In March 1923, Schenker visited the district government office to deliver his census form. Afterwards, relieved, he wrote in his diary, “The female civil servant [die Beamtin] does not ask about race” (SDO March 9, 1923). In an August 1927 letter to Violin, Schenker responded to the Viennese riots on July 1511 with a prescient warning that the Jews were doomed: “The events in Vienna have shocked me. Who knows how things will turn out as a result. In any event, they signify one step closer to the abyss. The Germans are sinking quickly, I refer to the Germans in general—in less than ten years one will be able to read the fate of the Jews on the brow of every German, just as on the brow of every Jew” (SDO August 5, 1927, letter to Violin). When the Nazis took power in Germany, Schenker increasingly focused on his Jewish identity. For example, on June 30, 1933, he wrote to his student Felix Salzer, “God in his infinite wisdom has called upon a Jew to expound the art of music, who 10 On Jews and the fraught concept of cosmopolitanism in post-World War I Germany and Austria, see Gelbin and Gilman (2017). 11 In the July Revolt of 1927, the Palace of Justice in Vienna was set on fire. Eighty-nine protesters and five policemen were killed, and over a thousand people were injured. See Botz (2016).
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will thus remain first and last the true praeceptor Germanorum” (SDO June 30, 1933, letter to Salzer). In addition, Schenker often conflated his Jewishness with his musical theories. For example, in his diary entry of May 21, 1933, he wrote, “[Oswald] Jonas . . . He is shocked by my profession of Judaism. Parallels: in the cosmos, the one origin in God—in music, the one origin in the Ursatz,—thus monotheistic thinking there and here. Everything else with respect to world and music a heathen adherence to the foreground” (SDO May 21, 1933). In a 1934 letter to Jonas, Schenker expanded on these ideas: “There was a time when the peoples learned from the Jews: to contemplate and write about God; why should the Jews not conversely learn music from the other peoples and propagate it through the ages, since the other peoples have probably repudiated it for good? The Jew would join to his religious monotheism the belief in one musical Ur-sache!” Schenker prefaced this comment with the thought, “Fundamentally our project is one of present-day Jewry as race and religious community” (SDO August 2, 1934, letter to Jonas; Cook, 237). In November 1933, Schenker noted in his diary that he had completed a letter to his brother-in-law Arnold Weil about “Schenker the Jew” (SDO November 10, 1933). This letter, evidently designed as a major statement about Schenker’s identity and beliefs, has been lost. In his diary entry of June 29, 1934, Schenker noted that he had read the biblical book of Esther, which recounts the survival of the Persian-Jewish community when it was marked for extermination: “I read the Book of Esther aloud: what a connection of motives! Mordecai is the founder of the festival of Purim; the religion has taken possession of this foundation, which continues to live in it for the good of the writing of history, of poetry, of the continuity of the Jews” (SDO June 29, 1934). Since Purim took place on February 28 in 1934, Schenker’s interest reflected his concern about Jewish survival, rather than religious considerations. Although Schenker was not a Zionist, he followed the development of the Z ionist project with sympathy. In 1924, he wrote in his diary, “Lengthy conversation with the young [Fritz] Saphir; he tells about his [family] piano business in Palestine, about the musical and concert life there; he hopes for an upswing, but sees clearly how the English are inciting the Arabs and the Jews against one other in order to do business” (SDO October 3, 1924). In 1926, Schenker took a walk and remarked in his diary, “A vast throng of people, which would be sufficient for the settlement of Palestine!” (SDO May 2, 1926). In 1929, he wrote, ironically and inaccurately, “A piece by Ernest Bloch—apparently a Zionist who, however, writes bad music” (SDO March 17, 1929). During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Schenker noted in his diary the plans of friends and students to settle in Palestine (SDO April 30, 1928; SDO March 31, 1930; SDO December 11, 1933; SDO April 2, 1934). In 1930, he complained about the British betrayal of the Zionists after World War I:
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An article by Churchill in the Neue freie Presse frankly admits the betrayal of the Zionists by the English: in the great hardship of 1917, they used the influence and the money of the Zionists and for this reason promised them their national homeland. He expressly emphasizes that in all the Allied countries, the Jews stood on their side, namely on the side of the English. . . . Who will compensate the poor Jews for their sacrifice in money and blood, which the villainous English made use of, their intentions apparently having been preconceived? (SDO November 15, 1930)
Schenker, World War I, and the Jews Schenker’s linkage of Jews and Germans, and his pro-German advocacy during World War I, parallel sentiments expressed by the eminent Viennese-Jewish writer Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931). During the war, Schnitzler described himself as “a Jew, an Austrian, and a German.”12 He defended the Dual Monarchy’s German ally, writing of “the great Germany . . . of which I, of Jewish descent, an Austrian, have always felt a part, with equal rights and equal responsibility” (Beller 1989, 163). While Schnitzler paired Jews and Germans as kindred peoples, he simultaneously admitted to the Jews’ rejection by the Germans (Beller 1989, 163). Schnitzler’s formulation demonstrates the fundamental anxiety that underlay the Jewish desire to acculturate to German society, and inevitably colored Jewish responses to German culture such as Schenker’s musical project. Schenker’s attitudes also recall the writings of an older contemporary, the German-Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen (1842–1918). Cohen began his career as a protégé of Heymann Steinthal (Myers 2001, 202). Like Schnitzler and Schenker, he energetically championed the German cause during World War I (Wiedebach 2012, 104), while expressing a belief in the “deep affinity between Germanism [Deutschtum] and Judaism [ Judentum]” (Cohen 1915, 13; Beiser 2018, 302). Schenker’s vociferous support for the Central Powers throughout World War I was normative for the Jews of Austria-Hungary (Rozenblit 2001, 4; Pauley 1992, 61–62). During the war, over three hundred thousand Jews served in the Austro-Hungarian army (Pauley 1992, 63; Rozenblit 2001, 82). Jewish loyalty to the multinational state was based on the perception that it was the guarantor of Jewish rights against antisemitic attacks from national movements throughout the Dual Monarchy (Rozenblit 2001, 119–21; Gellner 1998, 11, quoted in Brodbeck 2014, 1). Schenker’s hatred of Russia was also a typical sentiment among Habsburg Jews, galvanized both by statesponsored persecution of Jews in the Russian Empire and Russian mistreatment of Jews in occupied areas during World War I (Rozenblit 2001, 45–54). During the war, 12 Arthur Schnitzler, letter to Elizabeth Steinrück, December 22, 1914, quoted in Loentz (2003, 102).
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hundreds of thousands of Jews fled from the Russian invaders (Rozenblit 2001, 66; McCagg Jr. 1989, 203; Sanborn 2005, 307). In response, Jewish newspapers in the Dual Monarchy employed vitriolic language to attack Russia, for example, “the barbarism of our truly cannibalistic enemy” (Rozenblit 2001, 48). In 1913, Schenker had mentioned the Beilis ritual murder trial (see Levin 2014) with horror in his diary, noting that the Russian government supported the slanderous accusations, which had the potential to generate large-scale pogroms: “In Kiev a ritual murder trial is taking place in which the law is, from the outset, quite obviously supporting the ritual murder [charge]! The mere fact of the matter . . . is an indictment of the Russian nation and at the same time a guilty verdict against it!” (SDO October 9, 1913). In 1914, Schenker contemptuously recalled an antisemitic remark by Konstantin Pobedonostsev (1827–1907), the eminent Russian jurist and statesman associated with the May Laws of 1882 (Klier 2011), which led to the emigration of millions of Jews from the Russian Empire: “The forms that envy can take between individuals and nations is shown by the possibility that . . . merely the presence of the superior gives occasion for the inferior to get rid of the former by any means, even by criminal means. In this connection I am reminded of a remark by Pobedonostsev, who said that the Russian peasant has a right to feel aggrieved by the Russian Jew because he himself drinks hard liquor, whereas the Jew does not! In this very point lies the tragedy of humanity: that it needs people who do not drink hard liquor and yet, against its own interests, it would prefer to attack those whom it needs. In its fury and blindness, it does not see that equalization toward its own level can only bring harm, which however it does not itself want” (SDO August 21, 1914).13 In the “literature” supplement to his edition of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata, Op. 111, Schenker scornfully singled out pogroms as Russia’s contribution to culture (Schenker 2015, 21). In September 1915, Schenker portrayed the suffering of Jews in the Eastern European war zone with great sympathy in his diary: “Galician Jews . . . Anyone who lives, like them, from hand to mouth, under the most difficult conditions—hated, despised, and ostracized, persecuted, burdened usually with a large family, and underestimated in what they do best (as, for example, in their education)—will find no disposition to assimilate in their shattered being. They are like soldiers on the battlefield: weighed down with cares for their life, and in a constant state of warfare” (SDO September 29, 1915). A year later, in 1916, Schenker’s student Hans Weisse, now a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian Army, was stationed in Brzeżany, the town in which Schenker had attended Gymnasium during the early 1880s. He sent Schenker “The Old Jew,” a poem 13 In his diary entry of July 26, 1914, on the eve of World War I, Schenker wrote, “No doubt, the schnapps boutique Russia lies behind this” (SDO July 26, 1914). Schenker’s bitter remark in August 1914 about Pobedonostsev’s antisemitism sheds light on his comment in July, only a month earlier.
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of his own composition that illustrates the suffering of the Jewish population in the war. Weisse emphasizes the pervasive terror in which the Jews lived: You saw more, Jew, than your eyes Could absorb from the little window; There you sit, pensive, leaning back That hoary head. . . . Sometimes your eye now leaves the book, Meets a stranger’s glance with uncommon trust, – Yet it cannot hold out; no matter who it is, The glance is lowered, as if shrinking away, You’re afraid of strangers.
(SDO July 3, 1916, letter from Weisse to Schenker) (italics added)
Despite his anger, Schenker abruptly discarded his prejudices against Russia when he confronted the reality of war. In a diary entry of September 6, 1914, he bemoaned the inhumanity of man, condemned the concept of war, and showed intense sympathy for the Russians whom he reviled in the abstract: In the courtyard one could also see Russian captives (including also wounded ones). . . . The sudden and unexpected transformation in the condition of a young, healthy soldier into one of physical helplessness—which, however, was brought about not by a methodically progressive illness, so to speak, but rather by a sudden humanly hostile act—this contradiction made our sympathy resonate all the more intensely. . . . Since humanity has been conscious of itself, it has stared at the puzzle of this shameful and degrading fratricide. . . . Millions fight against millions, without knowing why or for what purpose! . . . Out of this irrationality in the conduct of political affairs, in the execution of the war mandate by the army, etc., a certain something shines along neural pathways that we now ignore, and it seems to tell us: . . . No human being should be the cause of the death of another, if things are as they ought to be! (SDO September 6, 1914) (italics added)
Probably eighty percent of Schenker’s rants against Germany’s enemies consist of vitriolic denunciations of the English and French. In the preface to their translation of Der Tonwille, Ian Bent and William Drabkin point out that Schenker’s attacks on the French have a long history in German culture (Schenker 2004a, x). Schenker’s antiFrench attitudes may also have been motivated by his long-simmering anger about the Dreyfus Affair. In 1899, he wrote, “At the end of the 19th century, good Catholic Frenchmen are burning the Jew Dreyfus at the stake of perjuries!” (SDO January 15, 1899). In 1912, Schenker again mentioned the Dreyfus Affair in his diary: “Thus, for example, in the Dreyfus Affair, [Émile] Zola did not merely speak the truth in
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[Ferdinand Walsin] Esterházy’s face; rather, a large part of humanity spoke through him [Zola] the blunt truth about his [Esterházy’s] crime” (SDO September 28, 1912). Shortly after World War I began, Schenker returned to the Dreyfus Affair as proof for the French predisposition to deception and treachery: “This involuntary desire for the truth, after the fact, is reminiscent of the Dreyfus Affair; even in those days the French nation made a great fuss over their love for the truth, but of course only after they had defiled themselves with the most dishonorable orgy of perjury” (SDO August 26, 1914) (italics added). Near the end of the war, Schenker once again raised the specter of the Dreyfus Affair to condemn the credibility of the French: “The Emperor protests against Clémenceau[’s] nasty slander; two letters seem to have been forged. Which Esterházy is in on the game this time? If the Emperor were in Paris, France would surely subject him to the fate of Dreyfus” (SDO April 11, 1918; Deisinger 2010, 26–27). Like Schenker’s attacks on Russia, his repeated denunciations of French hypocrisy and his condemnation of the dishonesty of the Allies echoed the language of the Viennese-Jewish press. In the Jüdische Korrespondenz of January 6, 1916, the unsigned lead article, “Humanity, Law and Culture,” proclaimed, The motives that prompted the initiators of the world war to begin it so nefariously are pretty clear. The prehistory of the tremendous struggle has probably not yet been established in detail, but so much is certain, that England’s greed, France’s chauvinism, Russia’s thirst for conquest, Serbia’s megalomania, and Italy’s perfidious betrayal were responsible for the terrible bloodshed. Nevertheless, the buzzwords “humanity, law, and culture” have never been used so much as during this war, and it is precisely the authors of the war who have the effrontery to want to cover their damnable actions with these highest attributes of morality.14
The most inflammatory of Schenker’s writings is his rant against the English and the French in “The Mission of German Genius,” prompted by his rage about the Allies’ demands on Germany and Austria in the post-war peace treaties of Versailles and St. Germain. Schenker condemned the English and the French as worse than savages and cannibals, using language reminiscent of Brahms’s attacks on the French as the “whore 14 “Die Beweggründe, welche die Urheber des Weltkrieges zu ihrem ruchlosen Beginnen veranlaßt haben, sind so ziemlich klar. Die Vorgeschichte des gewaltigen Ringens ist wohl noch nicht in allen Einzelheiten festgestellt, aber so viel ist gewiß, daß Englands Habsucht, Frankreichs Chauvinismus, Rußlands Eroberungsgelüste, Serbiens Größenwahn und Italiens perfider Verrat das schreckliche Blutvergießen verschuldet haben. Nichtsdestoweniger wurde noch nie mit den Schlagworten ‘Menschlichkeit, Recht und Kultur’ so viel herumoperiert, wie während dieses Krieges, und gerade die Urheber desselben besitzen die eiserne Stirne, ihr verdammenswertes Vorgehen mit diesen höchsten Attributen der Moral bemänteln zu wollen.” Jüdische Korrespondenz (1916). For a discussion of German-Jewish enthusiasm for the German war effort in World War I, see Grady (2017).
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of Babylon” (Rev. 19:2) in the manuscript of the Triumphlied (Beller-McKenna 2004, 102–3). He also accused the British of physical repulsiveness and uncleanness. At the conclusion of the passage, Schenker briefly alluded to the occupation of the Rhineland by French colonial troops: (Even savages and cannibals in their wild state are purer and more virtuous than the savages and cannibal hordes of Versailles [the participants in the Paris Peace Conference], who dress themselves as Christians in order to flaunt their Christian principles.) . . . Not only warring governments, kings, presidents, and other spokesmen, but even the peoples themselves have been shamed, disgraced, and, in the words of the Old Testament, “been made to stink.” The Earth reeks with the foetor britannicus, and needs to be freshened—Europe, even more so after the Franco-Senegalese era [Franko-Senegalentum], Europe needs purifying, in body and spirit! (Schenker 2004b, 7) (italics added)
Later in the essay, Schenker reviled the Western powers for redrawing the map of Europe at German and Austrian expense. He expressed the fear that the French would repopulate the Saarland as a prelude to annexing the region from Germany (Hannum 1996, 389ff.): And the League of Nations? The same old thief ’s motto—wait till the booty is in the bag, then let order commence. . . . But is it only a matter of theft? Is it not the League of Nations that also, for example, placed the filthy French in such oafish control of Germany’s Saarland, and permitted in the regions occupied by them the ignominy of their black troops—the advance party of their genitalitis, of the flesh of their flesh, of the cannibal spirit of their spirit—and similarly allowed all the impudent incursions by Czechs, Poles, Yugoslavs, etc.?15 Then, prudently, after fifteen years, by which time of course Italian and French banditry will have eradicated all trace of German character from the stolen territory, the League will step onto the world stage full of moral righteousness and cynically offer those regions the right to self-determination. (Schenker 2004b, 15–16) (italics added)
Is Schenker’s subject the black colonial troops, or the League of Nations and the French? Is his reference to the “cannibal spirit” (“the cannibal spirit of their spirit”) a reference to Africans? In the first passage under consideration, Schenker employs the term “cannibal” to refer unambiguously to the participants in the Paris Peace Confer15 Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia all became independent states after World War I, consisting in whole or in part of territories that had previously belonged to the Dual Monarchy. Romania and Italy were also awarded territories that had previously belonged to the Dual Monarchy. In addition, the post-war peace treaties ordered plebiscites in several formerly German and Austrian border regions to determine their status.
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ence. In another passage in “The Mission of German Genius,” Schenker clearly uses the term “cannibal” to describe the French: Bismarck, genius that he was, knew the “peace-loving” and “chivalrous” French better than did the mediocre ranks of German democrats, social democrats, and other harborers of French ideas. So for him it was a foregone conclusion that the French . . . would try to steal back the German city of Strasbourg, stolen by Louis XIV, for the umpteenth time. . . . The simple-minded French would just love . . . to do away with the Germans once and for all—yes, one actually hears such cannibalistic assertions! (Schenker 2004b, 14) (italics added)
All three passages have the same subject: the thievery of the Allies and the “cannibalistic” desire of the French to steal territory from Germany. In his tirade, Schenker specifies the target of his vivid images of “degradation” and “defile[ment]” as the “Western democratic model,” describing it as the source of a crisis so great that “no ocean of water can wash away the filth” [kein Ozean an Wasser den Schmutz abspült] (Schenker 2004b, 8; Schenker 1921, 7). He includes a reference to Germany’s enemies that fuses his own German and Jewish concerns: the neologism foetor britannicus, which he employs in place of the antisemitic slander foetor judaicus. Schenker’s use of this term demonstrates how he negotiated his identity as both German and Jew. His diary entry of December 1, 1914 shows that his choice of language in “The Mission of German Genius” was not random, but reflected his defense of his Jewish identity. Schenker proudly alludes to the ritual purity regulations codified in Jewish law and practiced universally by the Eastern European Jewish masses from whence he came: In this respect, it occurs to me further: how much more confused are the notions concerning hygiene among the Jews. To be sure, the Jews had many defenders and proponents, and in times of adversity there arose many champions of their cause; and yet, as far as I am aware, none of them found words in defense of the cleanliness of the Jews. . . . The wealthy Jew lives just as hygienically and cleanly as the wealthy Englishman; but what deserves to be emphasized in defense of the Jews is the fact that even the poorest Jews are cleaner than the poorest peasants of German, Polish, or Russian origin. (SDO December 1, 1914)
After the War: The Politics of Nostalgia Schenker’s political fulminations against Germany’s enemies, and his nostalgia for the fallen monarchies of Central Europe after the end of World War I, must be placed in the context of the political and economic chaos that followed the war. It was a crisis
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to which there seemed no solution except tragedy. Eybl argues, provocatively, that Schenker’s polemics were not really directed at the Western allies, but were designed to define his Jewish identity, positioning him as a loyal German against other Jews with cosmopolitan and/or pacifist views (Eybl 2018, [4]). Kevin Korsyn has connected Schenker’s monarchist leanings during the 1920s to his nostalgia for the Habsburgs. While Korsyn attributes a “romantic vision” of monarchy to Schenker (Korsyn 2009, 158), the latter’s motives were entirely practical. In 1913, Schenker had recorded his skepticism about the concept of monarchy, criticizing it within the context of his judgment of Christianity’s inferiority to Judaism: “‘For the king and for the fatherland,’ according to the popular slogan. That the kings come first in the phrase is based on the old inclination of humanity for graven images, which not even Judaism could completely eradicate. . . . Thus also the ‘king’ appeals to the human eye and takes precedence in the phrase over ‘fatherland’ which, like the concept of God, unfortunately remains all too abstract and invisible!” (SDO October 13, 1913). At the beginning of World War I, Schenker expressed doubt about the viability of the Habsburg state: “There isn’t really a state here, but rather a society; there isn’t a people, but an audience with newspapers—or newspapers with an audience; there is no government, only the highest level of society. In short, Austria is a single, huge coffeehouse with an adjoining salon—or a salon with an adjoining coffee-house” (SDO September 11, 1914). After the dissolution of the Dual Monarchy at the war’s end, Schenker described his political allegiances as a strategic choice: “In the absence of such [a national home], the Jew, in order to be able to have an intellectual impact, must adopt a home and function in a culture of his choosing” (SDO November 1, 1925). Schenker’s pragmatic approach to politics contradicts the very meaning of such terms as Vaterland and Heimat, tied by definition to personal sentiment and family history. At the beginning of the war, Schenker articulated his understanding that the concepts of nation and state were historically contingent ideas, not eternal verities, within the context of his hostility to the union of German Austria with Germany. Schenker rejected the association of the concepts of nationality and statehood, which would put his own status as a Jewish citizen of the Dual Monarchy in jeopardy: One must certainly not forget that the national principle was created and promoted around the middle of the previous century as dogma, and moreover as a dogma of state formation. . . . In fact, precisely today one proclaims the higher value of that idea of statehood that at least does not refer exclusively to national unity. (SDO September 3, 1914) (italics added)
Despite his doubts about the Dual Monarchy’s viability, Schenker, like most Habsburg Jews, mourned its demise and feared the new postwar order. In the war’s immediate aftermath, approximately 100,000 Jews were killed in pogroms in Poland and Ukraine
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(Veidlinger 2021). Schenker linked anti-Jewish and anti-German pogroms in Poland to the Monarchy’s collapse, mocking the newly independent Polish nation with the exclamation, “The fruits of self-determination!” (SDO December 31, 1918). He also noted the “plundering of Jewish property in Bohemia” (SDO December 18, 1918). Schenker continued to oppose political union between Germany and German Austria, ridiculing the Austrian Social Democratic Party’s program of Anschluß, union with Germany (Gould 1950). On December 31, 1918, he wrote, “‘The Opponents of the Annexation’—probably the most shameless thing that this organ [Arbeiter- Zeitung] has yet produced. . . . And a thousand times more contemptible the sentence: ‘The annexation to Germany seems to be the great idea that would rescue German Austria [Deutsch-Österreich] from the horrible collapse by which it lost its position as a great power, the creative idea from which a new chapter in the development of the German-Austrian people can proceed’” (SDO December 31, 1918).16 In the 1920s and ‘30s, Schenker objected to the mass politics of Hitler on the one hand and the communists on the other. Nevertheless, in 1922, a despairing Schenker praised Mussolini and declared himself a fascist, while continuing to yearn for the fallen Habsburg monarchy: Our poor Dr. Oppel (Kiel) must yet play for movies for countless hours!! And a thousand such examples. . . . Consequently, I praise the fascists exclusively! Get rid of “class” from the flesh of the nation—no sooner thought than done. And the swindling [Italian] leaders have already fled like cowards . . . and the communist federations have already disbanded, and already the workers have become enthusiastic fascists! . . . The most god-forsaken Habsburger has more cultural value than the entire wage-raising machinery, as the leader himself of the Austrian social democrats called the party. (SDO November 2, 1922, letter to Halm) (italics added)
Five years later, however, Schenker displayed hostility to Italian fascism when he critiqued the radio broadcast of a concert by the Vienna Symphony: “There follows [Ottorino] Respighi’s Pines of Rome—the most successful thing was the imitation of the birds, everything else had even less musical substance [alles übrige war noch weniger Musik]. Italian hands have provided an immense claque of supporters, but no fascism 16 Deisinger presents Schenker as a supporter of the Social Democrats’ advocacy of the merger of German Austria into Germany after World War I: “Only the criticism of the Austrian government in the Arbeiter-Zeitung in the face of the bread shortage and the proposed annexation of GermanAustria to Germany, demanded by many social-democratic politicians, found Schenker’s support.” In support of his thesis, Deisinger cites a clearly sarcastic January 1919 comment by Schenker: “Arbeiter Zeitung: ‘Where are we going?’ ([Friedrich] Austerlitz): for annexation to Germany; ludicrous [translated by Deisinger as ‘droll’] polemic against those who cannot so quickly make the leap from ‘international’ to ‘national,’ etc.” See Deisinger (2010, 21–22, 32).
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will be of any help here [aber da wird kein Fascismus helfen]: Respighi is no musician at all. . . . [Umberto] Urbano sang old [seventeenth- and eighteenth-century] Italian songs [by Giulio Caccini, Pergolesi, and Tommaso Giordani]—and here just about everything was, of course, at the very highest level, and the songs and the singer alike were deservedly accorded bursts of applause, also from the fascist claque” (SDO November 10, 1927; Hewlett 2014, 172; VSO 1927). In 1929, Schenker had a nightmare about the Italian fascists: I dreamed of Mussolini: Without an overcoat, I left a party and headed for the railway and went to Rome! [Arriving] there I go straight to Mussolini. . . . He now asks: “What do you think of the Eternal City?” . . . “I have heard that you place much greater value on the New Rome than the Old, admittedly without being disrespectful.” He: “It must indeed be this way.” I: “As an artist, I know the greater value of the Old.” At this point, Mussolini dismisses me. I want to get to my train, [but] Fascists refuse to give me the [necessary] information—and I have only 50 shillings travel money! Even the [ticket] clerk refuses to give me any information! I wake up!! (SDO May 6, 1929)
During the early 1930s, Schenker supported the Austrian clerical party, the Christian Socials, which opposed both the Austrian communists and the Nazis (Kitchen 1980). Schenker’s political stance was akin to that of most Austrian Jews, who perceived Christian Social Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß as a defender of the Jewish community (Pauley 1992, 260–63). Given the limited political options in Austria, even Karl Kraus accepted Dollfuß as a “lifesaver” [Lebensretter] (Iggers 1967, 10). After Dollfuß was murdered in 1934, Schenker wrote in his diary, “Radio: appreciation of the statesman Dollfuß. . . . Dollfuß towers like a giant above all other statesmen, he brings to mind Moses’s leading of the Jews out of Egypt. An Austrian heroic age!” (SDO September 29, 1934). Because Dollfuß had opposed the Nazis, Arturo Toscanini, Europe’s leading musical antifascist, conducted the Verdi Requiem in his memory at the Vienna State Opera on November 1, 1934.
Schenker’s Postwar Political Philosophy In a general way, Schenker’s sentiments during World War I and the following decade can be connected to what has been dubbed the “conservative revolution” in German culture.17 His viewpoint has both similarities and differences with those of Thomas Mann and Hans Pfitzner, both of whom expressed themselves forcefully during the postwar years against liberal values and in favor of German cultural tradition. Like 17 On the conservative revolution in music, see Attfield (2017).
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the ideologues of the “conservative revolution,” Schenker vociferously attacked the British and the French, with the specifically Jewish twist that he connected French duplicity in World War I and after to the Dreyfus Affair. These ideas would seem to place Schenker securely within the ranks of the conservative revolution in Germany. His cultural values and political convictions nevertheless diverge significantly from those of the post-World War I German or Austrian Right. While conservative cultural critics connected German traditions to German ethnic nationalism as expressions of the spirit of the people [Volksgeist], Schenker denied the validity of the very idea of the “people,” which he associated with mass politics of both the Left and Right: “The people, of which no one knows who it is, where it begins, where it ends [Das Volk, von dem niemand weiß, wer es ist, wo es beginnt, wo es aufhört] . . . This very people, sphinx though it be, is vaunted as the embodiment of the very idea of the state” (Schenker 2004b, 8; Schenker 1921, 7). Unlike the conservatives, Schenker posited that those with exceptional gifts separate themselves from their origins by their creative power, rather than expressing the spirit of the people:18 “I distinguish between Beethoven, who emerged from the folk . . . and the folk that remained folk. . . . The delusion that all of the folk is, like Beethoven, capable of the same characteristics in intellectual and moral regard damages humanity” (Bent et al. 2014, 263, letter to Halm, January 17, 1918).19 He also dismissed the völkisch strain in German musical nationalism (Williamson 2004), ridiculing Wagner’s use of ancient Germanic sagas in his operas: With his instinctive, ingenious cleverness, he [Wagner] seized upon the old sagas, which were supposed to remind the German nation of its glorious days of yore. He hoped and counted on making the fluids of old circulate once again, and so kept continuously in a state of renewal. . . . Should not the German nation thus have replaced the fluids of its youth long, long ago? And what significance should Wotan and his circle have for a highly developed nation? Had not the gods been long forgotten before Wagner’s time? What meaning can the truth of such an artificially freshened-up saga hold for us in our times, apart from a purely aesthetic one? (Schenker 2005a, 98–99)
18 For example, in 1893, the Viennese German racial-nationalist [deutschnational] music critic August Püringer wrote: “The artist is rooted in the life of the people and receives his artistic power from it” (Brodbeck 2014, 246). 19 See also Schenker’s diary entry for November 10, 1906: “It has to be admitted that all the geniuses of art were men from among the ‘people’ [das Volk], but that the artistic understanding of the genius lifted them up ultimately clear out of the ‘people.’. . . But the mere fact that anyone belongs to the ‘people’ bestows no credit whatsoever upon art” (SDO November 10, 1906).
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In “The Mission of German Genius,” Schenker explicitly linked his condemnation of the concept of the “people” to his support for monarchical government: Rather, Germans must realize that there is only one betrayal of nation, namely not knowing what “nation” itself means. They must strive to stamp out the pitiable lie of the “people” [die erbärmliche Lüge vom Volk] completely if they are not to bring about a Dark Ages of even greater suffering (an era characterized precisely by the lie of the “people”) and with it a betrayal of culture. . . . Let them [the Germans] make of their nation a model for all, let them prepare it for the first time ever for monarchy in its pure form. . . . A true monarchy will at long last exist when everyone has, through his king, himself become king. (Schenker 2004b,18; Schenker 1921, 19)
In Der Tonwille 5 (1923), Schenker expressed a deeply pessimistic view of human nature and of history, employing the same violent language (“cannibals” and “animals”) that he used when discussing Germany’s enemies: “I know that for a long time to come people will be cooking and eating one another like cannibals, only each time the feast will be given a different name, more gruesome in peace than in war. . . . Human beings today are still no more than monkeys or tigers, and . . . nations are still as animalistic as they were in the Bronze Age (Schenker 2004a, 224–25). For Schenker, the fatal flaws of human nature led to the inevitable failure of all forms of government: “Every government disappoints, tyrant, oligarch, emperor, president, every government must surely also betray, just as [does] the individual person, it is in the nature of things!” (SDO September 25, 1922, letter to Halm). Schenker’s words echo those of Schopenhauer, one of his intellectual heroes. In November 1918, Schenker had seized on a passage from Schopenhauer’s Parerga und Paralipomena to “prove” the necessity of monarchical government (Deisinger 2010, 22–23). Like Schenker, Schopenhauer denigrates humankind in general: “A state constitution that embodied abstract right would be an excellent thing for natures other than human. But since the great majority are extremely egoistic, unjust, inconsiderate, deceitful, and sometimes even wicked; and since, in addition, they are endowed with very meager intelligence, there arises from this the necessity of a power which is concentrated in one man [and] is itself above all law and right . . . a power to which all submit and which is regarded as something of a higher order, a ruler by the grace of God” (Schopenhauer 1974, 252–53). Schenker’s pessimistic political philosophy served as the context for his condemnation of the mass politics and demagogic leaders of the period after World War I: “We live in an era of absolutism—political, military, or social—an era in which democracy has become profoundly weak, making room for the cult of the individual, of the mercenary soldier, of the successful terrorist, and of the ruthless politician” (Schenker 2004a, 225).
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The preface to Schenker’s 1912 monograph Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony sheds light on the relationship of his political views to his musical values. Schenker accuses both Wagner—the iconically German composer—and the German nation as a whole of cultural perfidy, attacking Wagner for having “dealt musical art its deathblow” by debasing the language of music in order to appeal to the mass public in his music dramas (Schenker 1992, 18–19).20 Schenker gives his criticism of Wagner a specifically political character by comparing Wagnerism to democracy, “the general suffrage.” He then connects the musical crisis to a political one, suggesting that the only salvation— musical or political—lies in “the genius” (Schenker 1992, 19). For Schenker, genius is not a spontaneous and irrational manifestation, as Wagner had asserted (Karnes 2008, 110), but combines intuition and intellection (Karnes 2008, 117)21 along with— crucially—moral accountability. With regard to the genius’s intellectual exertions, Schenker wrote in Der Tonwille 4 (1923), “Genius, in its state of grace and full maturity, requires a whole lifetime of the most unremitting labor for its work” (Schenker 2004a, 161). In his diary, he recorded the maxim, “1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration—that is what genius amounts to” (SDO August 16, 1913). In 1913, Schenker defined the moral aspect of genius when he commented in his diary about the hundredth anniversary of Wagner’s birth. He denied Wagner the quality of genius as much for his moral failings as for his musical shortcomings, writing of Wagner’s “seriously compromised humanity” (SDO May 23, 1913).22 Schenker continued, “For the sake of a Wagner, the world is prepared to conceive a type of genius that lies even beyond the realm of goodness; it would surely not concede the same for a true genius— who of course would need no such thing.” In his Beethoven monograph, Schenker clarifies his polemical point about the genius at the end of the preface, referring to Emperor Maximilian I (1459–1519), considered to be the key figure in the creation of the Habsburg Empire: “We live in a hard time of intellectual robber-baronry; and no Maximilian has yet come into view who would be able to promise peace in the affairs of the intellect” (Schenker 1992, 26).23 20 “It was the theatrical blood in Wagner that determined him to understand all clarity only in terms of the hearing habits of a crowd of a thousand, of whom a more refined ear-culture is not to be expected” (Schenker 1992, 66; cited in Cook 2007, 130). See also Botstein (1985, 883, 1013–14). 21 Karnes asserts that Schenker eventually repudiated the concept of the reflective artist and returned to that of the intuitive genius. I suggest instead that Schenker’s notion of the exceptional artist, the “genius,” did not preclude the idea of a creative synthesis of intuition and reflection. 22 “Wagner’s antisemitism was not an overt cause for the skepticism of Schenker” (Botstein 2009, 174). Schenker, however, freely expressed views about Jews and Judaism in his diary that he would never have considered it possible to discuss in the public sphere. 23 Karnes notes that Guido Adler mentioned Emperor Maximilian in the inaugural preface for Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich (1894): “‘Since the time of Kaiser Maximilian I, the royal Court Chapel in Vienna, which looked after music of all kinds—for chamber and opera—along with the churchly service, has been a sparkling mirror of Western art of the most distinguished
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Almost twenty years later, in 1930, Schenker elaborated on his ideas about political and moral leadership, praising great German artists and scientists for their intervention in the public realm: “Now poets and intellectuals, [Albert] Einstein, [Thomas] Mann, East Prussian writers are practicing politics today, out of necessity!! . . . A people needs leaders who can anticipate things, not those who lag behind—lagging behind is something that the people themselves do” (SDO October 27, 1930).
Schenker, the Genius, and the Germans Schenker’s conception of genius drew on a long tradition in German thought. In his study of Schenker and Schoenberg, Matthew Arndt focused on the treatment of this term by Kant, Goethe, and Schopenhauer, describing the product of genius in terms of “self-realization” (Arndt 2013; Arndt 2018, 24ff.; Korsyn 2009, 171–72). Schenker’s cultural, not genetic, explanation for the creation of genius has now been criticized for precisely the ideas that he denounced (Ewell 2020a, [4.5.3]). In “Contextualizing Musical Genius: Perspectives from Queer Theory,” Vivian Luong and Taylor Myers argue, “For Schenker, the idea of genius was aligned with the idea of supremacy, especially the supremacy of the German genius composer in opposition to the lesser French, Russian, and English composers. As well, Schenker believed the genius was on a separate level genetically than an ordinary man” (Luong and Myers 2020). Luong and Myers allude to Schenker’s letter draft to Wilhelm Furtwängler of November 1931, in which he suggested, rather, that genius is a product of the sophistication of a national culture, and can be nurtured by intensive education: “I dare to assert that all the industries in the world do not compare with the German industry of genius. Once that is recognized, then this industry, too, must again be recapitalized, just as banks and all monetary values are being recapitalized today!” (SDO November 11–16, 1931, letter to Furtwängler). Schenker made these comments within the context of his belief that German culture could be adopted throughout the world, to the benefit of all: “If the Bohemians have come as far as we find today, they have the Germans to thank, whose example they have followed” (SDO November 5, 1912; see also Brodbeck 2014, 325). In the 1931 letter draft to Furtwängler, Schenker made remarks about the “godlike” element of genius when he discussed a famous non-Aryan, Jesus Christ. He simultaneously suggested in despair that the Germans may not produce another genius because they have renounced their culture:
sorts,’ he [Adler] wrote. ‘Artists of all lands and kingdoms, often the best of their age, converged upon it seeking fame and glory’” (Karnes 2008, 179–80).
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Is it possible for Jesus to be surpassed? Does he not remain the goal of all men, even into the remotest future? Is it possible for Plato to be surpassed? However much successive ages may take of these geniuses’ substrate, there remains in their work a godlike element that disdains each age! . . . I am in no doubt whatsoever that there will be nothing left for Germans in future centuries to do other than to cherish their musical geniuses with exactly that godlike honor with which the Jews wander through the ages with the Old Testament. (SDO November 11–16, 1931, letter to Furtwängler; see also Schenker 2014b, 70)
In Der Tonwille 3 (1922), Schenker denied that he dwelled on the importance of German geniuses in order to denigrate those from other nations: But it is not my intention—despite what certain people might think—to deprive Germans of the joy of discovering greatness in foreigners. Since I revere true genius . . . how could I reconcile it with my conscience, with my mission, if I were to belittle a genius, even if it be a foreign one? . . . One really cannot begin to understand a Michelangelo or Rembrandt, a Shakespeare or Dostoevsky, etc., if one has no more than the conventional knowledge of the Germans Bach, Beethoven, and Goethe. (Schenker 2004a, 137)24
As a musicologist and theorist, Schenker’s scholarly interests inevitably reflected the German musicology of his time. He began his career at the tail end of the first great “discovery/documentation period” of German musicology and built on the work of his predecessors. To demonstrate his musicological competence, Schenker inserted a roll call of forgotten contemporaries of Haydn and Mozart in Der Tonwille 2 (Schenker 2004a, 64). In his own musicological work, Schenker researched and/or edited the music of Beethoven, C. P. E. Bach, and Haydn; his students carried on his work on the two latter figures. During the nineteenth century, German musicologists created a usable past. In their studies of the history of music, they prioritized the works of German composers such as Bach, Handel, Buxtehude, Johannes Eccard (Berger 2005, 19), and Schütz (Karnes 2008, 173; Kelly 2004, 576–77). Within the context of this German nationalist artistic ideology, Schenker’s roll call of great composers can hardly be defined as a nationalist or racist manifesto. It was, rather, the expression of the scholarly enthusiasms of a specialist, not designed to have a wider resonance. Schenker included C. P. E. Bach among his great figures while excluding Wagner. Like his advocacy of C. P. E. Bach, Schenker’s promotion of Haydn represented, not a defense of the canon 24 Schachter writes, “One wonders how he [Schenker] accounted for Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Montaigne, Newton, Descartes, Rembrandt, Darwin, Tolstoy, to name a few” (Schachter 2001, 5).
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as currently constituted, but an effort to bring an underappreciated composer to the attention of musicians and scholars (Proksch 2011; Proksch 2015, 115–16); in Schenker’s estimation, Haydn’s music was “poorly performed or distributed in corrupt texts, or . . . drooled over in the idle chit-chat of loathsome, presumptuous ignorance” (Schenker 2004a, 113). Brahms’s scholarly engagements with Baroque music served as a guide for Schenker’s own work in that area. Schenker praised Domenico Scarlatti while noting the interest that Brahms had taken in his music (Bent 1986, 141). Likewise, in May 1933, Schenker noted in his diary the arrival of a new edition of François Couperin’s music, prepared by his former pupil Otto Vrieslander (SDO May 15, 1933b); Brahms had lent his name to an edition of Couperin’s keyboard music (Kelly 2004). One of the most important developments in early twentieth-century musicology was the revival of seventeenth-century music, marked by the first modern performances of Monteverdi’s operas. Given his close attention to musicological matters, it is not surprising that Schenker repeatedly expressed his admiration for seventeenthand early eighteenth-century French and Italian music. In 1925, he described a radio broadcast of music by “old Italians,” and opined, “The two arias by Pergolesi stand out” (SDO November 23, 1925). In 1928, he praised “a sonata by [Pietro] Locatelli” and “a thoroughly beautiful Pastorale by Couperin” (SDO January 30, 1928). In 1930, Schenker described as “very beautiful” a radio broadcast that included vocal works by Alessandro Scarlatti, Giulio Caccini, and Giacomo Carissimi (SDO April 23, 1930). In 1931, he wrote to Furtwängler, “What the earliest Italian composers wrote still benefited even our masters” (SDO November 11–16, 1931, letter to Furtwängler). Schenker’s musical values reflected the non-racialist but hegemonically German ideology of Austrian liberalism, as expressed by Viennese music critics in the 1880s and 90s, the years in which he completed his studies and began his career. These critics conceived the Germans as a Kulturnation, rather than insisting on racial criteria for musical participation in the Volksnation, as did the nationalist Wagnerians (Brodbeck 2014, 302, 317). As a Jew, Schenker constructed his Germanically oriented “imaginary museum of musical works” (Goehr 1992) in such a way as to create a space for his own participation in German musical culture. In so doing, he followed a common strategy employed by Jews in nineteenth-century Central Europe, selectively interpreting Christian and German culture within a universalist paradigm.25 Schenker valorized the German idea of absolute music (Dahlhaus 1989; Goehr 1992), while deemphasizing German culture’s religious core. He published relatively few analyses of J. S. Bach’s religious works. For Schenker, Bach was the master of diminution (Schenker 2014a, 2–19), not the great musical evangelist. Likewise, each of the other compos25 “Schenker redefines the German in music: he wrenches it away from the Wagnerians and relocates it back in time to the Viennese classics, back to a legacy that is common to Jew and gentile” (Cook (2007, 88). See also Eybl (2018, [4]) and Beller (1989, 148).
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ers discussed by Schenker was significant in his eyes because of specifically musical virtues. C. P. E. Bach preserved the understanding of the delicate balance between counterpoint and harmony, destroyed by Rameau’s concepts of the fundamental bass and chord inversions (Schenker 2014b, 1–9). Beethoven was the great master of largescale structural connections. Brahms was the last of the masters who was “in a position to receive the magnificent [symphonic] technique of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven” (Schenker 2005a, 43; Schenker 2005b, 142). In contrast, Schenker dismissed Wagner’s music as inferior because of his failure, in Schenker’s view, to create large-scale structural connections (Schenker 2004b, 23–24; Botstein 2009, 172–73). Schenker developed these ideas while German music, and particularly Beethoven reception, was dominated by nationalist polemics (Dennis 1996; Brodbeck 2014). Schenker e xpressed his universalist vision of the meaning of art most eloquently in Der Tonwille 5: “Art unites and makes brothers of all humanity. Never has war been waged on account of art, as it has so often in the name of religion” (Schenker 2004a, 212).
Schenker and Nazism Suggestions have recently been made that Schenker was an admirer of Hitler (Ewell 2020a, [4.3.5]), replaying an ugly post-World War I controversy in which he was attacked for his conservative political and musical views. Schenker’s detractors accused him of hiding his Jewish identity and supporting the Nazis. In response, Schenker forcefully rejected the Nazis and noted that he had refused to convert to Christianity, unlike many of his Jewish critics. He linked their rejection of their Jewish origins to his contention that they had repudiated German culture: “All baptized Jews everywhere, who adopt foreign names, foreign religion, foreign language, have appointed me, tax-free, to the position of ‘swastika wielder’—though I am the only one among them who has no business in these matters” (letter to Vrieslander, May 6, 1923, quoted in Reiter 2015, 283) (italics added). Schenker later underlined his refusal to undergo baptism: “I have not been baptized and, when asked, confessed my Jewish faith with pride and love, indeed with the utmost conviction that no writer of history can share with me, not even the most enlightened Jew” (SDO October 29, 1930). In August 1923, Schenker confronted composer Karl Weigl (1881–1949) about the defamatory claims that had recently been disseminated: “Weigl and his wife [Valerie Weigl] knock; right at the beginning of the conversation I mention the swastika accusation, completely unabashedly (Lie-Liechen [Jeanette Schenker] believes that it [the accusation] stemmed directly from Weigl)” (SDO August 20, 1923). In 1925, Schenker was satirized in Abbruch [Demolition], a parody issue of the contemporary music journal Musikblätter des Anbruch, as a rabid German nationalist and antisemite:
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I . . . have proven that new music is not music at all and that there is nothing after Beethoven and Schumann (hallowed be the name) and perhaps Brahms, and that all this only became clear after I discovered it and that I will proclaim this to all mankind because we Germans will not be trifled with and the good Lord still dwells among us and the Jews will come to see their world empire defeated in the name of German Art, in the name of Beethoven, in the name of Bach, in the name of Schumann, in the name of Brahms, and in the name of Heinrich Schenker from Pódwoloczyska. God grant it. (Hailey 2006, 64; Burgstaller 2018, 32–35)
This attempt to associate Schenker with the völkisch attitudes of the German political Right was singularly inept in its contradictions. While suggesting that Schenker was a German antisemite (“we Germans will not be trifled with and the good Lord still dwells among us and the Jews will come to see their world empire defeated in the name of German Art”), it inaccurately named his place of birth as the Galician town of Pódwoloczyska, rather than the village of Wiśniowczyk. The error correctly implied, however, that Schenker was a Galician Jew who had settled in Vienna, for both areas had a predominantly Jewish population. In response to the Abbruch article, Schenker returned to the slanders about his political views in a diary entry about his friend, artist Victor Hammer (1882–1967): “It is also strange that someone who is so clever, in spite of all ignorance, does not hit on the idea that all of the people who accuse me of Nazi allegiances, or of insincerity, such as by hiding my Jewishness, would not rather resort to factual refutations instead of all the arguments.”26 As proof of his purported Nazi allegiances, Schenker’s present-day critics cite a letter that he wrote to his pupil Felix-Eberhard von Cube on May 14, 1933 (Ewell 2020a, [4.3.5]). Jackson (followed by Nicholas Cook [Cook 2007, 150]) has pointed out, however, that Schenker condemned Hitler soon after: “On July 13, 1933, Schenker noted in his diary that he had received a letter from [Reinhard] Oppel which was ‘evidence of [his] disenchantment with the new regime,’ and, ten days later, on July 23, he reported: ‘Letter to Oppel dictated: I confirm him in his skepticism’” (Jackson 2019, 159). Jackson, however, does not discuss Schenker’s many earlier denunciations of the Nazis. After Hitler was named chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, Schenker’s letters and diaries indicate that he was aware of the unfolding political crisis, but withheld judgment at first about the situation’s severity. On February 21, 1933, he wrote in his diary, “Lie-Liechen [Schenker’s wife Jeanette] telephones Mozio [Schen26 “Sonderbar auch, daß ein bei aller Unwissenheit so gescheiter Mensch nicht auf den Gedanken kommt, daß alle diejenigen, die mir ein Hakenkreuzlertum andichten, oder Unaufrichtigkeit, wie etwa das Verbergen des Judentums, statt aller Einwände nicht lieber zu sachlichen Widerlegungen greifen” (SDO September 30, 1925; Jackson [2019, 158–59]).
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ker’s brother Moritz]; he will come at 4:30—and he appears, bringing the installment that is due. Declares the notice harmless—do not sell anything!—a war is imminent!!” (SDO February 21, 1933) (italics added). On February 27, the Reichstag was set on fire. At Hitler’s behest, President Hindenburg suspended individual and civil liberties in Germany on the following day. On March 20, 1933, Oswald Jonas wrote from Germany, “The project of presenting introductory lectures to the Furtwängler concerts on the radio must for now, because of the altered circumstances, unfortunately be postponed” (SDO March 20, 1933, letter from Jonas to Schenker) (italics added). On March 24, 1933, President Hindenburg signed the Enabling Act, which gave Hitler dictatorial powers. On April 2, Schenker wrote in his diary about his meeting with a distraught Otto Erich Deutsch, a Jewish convert to Protestantism, “Deutsch is physically suffering from his perception of his loss of Germanness! In my case, too, he says that anti-Semitism is playing a role—which is surely not correct” (SDO April 2, 1933). Despite the warnings of his friends, Schenker, like most German and Austrian Jews, was not yet ready to panic at the very beginning of April 1933 (Friedländer 1997, 15–17, 60–62). All that changed a week later. During the Nazi period, Schenker’s friend and student Wilhelm Furtwängler compromised himself by his public activities, while privately expressing hostility to the Hitler regime. Furtwängler, however, made repeated efforts to assist Jewish musicians who were endangered by Nazi policies.27 On April 7, 1933, the Nazis enacted the first of a series of discriminatory laws against the Jews of Germany (Dawidowicz 1975, 58–60). On April 6, Furtwängler wrote a letter to Joseph Goebbels in which he criticized the persecution of Jewish artists (Furtwängler 1954, 70–71). The letter was published on April 11. Schenker noted in his diary, “Furtwängler to the minister: takes a stand against theoretical condemnation of the Jews—where art is concerned, the only criterion is whether it is good or bad” (SDO April 11, 1933). For Schenker and his friends, Goebbels’s dismissal of Furtwängler’s arguments, in a statement also published on April 11 (Wulf 1963, 86–89; Levi 1994, 45–46), served as the breaking point. On April 29, Schenker wrote in his diary, “From Vrieslander . . . He is sharply critical of Germany, but rightly so!” (SDO April 29, 1933). Four days later, on May 3, Schenker registered his dismay in a letter to Anthony van Hoboken. In March, Hoboken had written to Schenker (SDO March 20, 1933), 28 enclosing an article about music from the Frankfurter Zeitung, of which Schenker now wrote, “This language! Is it a language at all? . . . The Viennese folk-tongue calls anything similarly incomprehensible ‘Spanish’; or is that already ‘Hebrew,’ which in Germany today is ‘mandatory’?” (SDO May 3, 1933, letter to Hoboken). Schenker was alluding to the Nazis’ declara27 On Furtwängler’s complicated relationship with the Nazis, see Shirakawa (1992); Allen (2018); Prieberg (1991). 28 Hoboken’s letter has not survived.
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tion that German texts by Jewish writers should heretofore be considered translations from Hebrew (Friedländer 1997, 57; Iggers 1967, 9). He continued, Now I am including out of gratitude my essay from the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung of April 28. Neither have I been baptized for its sake—which, incidentally, would have been of no use—nor have I written the original in Hebrew. . . . I sent it off in mid-February (still before Hitler). That in the circle of the many “musicians,” “critics,” who follow the journal, my “alien race” would not already have been ascertained, I don’t believe. It is something else: that to these very gentlemen my essay must necessarily remain incomprehensible, just “Hebrew.”
Writing to Cube on May 6, 1933, Schenker denounced the politicization of art in Nazi Germany, the subject of the public debate between Furtwängler and Goebbels: “In a world that has not yet understood the smallest of tones, yet dares to politicize it [music], there is no longer any place for musicians who contest [absprechen] music’s calling in the realm of politics. And yet, as all previous experiments have been an embarrassment, so too will the most recent experiment prove to be an embarrassment: in spite of all the political murmurings, the unique art of music [die Musik in ihrer Sonderart] will ultimately survive” (SDO May 6, 1933, letter to Cube). On May 11, 1933, Cube wrote to Schenker to persuade him that the Nazi regime was a positive development, pressing the point despite the recent flight from Germany of his colleague Moriz Violin, one of Schenker’s closest friends. Although Cube was having professional difficulties due to his association with Schenker, he continued to support the Nazis: “The events in Germany are in essence what you have so often extolled. Do not let the revolutionary neighbor-noises deceive you about the geniusconceived Urlinie here! Germany is conceiving the world anew! . . . Violin’s flight to Vienna is something I count among the errors that are committed so often out of the conflict between spirit and flesh. . . . I shall remain true to the cause, as I have until now.” Cube praised the Nazis’ admiration for Wagner, a composer who Schenker abhorred: “Since the professional musicians have not yet made their way to the spheres of Beethoven or Bach, we cannot demand this, or even less, from politics. Wagner seems to me progress beyond Stravinsky and Hindemith. The path is pointing toward Bach and Beethoven” (SDO May 11, 1933, letter from Cube to Schenker). In his carefully phrased response to Cube of May 14, 1933, Schenker praised Hitler for defeating the hated communists.29 He simultaneously displayed concern about the worsening situation of the Jews in Germany under Nazi rule, however, disputing 29 “Schenker had long considered the Communists to be enemies of Germany and cared even less for the Nazis (except insofar as he hoped they would dispense with the Communists)” (Proksch 2011, 340).
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Cube’s criticism of Violin: “I have been informed of Violin’s situation from time to time by his sister [Fanny Violin], without his knowing it; she recounted terrifying things!” (SDO May 14, 1933, letter to Cube). Schenker ignored Cube’s praise for the Nazis’ musical policies. He insisted that the cure for musical modernism could only have an artistic source, granted that from hindsight it is difficult to interpret his remarks about musical “brownshirts” [Musik-“Braunhemden”]30 in any other than the most unpleasant terms. In connection with this comment, Schenker expressed a low opinion of the musical tastes of the German masses: “I have prepared the weapons, but the music—the true German music of the greats—finds no understanding among the masses who should bear the weapons.” Schenker also indicated that he was aware that all cultural activities connected to Jews were threatened: “Professor Oppel in Leipzig . . . leads a national socialist ‘cell,’ in which he continues to teach Schenker, now as before, insofar as this is possible” (italics added). On May 16, 1933, Furtwängler delivered the keynote address at the Brahms Festival in Vienna. Schenker attended the event at Furtwängler’s invitation (SDO May 16, 1933; SDO May 15, 1933a). Furtwängler discussed “Brahms the Nordic,” “Brahms the German,” and the basis of Brahms’s music in German folksong (Loges 2012), at a time when the Nazis were emphasizing these ideas (Beller-McKenna 2001a, 195– 99). While not an explicit expression of Nazi ideology, Furtwängler’s speech, with its heavy emphasis on Brahms’s Germanness, reflected the völkisch narrative about the composer popular during the 1920s and 30s.31 It may also have been a response to rumors of Brahms’s possible Jewish origins that were circulating at the time (BellerMcKenna 2001a, 195; Beller-McKenna 2001b), echoing attacks on his music during the 1890s by German nationalist critics in Vienna (Notley 1993, 122–23; Notley 2007, 33–34; Brodbeck 2014, 243, 262–63). Schenker was indignant that Furtwängler had used some of his purely musical ideas about Brahms in the lecture without crediting him. In addition, he was unhappy with Furtwängler’s use of the term Volksverbundenes, connected to the people, rather than Schenker’s preferred term, Naturgegebenes, derived from nature, i.e., natural laws (SDO July 28, 1933; Hust 2010, 13). While Schenker believed that he was articulating fundamental musical concepts derived from natural phenomena, Furtwängler instead described Brahms antithetically as inspired by the German racial spirit. In 1929, Schenker had mocked the musical expression of the “spirit of the Volk” in his diary: “One need only think of the Russian barbarisms of Tchaikovsky, or the Spanish ones, which most recently came into circulation—always and everywhere the same: 30 “And where would one now find the number of musical ‘brownshirts’ that would be needed to hunt down the musical Marxists?” (SDO May 14, 1933, letter from Schenker to Cube). 31 For a suggestive rationalization of Furtwängler’s rhetoric in the speech, see Prieberg (1991, 64– 66).
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the musical giftedness of the people does not extend beyond a handful of notes, which are repeated endlessly with almost animalistic tenacity” (SDO December 14, 1929). On May 17, 1933, a day after Furtwängler’s Brahms lecture, Schenker recorded in his diary, “Jonas speaks of dreadful things in Germany with regard to the Jews” (SDO May 17, 1933). On May 20, 1933, Furtwängler visited Schenker and discussed the disastrous political situation in Germany. Schenker first complained about Furtwängler’s use of the term volksverbunden, noting that such ideas were “‘themes’ that could easily be exploited by our opponents.” “Then ‘Germany and the Jews’—Furtwängler is ashamed and asks if he would not do better by moving to Vienna!” (SDO May 20, 1933). On June 1, 1933, Schenker discussed Furtwängler’s Brahms lecture in his diary. His comment about the Nazi concept of Gleichschaltung [enforced conformity] is clearly sarcastic: “To Furtwängler (letter): concerning his published lecture . . . I consider the high level he has attained in his life: the foremost conductor, their [i.e., the orchestra’s] baton and thinking head [i.e., director]. A pity that he is unable to achieve a resurrection of the craft through ‘enforced conformity’—etc.” (SDO June 1, 1933). Schenker returned to the concept of Gleichschaltung in his letter of June 30 to Salzer. He used the French word ensemble, then commented, “why should a Jew never use foreign words when the most regimented Teutons [gleichgeschaltetsten Germanen] use them so persistently?” (SDO June 30, 1933, letter to Salzer). Schenker’s use of the concept of Gleichschaltung was tantamount to accusing Furtwängler of serving as a mouthpiece for Hitler. On August 4, 1933, Schenker wrote in his diary, “To Hans Weisse (letter): . . . I describe the situation in Germany, regret Furtwängler’s step backwards” (SDO August 4, 1933). On July 2, 1933, Schenker bluntly expressed his contempt for the Nazis in his diary: “At midday, a new guest, Hasslreiter, arrives from Vienna—a Hitlerian out of stupidity” (SDO July 2, 1933). On July 5, 1933—a week before the letter to Oppel cited by Jackson—Schenker wrote optimistically in his diary, “From Mozio [Schenker’s brother Moritz]: he . . . reports on . . . the beginning of the decline [beginnenden Zerfall] of the National-Socialist Party in Germany” (SDO July 5, 1933). In a November 1933 diary entry, Schenker wrote, “In the letter [from Oppel], a good analysis of the musical situation [in Germany]. The juxtaposition of the names Hitler, Goeb[b]els, and Schenker has a very amusing effect” (SDO November 28, 1933). In December 1933, Schenker condemned not only Hitler but the German people as a whole, writing of “the product of the German music-geniuses . . . misunderstood, betrayed, defiled by the Germans, but long since having become a boon for mankind” (SDO December 21, 1933, letter to Jonas) (italics added). On June 12, 1934, Schenker wrote to Hoboken, suggesting—as his brother had a year before—that Hitler’s demise was near: “Hitler will certainly fly over Austria to Mussolini, but from Austria he was thrown out long ago [Schenker refers to Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß’s banning of the Austrian Nazi
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party, the DNSAP, in June 1933]. Could his weeks be numbered even in Germany?” (SDO June 12, 1934, letter to Hoboken). Schenker was too optimistic; Dollfuß was assassinated by Austrian Nazis only six weeks later, on July 25.
Negotiating a Path Through a Hostile World Given the radical disjunction between Schenker’s carefully delimited praise for the Nazis in the letter to Cube of May 14, 1933 and the anti-Nazi sentiments that he consistently expressed elsewhere, both before and after, it is possible that he was equivocating in his response to Cube. Schenker’s opening paragraph provides evidence for this suggestion. He responded to Cube’s defense of Hitler (SDO May 11, 1933, letter from Cube to Schenker)32 by prefacing his criticism of the latter’s musical analyses with effusive praise of his character that is both irrelevant and seemingly evasive: “Everything in your letter—your arguments, your declaration—shows an extraordinary measure of capability and character, which very few people today share with you. . . . Let me also reiterate the following: anyone who, like yourself, has demonstrated such a degree of ‘attention’ and presentation has, so to speak, the right to make an occasional mistake: a mistake made on the basis of the truth is always more valuable than a mistake made on a basis that is itself a mistake” (SDO May 14, 1933, letter from Schenker to Cube). Schenker’s correspondence with Furtwängler shows a similar evasiveness. Schenker repeatedly ridiculed the music and ideas of Richard Wagner in his published w ritings, as well as in his correspondence with friends and colleagues. He condemned Wagner as “the hangman of German music,” accusing him of “shattering the Urlinie and destroying musical truth” (Schenker 2004b, 24). Schenker also castigated Wagner for the dramatic basis of his musical syntax: “His [Wagner’s] music follows the logic of thoughts and events [in his operas] far more than the laws that reside in music itself. . . . He does not put together ideas from various elements, he builds no groups, he takes no care of the succession of keys, since he never has in mind a higher unity that is equivalent to any form” (Schenker 2005a, 99). Schenker was, however, diplomatic in broaching the topic of his distaste for Wagner with Furtwängler, his most powerful disciple. In his November 1931 letter draft to Furtwängler, Schenker wrote, “Your call to Wagner is really in keeping with the times. Certainly it ought to and must be stated in criticism of this giant spirit from the loftier vantage-point of the yet greater masters of instrumental music in all seriousness that ‘Leitmotive’ = ‘motive.’ . . . The disadvantages of a motive-based technique . . . recur also in his Leitmotive technique, they 32 On Cube’s admiration for the Nazis, see Drabkin (1984–85). For discussion of another Schenker disciple with right-wing views, see Koslovsky (2017).
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work counter to any synthesis, even the synthesis of a ‘music drama’!” (SDO November 11–16, 1931, letter to Furtwängler; Hust 2010, 11). Schenker’s careful attempts to veil his Jewish identity in order to facilitate the dissemination of his musical theories in Germany33 fall into the same category as his delicate handling of the political and musical views of his students and admirers. Early in his career, Schenker vacillated on this point. He originally entitled one of his works Tänze der Chassidim, but then retitled the work Syrische Tänze so as not to call attention to his Jewish identity (Federhofer 1985, 82–83; Cook 2007, 225; Reiter 2015, 282). Schenker’s discomfort in this episode undoubtedly led to increased caution later in his career. In 1925, he wrote about his fear that general awareness of his Jewish identity would impede the reception of his theories: “It is my duty to complete my work, but not first to risk innately superfluous publicity, perhaps jeopardizing the work” (SDO September 30, 1925). Schenker and his friends were all the more aware of this problem after the Nazis took power. Although he felt slighted when Furtwängler omitted his name in the May 1933 Brahms speech, he indicated to Salzer that the matter was a delicate one: “I shall, as usual, give an explanation in our first lesson, one that I am sure will surprise you; to put this down on paper isn’t possible” (SDO June 30, 1933, letter to Salzer). Given the heavily political cast of Furtwängler’s speech and the contemporary controversy about Brahms’s possible racial “taint,” Furtwängler undoubtedly omitted any mention of Schenker due to the latter’s Jewishness.34 On August 5, 1933, Hoboken wrote to Schenker, “It must be amazing even to you that you are now cited and celebrated there [Germany] as the trail-blazer of the ‘now self-aware Germany.’ Does Goos know of which infamous race you are a member?” (SDO August 5, 1933, letter from Hoboken to Schenker). In his letter to Jonas of December 21, 1933, Schenker wrote, “On the other hand we must bear in mind that an assiduous display of commitment to the matter [his Jewish identity] could be in some sense detrimental. . . . Above all, the ‘Mission’! If this musical revelation will come about better and more easily, provided we desist from offending the musical heathens, let us avoid anything that is unnecessary. . . . Keep the enclosed essay and show it to the like-minded, but always with discretion: two Jews at once would be too much for antipathetic minds” (SDO December 21, 1933, letter to Jonas). 33 See the discussion of “denominational incognito” in Eybl (2018, [2]). 34 On September 26, 1934, Furtwängler wrote to Schenker, “I am coming to Vienna in December for the first time (three times in all), where I hope to see you. I will then be able to recount and explain all sorts of things to you in person, which I cannot do now. Among other things, why I have not thus far carried through my intention to express myself publicly about you and your work. The general (i.e., political) conditions of life for someone who serves art as much as I do persist in being very uncertain and unclear” (SDO September 26, 1934, letter from Furtwängler to Schenker).
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Schenker and Racism In recent years, Schenker’s perspectives on non-Western peoples and cultures have come under increased scrutiny, particularly his attitudes, both musical and political, toward Africans and black Americans. In several instances, Schenker made blanket ideological pronouncements belittling the musical products of non-Western cultures. When given the opportunity to hear non-European music, he often expressed pleasure, however. For example, in 1906, Schenker wrote in his diary, “In the Apollo Theatre with Dr. and Mrs. Robert Brünauer. The Negro dances almost thrilling. The Japanese achieve wonderful things in terms of imagination and energy” (SDO D ecember 13, 1906). In 1927, Anthony van Hoboken played a recording of spirituals for Schenker, who responded enthusiastically, “The musician who assembled the Negro choruses that you played for us on your phonograph should be considered a true musical genius; it would be worthwhile to know who that is: he deserves a first place among musicians, certainly ahead of Strauss and Pfitzner” (SDO August 12, 1927, letter to Hoboken). While we cannot pinpoint the recording that Schenker heard, many choral recordings of spirituals were made in the 1910s and ‘20s, some by the renowned Fisk Jubilee Singers, which toured Europe in 1924 and 1925 (Brooks 2000). On a second occasion, Schenker criticized a broadcast of spirituals at the same time as he criticized American popular music, and for the same reason—neither music satisfied his parochial requirements for great art: “Radio: Negro spirituals—completely falsified, dishonest expropriation of European music, similar to the American music expropriated from foreigners under the label ‘national music’!” (SDO January 16, 1931). 35 On a third occasion, Schenker complained that a performance of spirituals—not the music itself— was “too saccharine,” but praised it as “excellent”: “Radio: Westminster Choir! In the program there is no music by Brahms, Schumann, Mendelssohn, or Schubert—only songs and Negro spirituals; the performance of these pieces is at any rate excellent, but too saccharine, which may easily explain why those masters have been omitted” (SDO May 2, 1929). Whatever Schenker’s motivation for criticism in the last two cases, his lavish praise in the first instance precludes the possibility that he condemned black artists because of racism. In The Masterwork in Music 3 (1930), Schenker criticized jazz because he considered it to be rhythmically impoverished: “German composers have still understood 35 Ewell's quotation from this diary entry (Ewell 2020, [4.2.3]) relies on an inaccurate trans lationin SDO: “Negro spirituals—completely falsified, dishonest expropriation of European music, similar to the American music expropriated by foreigners [von Ausländern = from foreigners] under the label ‘national music’!” Schenker was saying that both spirituals and American “national” music were expropriated from European music, not that the music of black Americans was inferior because of their race.
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nothing of the realm of musical rhythm, by which I mean the artistically appropriate rhythm that has evolved over centuries, if they could still find rhythm in jazz, when jazz possesses as little genuine rhythm as a metronome or a train wheel” (Schenker 2014b, 7). Nevertheless, Schenker compared jazz favorably to Nazi art in a July 1933 letter to Hoboken: “The recently repudiated [by the Nazis] dynamic of jazz was almost more fun than that of today’s nationalistic art” [lustiger als die der völkischen Kunst] (SDO July 25, 1933, letter from Schenker to Hoboken). Schenker’s letter demonstrates both that he considered Nazi culture to be beneath contempt, and that he judged the art of black Americans by purely artistic criteria. Even though Schenker admired jazz no more than other manifestations of popular culture, he preferred it to the artistic products of the “master race.” To compare Schenker’s comments about music-making by Africans and black Americans to the discourse of his American contemporaries, I offer an excerpt from the 1915 book The Art of Music: Music in America. The book includes an introduction by noted composer Arthur Farwell, and was published in a series of music appreciation volumes under the general editorship of Daniel Gregory Mason, professor of music at Columbia University from 1910 to 1942. Its infantilization of black Americans and their music is worlds apart from Schenker’s remarks: The negro in his uncivilized way was endowed with the ingenuousness of a child, and the susceptibility to impressions that goes with the untutored mind. He had a childlike, poetic nature, a natural gift of song, an emotionalism and a sentimentality that responded unfailingly to all the pangs of an unjust and cruel existence. . . . Add to this the intense religious excitement to which the negro is subject—an emotion which seems to have translated itself with all its elemental power from savage idolatry to Christian worship—and you have a combination which could not but produce a striking result. (Farwell and Darby 1915, 285)36
Schenker’s dismissal of non-Western music based on modal scales has been cited as proof of his racist attitudes. His discussion of this topic, like his remarks about American music, reveals both his freedom from biological racism and his cultural parochialism. Schenker writes of the “captivating charm” of Arabic, Japanese, and Turkish songs (Schenker 1987, 28). Nevertheless, he rejects all music not based on the European major-minor system, including Gregorian chant (Schenker 1987, 30), medieval and Renaissance European music (Schenker 1987, 22), 37 European folk song (Schenker 1987, 29–30), and the music of his own people, the Jews (Schenker 1987, 36 On Mason’s anti-black racism and antisemitism, see Noble (2002, 191–92). 37 Schenker’s dismissive attitude toward medieval European music mirrors the attitudes of German musicologists of the pre-World War I period. See Koslovsky (2009, 28).
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21): “It was none other than our masters who triumphantly elevated us long ago—even centuries ago—beyond the Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic stages, as well as that of the church modes, because they recognized the need for a compromise between horizontal and vertical harmony and thus were the first to create diatony out of the primeval chaos” (Schenker 1987, 22). Schenker suggests, however, that non-Western cultures could recapitulate the history of Western music and arrive at the same principles: “An attempt at polyphony—in itself perfectly conceivable—by the Japanese of today, for example, could perhaps lead to the same discovery of the harmonic principle as that made by the Westerner of centuries ago” (Schenker 1987, 21). Schenker’s comment about “tension spans” in music has also been offered as proof of his racism; he wrote that “tension spans” in Beethoven’s music are better than a “blood test” as a proof of German origins (Schachter 2001, 17; Cook 2007, 147–48; Ewell 2020a, [4.3.4]). Challenging this view, Karen Painter has described Schenker’s words as evidence of his cultural, rather than racial, definition of German identity (Painter 2007, 196). Schenker’s remarks about Beethoven do not support the doctrine of scientific racism, but controvert it, in a characteristically irritating German way. The nineteenth-century historian Wilhelm Riehl (1823–97) similarly asserted that the Frenchman George Onslow (1784–1853) was “really German” because Onslow’s music was of high quality, due to the use of “German” compositional techniques.38 In discussing Schenker’s politics, Nicholas Cook describes this reasoning as a circular argument, with the premise that great music from any source should be defined as German, and the conclusion that German music is great. As Cook notes, Schenker employed this rationale when he discussed the music of Chopin, Smetana, and Dvořák (Cook 2007, 238–41). Cook points out, however, that Schenker’s discussion of Smetana represented a liberal political position at a time when protests against Czech culture took place in Vienna:39 “Schenker’s demonstration of the German basis of the Bohemian composer’s music would have served to promulgate a more generous conception of the German than the narrowly nationalistic or racial one, and to underline the indispensable contribution of the outsider to German culture” (Cook 2007, 241). Schenker’s attitude to Smetana’s music represented the consensus view among liberal critics in Vienna during the 1890s. For example, Albert Kauders judged Smetana’s music, “in its innermost basic character,” to be “German,” and added, “I count among
38 “His works belong, fundamentally, much more to the history of German music, and Germany has the especial duty to cherish the memory of this foreign master, who is a naturalized artist among us” (Riehl 1886, 294) (my translation). 39 For a discussion of the enthusiastic reception of Smetana’s music in Vienna in 1892–93, see Brodbeck (2014, 265–89).
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German art everything that confesses the Gospel of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven and emulates their sublime teaching in deed and work.”40 Like Schenker, Riehl, and Kauders, English musicologist William Henry Hadow (1859–1937) categorized the nationality of composers in cultural, rather than racial, terms. He applauded the German practice of appropriating the accomplishments of non-German composers, demonstrating that this approach was the common currency of the period: That Mozart was an Italian composer seems now to be taken as an accredited jest; but it is more serious when we show our gratitude for the splendid work that Germany has done by scoring to her account all that has been accomplished by her neighbors. Schumann claims Chopin as a fellow-countryman; we are so far from protesting that we add Liszt, for whom “the great German master” was long a newspaper synonym, and even hesitate about Smetana and Dvořák. (Hadow 1897, 14–15) (italics added)
Schenker has been criticized for condemning racial mixing. Music theorist Philip Ewell cites Schenker’s comment “‘race’ is good, ‘inbreeding’ [Inzucht] of race, however, is dismal [trüb]” in a 1934 letter to Hoboken (Ewell 2020, [4.2.4]; SDO January 13, 1934, letter to Hoboken),41 without realizing that this is an attack on the concept of racial purity rather than an endorsement. For that, Schenker would have had to use the word “interbreeding.” By use of selective quotation, Ewell conceals the fact that Schenker portrayed himself as a racial alien living among Germans. In the sentence under consideration, Schenker continues: “Art has nothing to do with this [die Kunst steht ganz wo anders], so it is perfectly appropriate in the world that in Vienna racial aliens still represent interesting flecks of color (Jews, Hungarians, Slavs, Italians, etc., etc.)” (SDO January 13, 1934, letter to Hoboken) (italics added).42 In the prior sentence, Schenker observes that in Vienna, Jews like himself—now criminalized racially in Germany—were still permitted to participate in the arts: “Today, Vienna seems to 40 Albert Kauders, “Die böhmische Oper in Wien,” Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, June 3, 1892, quoted in Brodbeck (2014, 271–72). 41 Ewell employs the translation of this letter in SDO: “‘Race’ is good, ‘inbreeding’ of race, however, is murky [trüb].” I suggest, however, that the term ‘murky’ is not an appropriate translation of “trüb” within this context, given that Schenker employs the word to pass moral judgment. 42 In Die österreichisch-ungarische Monarchie in Wort und Bild (1886–1902), Eduard Hanslick employed similar language: “Vienna is not merely the musical Imperial Capital of Austria but a power ful empire in itself. Its musical supremacy extends across the borders of the monarchy. Gentle echoes of Slavic, Magyar, and Italian tunes, enlivening and embellishing rather like racial mixing — [Racenmischung] gently resound, without distracting from the eminently German character of Viennese music.” Hanslick, “Die Musik in Wien,” quoted in Brodbeck (2014, 3). For a discussion of Stefan Zweig’s remarks about Vienna’s cosmopolitan character in the World of Yesterday, see Gelbin and Gilman (2017, 173).
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me the most plausible place for you to be,43 if only because here—do not laugh—the Jews can make their mark in music and display many varieties (annoyance, entertainment).” The letter closes with a postscript about Furtwängler’s threat to leave Germany, presumably over Nazi artistic policies: “Furtwängler is said to have threatened to leave Germany; have you heard anything about that?” In his diary entry of May 20, 1933, Schenker had noted his conversation with Furtwängler about this very possibility (SDO May 20, 1933). Schenker’s reference to “blacks marrying into the gloire and esprit business” [die Einheirat der Schwarzen in das Gloire- und Espritgeschäft] in “The Mission of German Genius” (Schenker 2004b, 18; Schenker 1921, 18; Eybl 1995, 20) has been adduced as an example of his loathing for racial mixing, yet a fuller quotation shows this passage to be a swipe at the French and their pretensions to military glory, not at blacks: “No Anglo-Saxon, French, or Italian mother could ever carry in her womb a Moses, Christ, Luther, a Buddha, Confucius, Lâo-Tzse, also no Bach, Mozart, Goethe, Kant (the French not even after blacks married into the gloire and esprit business!).” Earlier in “The Mission of German Genius,” Schenker ridicules the French in the same way: “The French really do not know any noble pastimes other than vaunting their lust after gloire, which is engendered not by bravery, but only by banal vanity” (Schenker 2004b, 14; see also Schenker 2004b, 5). Schenker’s reference to “Senegalese marriage relationships” [Senegalenschwägerschaft] (Schenker 2004b, 5; Schenker 1921, 5)44 is but one item in a long list of crimes committed by the British and the French. It is juxtaposed in Schenker’s text with “Congolese atrocities,” i.e., the murder of millions of Africans by European colonial troops. A neologism, Senegalenschwägerschaft may refer to West African marriage practices that deviated from European customs, including relationships classified under the colonialist designation mariage à la mode du pays (Zimmerman 2011; Zimmerman 2020; Jones 2005). Mariage à la mode du pays was a term originally employed to describe unions between European men and colonial women that fell short of the European definition of marriage, but was later applied as well to African soldiers conscripted into the French army, known as tirailleurs sénégalais.45 43 In Hoboken’s previous letter to Schenker, he had announced that he was building a house in Vienna. (SDO January 5, 1934, letter from Hoboken to Schenker). 44 Literally, “Senegalese family relationship by marriage.” 45 “Within the [French] military’s usage at the end of the nineteenth century, mariage à la mode du pays no longer uniquely referred to conjugal relationships between European men and African women. Officials came to refer to tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal and sexual relationships with female prisoners of war and former female slaves as mariage à la mode du pays, which simultaneously and ambivalently portrayed these heteronormative relationships as marriage and not marriage. This questionable legitimacy remained a dominant feature of tirailleurs sénégalais’ marital traditions into the interwar years” (Zimmerman 2020, 44).
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Schenker mentioned Africans solely within the context of his anti-French polemics after World War I. France’s use of colonial troops during the war and after led to fears that it would attempt to permanently upset the European balance of power by adding the demographic weight of its colonies to its military resources in order to gain mastery over Germany. For example, in Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, Thomas Mann wrote of “the victory of the pacifistic-bourgeois ‘militarism with a cause’ (with Negro armies) over the ‘military way of thinking’” (Mann 1987, 19). When the French occupied the Rhineland immediately after the war, they posted some African troops in that region. Many leftist, feminist, anti-imperialist, and pacifist activists in Europe, the United States, and Canada joined with the German political Right in raising the specter of widespread abuse of German women by savage Africans (Wigger 2017; Collar 2012; Reinders 1968; Campbell 2014). The campaign was led by British politician E. D. Morel, a human-rights advocate who had publicized Belgium’s Congolese atrocities fifteen years earlier. Morel’s prior anti-imperialist activities provided credibility for the racist accusations in his pamphlet The Horror on the Rhine, including lurid details of the management of brothels (Mitchell 2014, 165). Morel coupled condemnation of the black troops for their alleged degenerate behavior with a denunciation of both French imperialism against the Germans and the Paris Peace Conference. In America, W. E. B. Du Bois republished a long excerpt from one of Morel’s articles in The Crisis, implicitly agreeing with his class analysis of the situation while repudiating his racial arguments.46 Although Du Bois later expressed disappointment with Morel’s race-baiting in The Crisis ([Du Bois] 1921, 24), he simultaneously lauded him in the pages of The Nation (Du Bois 1921). Schenker read and admired three essays by Francesco Saverio Nitti, former Italian prime minister and a supporter of Morel’s campaign. The liberal Nitti also employed racist rhetoric in his impassioned arguments condemning the Treaty of Versailles and advocating pan-European cooperation (Wigger 2017, 61–71; Reinders 1968, 25). For Schenker, Nitti was all the more believable because he was “not a Germaniac, not a pan-German, not völkisch” [kein “Germaniak,” kein “Alldeutscher,” “Völkischer” ist] (SDO September 25, 1922, letter to Halm). Nitti’s writings reinforced Schenker’s outrage at a report in the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung about French brothels in the occupied Rhineland, which he characterized as “immoral and shameless” (WAZ 1919; 46 “The French militarists whose schemes in Europe are a menace to the world, inform us that they intend to have a standing army of 200,000 colored troops in France, of whom 100,000 will be primitive Africans. They will be used by the French militarists all over Europe in pursuance of their avowed purposes. . . . Negroes, Malagasies, Berbers, Arabs, flung into Europe by the hundred thousand in the interests of a capitalist and militarist order. That is the prospect—nay, that is the actuality—which the forces of organized European labor have got to face, and face squarely” (E. D. Morel, quoted in [Du Bois] 1920, 142). See also Campbell (2014, 478).
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SDO February 13, 1919). Sadly, in Der Tonwille 5, Schenker echoed the defamatory claims presented by both Morel and Nitti, accusing the French of “dragging our girls and women off to your Negro brothels” (Schenker 2004a, 223). In retrospect, the Rhineland scandal and Schenker’s response illustrate, not the ascendancy of fascism, but the ideological deficiencies of the European Left—its willingness, as an organized movement, to entertain clearly racist notions—during the early 1920s, and the highly circumscribed notions of internationalism current in Europe at that time.
Schenker in America Many scholars have described Schenker’s theory of levels as hierarchical (Morgan 2014; Schachter 2001, 13; Cook 2007, 153, 265). Ewell has extended this line of reasoning, employing analogical thinking to contend that Schenker’s musical hierarchies reflect a belief in racial hierarchies (Ewell 2020a, [4.5.4]). The association of Schenker’s theories with hierarchical thinking reflects a key element in the American reception of Schenker, in which his theories were recast—in some ways deliberately misunderstood—in order to conform to the shibboleths of the American academic world. Many of Schenker’s American disciples replaced his dynamic biological metaphors, images of growth, with static architectural terms such as Salzer’s “fundamental structure,” in what Robert Snarrenberg characterized as nothing less than a betrayal (Snarrenberg 1994). Schenker himself denounced the idea that his theory posited a series of hierarchies. In a 1924 diary entry, he objected to what he considered Furtwängler’s exaggerated emphasis on the background at the expense of the foreground in a performance of Haydn’s The Creation: “He . . . does not know that the rights of the foreground must be upheld, for which the [Ur]Linie is working in the background” (SDO December 16, 1924; Hust 2010, 8). In his 1931 letter draft to Furtwängler, Schenker made clear that he considered the foreground and background to be linked like the roots and the leaves of a plant. He also asserted that they parallel similar structures in verbal languages: The image of the Ursatz and its layers that I offer has its logic only in the connection to a content, whereby it is completely immaterial whether one views it as moving from the simplest thing in the background to the most colorful thing in the foreground, or conversely from the most colorful in the foreground to the simplest in the background. That indicates at the same time that the background is present always and everywhere in the foreground, i.e., the background proceeds always in tandem with the foreground. . . . [A]t the very moment a growth process gets underway, what is burgeoning submits itself to that selfsame “logic” that adheres to my image. . . . Artists who work with language can also confirm this process from their own creative activity. They, too, operate with a certain
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something that causes the foreground to grow with the simplest foundation [das den Vordergrund mit einfachster Grundlegung wachsen läßt]. (SDO November 11–16, 1931, letter to Furtwängler) (italics added)
In Der freie Satz, Schenker reiterated his insistence that his theory was not hierarchical: “The concept of the fundamental structure [Ursatz] . . . presents only the strictly logical precision in the relationship between simple tone-successions and more complex ones. Indeed, it shows this precision of relationship not only from the simple to the more complex, but also in reverse, from the complex to the simple” (Schenker 1979, 18). Music theorist and philosopher Viktor Zuckerkandl, a student of Schenker, employed his biological metaphors in lectures about his theories at the Eranos conferences in 1960 and 1963 (Tan 2020). Perhaps the most egregious of all accusations against the Schenkerians are the assertions that Schenker’s disciples were white German racists who disseminated his musical theories in America by deceptively hiding their racist character and origins.In this retelling, the pedagogical work of the American Schenkerians during the 1930s paralleled the activities of the pro-Nazi German-American Bund (Ewell 2020a, [4.3.6], note 17). Fritz Kuhn, leader of the Bund, spoke at the conclusion of its February 1939 rally at Madison Square Garden: “You all have heard of me through the Jewish-controlled press as a creature with horns, a cloven hoof, and a long tail. We . . . demand that our government shall be returned to the American people who founded it. If you ask what we are actively fighting for under our charter, first a socially just, white Gentile-ruled United States” (Curry 2017). Is it plausible to associate Schenker’s refugee students, all of whom were Jews or of Jewish descent, with the American Nazis? Not surprisingly, the actual situation was the reverse. When they came to America, Schenker’s students discovered, not surprisingly, that they were “othered,” just as they had been in Europe. Most major American universities refused to hire Jews, due to entrenched antisemitic attitudes among faculty and administrators (Norwood 2009; Leff 2019). Weisse arrived in 1931, Jonas in 1934, Oster in 1938, Salzer in 1939 (Koslovsky 2009, 45), and Zuckerkandl in 1940. When Weisse joined the music faculty at Columbia University during the 1930s, he was hired only as an adjunct lecturer, despite a doctorate from the University of Vienna, and was not permitted to teach Schenker’s theories.47 In 1939, when the Columbia music department urgently needed to augment its musicology faculty, Paul Henry Lang wrote a letter to Dean of Graduate Faculties George B. Pegram, complaining that he would have to hire another Jewish scholar: “In the present emergency, I am 47 In a letter to Schenker, Weisse stated that he “smuggles” Schenker’s theory into his Columbia lectures (SDO March 15, 1934, letter from Weisse to Schenker). See Berry (2003, 114–15); Jackson (2010, 130–32).
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unable to find anyone competent enough to fill the position . . . and must fall back to the solution resorted to by Harvard, Yale and New York University, namely to engage one of the German Jewish refugee scholars” (Lang 1939).48 During the prewar years, Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of Columbia University, showed great courtesy to representatives of Nazi Germany (Norwood 2009, 76–78). During the 1930s, the political orientation of the organized community of Jewish musicians in New York could not have been further from the attitudes of the Columbia faculty and administration. In April 1934, Mailamm, the Jewish musicians’ organization, arranged a reception in New York to celebrate Arnold Schoenberg’s recent arrival in the United States. At the reception, Schoenberg spoke about “The Jewish Situation” (Schoenberg [1934] 2003), and the Hall Johnson Singers performed spirituals. Mischa Elman, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, and Louis Gruenberg were present, while messages from Ernest Bloch, George Gershwin, and Rubin Goldmark were read to the gathering (Heskes 1997, 307). In 1934, to invite a black American group to perform at such an event was the exception, not the rule.
Some Concluding Thoughts In this essay, I have attempted to demonstrate that Heinrich Schenker’s Jewish identity was central to his understanding of the concepts of race and nation. As a stigmatized Jew, he wished to gain acceptance for his musical theories as a part of the German tradition, which he conceived in linguistic and cultural terms, while rejecting ethnic and religious criteria. Schenker embraced the doctrines of German cultural nationalism developed by German-Jewish scholars of the previous generation as the basis for his admittance to the world of European high culture. After World War I, Schenker espoused an authoritarian politics because he judged that there was no other viable alternative in continental Europe. His harsh view of the French Republic was founded, at least in part, on the eruption of French illiberalism generated by the Dreyfus case, to which he returned again and again in his diary. Likewise, his animus toward Russia was a response to its government’s brutal, systematic persecution of Jews over many decades. Schenker, like most Central European Jews, vainly put his trust in the willingness of the German and Austrian governments to protect Jewish civil and political rights. Schenker was not an “anti-racist,” nor should anyone expect him to have been. He was, inevitably, a product of his place and time. Given those strictures, Schenker was more enlightened in his attitudes toward the concepts of race and nation than many of his contemporaries, despite his endless fulminations against Germany’s enemies, real 48 Lang hired the Jewish Erich Hertzmann.
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and imagined, and his hegemonic German cultural philosophy. Returned to its context, his violent language is revealed as a journalistic commonplace of his day, rather than the exception that seemingly demonstrates his bigotry. Nevertheless, Schenker’s students rejected his politics—a product of the Central European cauldron in which he lived—not due to duplicity, but because they thoroughly disliked them.49 Fifty years ago, as a teenager, I studied with a student of Hans Weisse, who volunteered his own embarrassment about Schenker’s vociferous advocacy of German nationalism. My teacher had undoubtedly received his information directly from Weisse himself. Schenker was not a self-hating Jew (see Neely 2020, at 33:35) nor an admirer of Hitler, as has recently been alleged. His letters and diaries copiously document his pride in his Jewish identity, his rejection of völkisch politics, and his firmly anti-Nazi attitudes. If Schenker had really been an American-style racist, it is hard to imagine how that might have complicated the reception of his musical theories in American academia during the 1930s, when major universities eagerly reached out to their German counterparts and anti-Nazi student demonstrators were expelled (Norwood 2009). In the past quarter-century, far from endeavoring to hide evidence of Schenker’s ideological failings, Schenker scholars have engaged in an unprecedented documentation and examination of his life, seemingly prioritizing that project in preference to his theoretical work, which remains poorly understood. The recent American controversy over Schenker is fundamentally based on a denial of Jewish history and identity. As Barbara Whittle has pointed out, “To present Schenker’s career as more or less normal, and his behavior as merely irascible and overbearing, is to treat as irrelevant the vast social trauma in which he found himself caught up at a particularly sensitive moment. This was the point at which the confrontation between the medieval world of quietist Judaism and post-Enlightenment, secular, technological civilization was beginning to show its potential for catastrophe” (Whittle 1994, 17). Schenker devised a musico-historical narrative, rooted, not in a belief in Germanic racial superiority that he could not possibly claim, but rather in his anxiety about the future of German culture, as well as his uncertain status as a Jew within the multi-national Dual Monarchy, and later, the Austrian state. Tragically, Schenker and his students, stigmatized as Jews both in Germany and the United States, have retrospectively been relabeled as “white Germans”—a historical impossibility—as a prelude to accusations that they created musical theories designed to reinforce the toxic, ultimately genocidal politics of their persecutors. Only by rejecting a spurious presentism and grasping the foreignness of the past will we be able to grasp the significance of Schenker’s strange story, so remote from the contem49 Oswald Jonas later recalled, “And the Schenker circle doesn’t roar with laughter at such ignorance, obstinacy, and gross distortions? Insane blindness turns Schenker as well into a victim of the war [World War I]” (Rothgeb 2006, 116; Rothfarb 2018, 41).
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porary American experience: his futile attempt, as a Jew, to save German culture from the depredations of modern German racialist nationalism.
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_______. July 5, 1933. Diary entry by Schenker. http://www.schenkerdocuments online.org/documents/diaries/OJ-04-06_1933-07/r0005.html. _______. July 25, 1933. Handwritten letter from Schenker to Hoboken. http://www. schenkerdocumentsonline.org/documents/correspondence/OJ-89-6_9.html. _______. July 28, 1933. Diary entry by Schenker. http://www.schenkerdocuments online.org/documents/diaries/OJ-04-06_1933-07/r0028.html. _______. August 4, 1933. Diary entry by Schenker. http://www.schenkerdocuments online.org/documents/diaries/OJ-04-06_1933-08/r0004.html. _______. August 5, 1933. Typewritten letter (carbon copy), from Hoboken to Schenker. http://www.schenkerdocumentsonline.org/documents/correspondence/OJ-896_10.html. _______. November 10, 1933. Diary entry by Schenker. http://www.schenkerdocuments online.org/documents/diaries/OJ-04-07_1933-11/r0010.html. _______. November 28, 1933. Diary entry by Schenker. http://www.schenkerdocuments online.org/documents/diaries/OJ-04-07_1933-11/r0028.html. _______. December 11, 1933. Diary entry by Schenker. http://www.schenkerdocuments online.org/documents/diaries/OJ-04-07_1933-12/r0011.html. _______. December 21, 1933. Handwritten letter from Schenker to Jonas. http://www. schenkerdocumentsonline.org/documents/correspondence/OJ-5-18-33.html. _______. January 5, 1934. Typewritten letter (carbon copy) from Hoboken to Schenker. http://www.schenkerdocumentsonline.org/documents/correspondence/OJ-897_1.html. _______. January 13, 1934. Handwritten letter from Schenker to Hoboken. http:// www.schenkerdocumentsonline.org/documents/correspondence/OJ-89-7_2.html. _______. March 15, 1934. Handwritten letter from Hans Weisse to Schenker. http:// www.schenkerdocumentsonline.org/documents/correspondence/OJ-15-16_94. html. _______. April 2, 1934. Diary entry by Schenker. http://www.schenkerdocuments online.org/documents/diaries/OJ-04-07_1934-04/r0002.html. _______. June 12, 1934. Handwritten letter from Schenker to Hoboken. http://www. schenkerdocumentsonline.org/documents/correspondence/OJ-89-7_9.html. _______. June 29, 1934. Diary entry by Schenker. http://www.schenkerdocuments online.org/documents/diaries/OJ-04-07_1934-06/r0029.html.
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_______. August 2, 1934. Handwritten letter from Schenker to Jonas. http://www. schenkerdocumentsonline.org/documents/correspondence/OJ-5-18-49.html. _______. September 26, 1934. Handwritten letter from Furtwängler to Schenker. http://www.schenkerdocumentsonline.org/documents/correspondence/OJ-1116_15.html. _______. September 29, 1934. Diary entry by Schenker. http://www.schenkerdocuments online.org/documents/diaries/OJ-04-07_1934-09/r0030.html. Schenker, Heinrich. (1910) 1987. Counterpoint (Kontrapunkt). Vol. 1. Translated by John Rothgeb and Jürgen Thym. Edited by John Rothgeb. New York: Schirmer Books. _______. (1912) 1992. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Translated and edited by John Rothgeb. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. _______. 1921. Der Tonwille: Flugblätter zum Zeugnis unwandelbarer Gesetze der Tonkunst. Vol. 1. Vienna; Leipzig: Tonwille Flugblätterverlag. _______. (1921–23) 2004a. Der Tonwille: Pamphlets in Witness of the Immutable Laws of Music. Vol 1: Issues 1–5. Translated by Ian Bent et al. Edited by William Drabkin. Oxford: Oxford University Press. _______. (1921) 2004b. “The Mission of German Genius.” In Schenker, Der Tonwille. Vol 1: Issues 1–5. Translated by Ian Bent. Edited by William Drabkin, 3–20. New York: Oxford University Press. _______. (1925) 1994. The Masterwork in Music: A Yearbook (Das Meisterwerk in der Musik. Ein Jahrbuch). Vol. 1. Translated by Ian Bent et al. Edited by William Drabkin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. _______. (1930) 1997. The Masterwork in Music: A Yearbook (Das Meisterwerk in der Musik. Ein Jahrbuch). Vol. 3. Translated by Ian Bent et al. Edited by William Drabkin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. _______. (1935) 1979. Free Composition (Der freie Satz). Translated and edited by Ernst Oster. New York: Longman. _______. 2005a. “The Decline of the Art of Composition: A Technical-Critical Study.” Translated by William Drabkin. Music Analysis 24, no. 1/2: 33–129. _______. 2005b. “Über den Niedergang der Kompositionskunst: Eine technisch-kritische Untersuchung.” Transcribed and edited by William Drabkin. Music Analysis 24, no. 1/2: 131–232.
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I N DE X OF COM P OSER S A N D AU T HOR S (Pages given in bold refer to Vol. 2)
Adorno, Theodor 145, 152, 156–57 Alpern, Wayne 2 Aquinas, Thomas 224, 230 Aristotle 223–24, 230 Arndt, Matthew 265 Asch, Sholem 250 Bach, C. P. E. 2, 266, 268 Sonata for Keyboard No. 3 in F minor, Wq. 57 59; 49 Bach, J. S. Fugue in C minor, BWV 847 50; 37, 112–13 Fugue in E minor, BWV 855 41; 24 Fugue in B minor, BWV 869 85 Fugue in B! minor, BWV 891 198 Invention in D minor, BWV 775 50; 36 Italian Concerto in F major, BWV 971 28; 17 Little Prelude in C major, BWV 924 31; 19 Little Prelude in D minor, BWV 926 31 Organ Prelude in E minor, BWV 548 24 Prelude in C minor, BWV 546 6 Prelude in F# minor, BWV 859 190 Sinfonia No. 9 in F minor, BWV 795 166 Sonata No. 3 in C major for Unaccompanied Violin, BWV 1005 11; 8 Barcaba, Peter 147, 160, 162 Barkan, Elazar 244 Bartók, Béla String Quartet No. 4, Sz. 91 245 Beach, David 87 Beethoven, Ludwig van
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Für Elise, WoO 59 28 Piano Sonata in G major, Op. 14, No. 2, III 31 Piano Sonata in D major, Op. 28 10; 14 Piano Sonata in G major, Op. 31, No. 1 5 Piano Sonata in F minor, Op. 57 (“Appassionata”) 31 Piano Sonata in E! major, Op. 81a 62; 51 Piano Sonata in A major, Op. 101 29, 31; 17–18 Piano Sonata in C minor, Op. 111 246, 254 Sehnsucht, WoO 134, No. 1 48; 33 Sonata for Cello and Piano in A major, Op. 69 60 Symphony No. 3 in E! major, Op. 55 (“Eroica”) 12, 44; 12 Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67, III 47, 194; 32 Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68, (“Pastorale”) 62; 50 Bekker, Paul 189 Bent, Ian 21, 255 Bloch, Ernest 245, 252, 284 Boas, Franz 247 Boenke, Patrick 160 Bon, Anna Sonata for Cembalo in B! major, Op. 2, No. 2 45 Bösendorfer, Ludwig 214 Botstein, Leon 246, 248 Brahms, Johannes 188, 268, 272 Intermezzo in A minor, Op. 76, No. 7 42
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304 Index of Composers and Authors Intermezzo in C# minor, Op 117, No. 3 51–52; 38 String Quartet in C minor, Op. 51, No. 1 194 Symphony No. 3 in F major, Op. 90 51; 39–41 Brentano, Lujo 215 Brown, Matthew 7, 172 Bruckner, Anton 2, 22, 188, 194 Brüstle, Christa 190 Bunzl, Matti 247 Burkhart, Charles 78 Burnham, Scott 135 Burstein, Poundie 11 Butler, Nicholas Murray 284 Cadwallader, Allen 166 Caplin, William 12 Chopin, Frédéric Etude in C major, Op. 10, No. 1 48; 34 Etude in G! major, Op. 10, No. 5 43 Etude in F major, Op. 10, No. 8 9 Etude in C minor, Op. 10, No. 12 9, 94 Mazurka in A! major, Op. 59, No. 2 73–78, 81–82; 56, 58–59 Cohen, Hermann 253 Cook, Nicholas 278 Cross, Jonathan 162 Cube, Felix-Eberhard von 146, 269, 271–72, 274 Dahlhaus, Carl 148, 154–55, 158, 166, 170 Dahms, Walter 149 Damschroder, David 14–15 Deisinger, Marko 161, 171 Demelius, Gustav 211, 215 Deutsch, Otto Erich 164, 250, 270 Diederen, Veronica 173 Disraeli, Benjamin 244, 250 Dollfuß, Engelbert 261, 273 Downes, Olin 245–46 Drabkin, William 21, 152, 255
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Dresdner, Albert 249 DuBois, J. A. A. 75 Du Bois, W. E. B. 245, 281 Duguit, Léon 212 Eibner, Franz 146–47, 160 Ewell, Philip 279, 282 Exner, Adolph 211, 215 Eybl, Martin 147, 160–61, 165, 170–71, 195, 248, 259 Farwell, Arthur 277 Federhofer, Hellmut 146–47, 152, 154, 161–62, 164, 195 Fink-Mennel, Evelyn 160, 165 Fladt, Hartmut 162, 165 Förster, Emanuel Aloys 6 Frisius, Rudolf 152 Froebe, Folker 163, 171 Furtwängler, Wilhelm 248, 265, 267, 270–75, 280, 282 Giesen, Matthias 161 Gjerdingen, Robert 169–71 Goebbels, Joseph 270–71 Goldberg, Halina 75–76 Gropius, Walter 249 Gross, Gustav 215 Grünhut, Karl 215 Grunsky, Karl 195 Haas, Bernhard 147, 161–62, 166, 173 Haas, Bruno 168–69 Hadow, William Henry 279 Halm, August 187–201 Hammer, Victor 269 Handel, George Frideric Concerto for Organ in B! major, Op. 7, No. 1, HWV 306 29 Suite in D minor, Gigue, HWV 437 50; 36 Hart, H. L. A. 226 Hartmann, Heinrich 147
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Index of Composers and Authors Hasse, Johann Adolphe Overture I to Alcide al Bivio 63–64; 51 Hauptmann, Moritz 22, 27, 33, 169 Haydn, Franz Joseph The Creation Hob. XXI:2 282 String Quartet in C major, Op. 76, Hob. III:77 (“Emperor”) 13 Symphony No. 23 in G major, Hob. I:23 47 Symphony No. 56 in C major, Hob. I:56 64–66; 52–54 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 153, 225 Hein, Ethan 171 Heinzelmann, Sigrun 161 Hertzka, Emil 251 Hiller, Ferdinand 75 Hoboken, Anthony van 270, 273–77, 279 Hofmann, Franz 211, 215 Holtmeier, Ludwig 152, 162–63 Hust, Christoph 164 Inama-Sternegg, Karl 215 Jackendoff, Ray 79 Jacobs, Joseph 245 Jellinek, Georg 212, 215, 217–21, 225, 228–30 Jhering, Rudolf von 224–25, 230 Jonas, Oswald 7, 146, 151, 160, 252, 270, 273, 275, 283 Joseph, Franz 212 Justinian, Emperor 210–11, 226, 229–30, 232 Kalbeck, Max 211, 214 Kaminsky, Peter 129–31 Kauders, Albert 278–79 Kaufmann, Harald 147, 157 Keiler, Allan 15 Kirnberger, Johann Philipp 3, 5, 85–88, 90–92, 95–96 Kobylańska, Krystyna 74 Köhler, Rafael 190, 201 Kolneder, Walter 148
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Korsyn, Kevin 259 Kraus, Karl 261 Krebs, Harald 1 Kretzschmar, Hermann 189 Kuhn, Fritz 283 Kurth, Ernst 148, 189, 250 Laffitte, Jean-Paul 212 Lang, Paul Henry 283 Laufer, Edward 109 Lavater, Johann Caspar 156 Lazarus, Moritz 246–47 Lerdahl, Fred 79 Lester, Joel 87 Levin, Robert D. 135 Lewis, David Levering 245 Liszt, Franz “Der du von dem Himmel bist,” S. 279 30 Long, Marguerite 121 Louis, Rudolf 2 Luhmann, Niklas 168–69 Luong, Vivian 265 Lustkandl, Wenzel 215 Maassen, Friedrich 211, 215 Mann, Michael 152 Mann, Thomas 261, 281 Manuel, Roland 121 Marpurg, Friedrich Wilhelm 3 Mason, Daniel Gregory 277 Maximilian I, Emperor 264 Mayer, Salomon 215 Mayrberger, Carl 2 Mendelssohn, Cécile 74–76 Mendelssohn, Fanny 73–74 Mendelssohn, Felix Song without Words, Op. 53, No. 4 49; 35 Song without Words, Op. 62, No. 1 73–82; 56–57 Menger, Anton 215 Messiaen, Olivier 121 Metternich, Klemens von 219
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306 Index of Composers and Authors Mokrejs, John 7 Morel, Edmund D. 281 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Clarinet Quintet in A major, K. 581 121 Piano Sonata No. 1 in C major, K. 279, II 30 Piano Sonata in A minor, K. 310 10, 30; 7 Piano Sonata in B! major, K. 333 135–42 Piano Sonata in D major, K. 576, II 29 String Quartet No. 21 in D major, K. 575, III 28 Mussolini, Benito 260 Myers, Taylor 263 Neumann, Friedrich 146 Nichols, Roger 124 Nitti, Francesco Saverio 281 Onslow, George 278 Oppel, Reinhard 145, 269, 273 Oster, Ernst 32, 101, 112, 138 Painter, Karen 278 Pegram, George B. 283 Pfaff, Leopold 215 Pfitzner, Hans 261, 276 Plato 223, 230, 266 Plum, Karl-Otto 146, 154 Pobedonostsev, Konstantin 254 Polth, Michael 162–69, 172–73 Rameau, Jean-Philippe 1–3, 5, 16, 86–87, 96, 219, 268 Ratz, Erwin 146 Ravel, Maurice Frontispice, M. 70 131 L’Enfant et les sortilèges, M. 71 130–31 Piano Concerto in G major, M. 82 121–30; 96–105 Piano Trio in A minor, M. 67 131 Sonata for Violin and Cello (Duo Sonata), M. 73 120; 95
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String Quartet in F major, M. 35 131 Valses nobles et sentimentales, M. 61 131 Violin Sonata No. 2, M. 77 130 Rawls, John 226, 230 Rehding, Alexander 191 Respighi, Ottorino 260–61 Riehl, Wilhelm 278–79 Riemann, Hugo 7–8, 22, 25, 28, 33, 149, 151, 158, 167 Riepel, Joseph 57 Riezler, Walter 149, 155–56, 188, 193–94 Rohringer, Stefan 163, 166, 168–69, 171, 173 Rohrmeier, Martin 164, 172 Rosenfeld, Paul 245 Rothfarb, Lee 2, 188–89, 192–93, 198 Rothgeb, John 11, 33 Rothstein, William 78, 119 Russ, Michael 124 Rutini, G. M. 63 Sonata for Cembalo in E major, Op. 2, No. 5 45 Salzer, Felix 112, 152, 251, 273, 275, 282 Savigny, Friedrich Carl von 217 Scarlatti, Domenico Sonata in D minor, K. 1 2 Schachter, Carl 119, 171, 227, 231 Schäfke, Rudolph 189 Schmitt, Florent 121 Schnitzler, Arthur 253 Schoenberg, Arnold 2, 6, 8, 85, 228, 284 Schopenhauer, Arthur 263 Schorske, Carl 247 Schrutka, Emil 215 Schubert, Franz Octet in F major, D. 803 101, 113 String Quintet in C major, D. 956 113 String Quintet in A major (“Trout”), D. 667 113 Symphony No. 1 in D major, D. 82 104–5; 85 Symphony No. 2 in B!major, D. 125 106–7; 86–87
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Index of Composers and Authors Symphony No. 3 in D major, D. 200 109, 111; 88, 90 Symphony No. 4 in C minor (“Tragic”), D. 417 107, 109–10; 87, 89 Symphony No. 5 in B! major, D. 485 102; 84, 88 Symphony No. 6 in C major, D. 589 105–6; 86 Symphony No. 8 in B minor (“Unfinished”), D. 759 101, 111–12; 90–91 Symphony No. 9 in C major (“Great”), D. 944 102–3, 110; 84, 89 Schuijer, Michiel 165 Schumann, Robert “Aus meinen Tränen spriessen”, Op. 48, No. 2 60–61 Schwab-Felisch, Oliver 163, 165, 172 Sechter, Simon 2–9 “Theme” with Variations 6–7; 4 Sibelius, Jean 245 Siegel, Hedi 10 Siegel, Heinrich 215 Simon, Albert 173 Smith, Peter H. 39 Snarrenberg, Robert 282 Solie, Ruth 201 Spitta, Philipp 85 Steinthal, Heymann 246–47, 253 Straus, Joseph N. 118 Suppan, Wolfgang 161
307
Volkov, Shulamit 247 Wagenseil, G. C. 63 Sonata for Harpsichord (with violin accompaniment) in E! major, Op. 1, No. 1 46 Wagner, Richard 2, 262, 264, 266, 268, 271, 274 Wahlberg, Wilhelm 215 Wason, Robert 1, 21 Wassermann, Jakob 248 Weber, Gottfried 4, 7 Weigl, Karl 268 Weil, Arnold 252 Weisse, Hans 87, 89–90, 96, 254–55, 273, 283, 285 Whittle, Barbara 285 Wingert, Hans 146–47 Wozonig, Thomas 146 Zeissberg, Heinrich 215 Zhishman, Josef 215 Zimmermann, Robert 215 Zuckerkandl, Viktor 164, 283
Tacitus, Publius Cornelius 224, 230 Thuille, Ludwig 2 Thun-Hohenstein, Leo 212, 215 Toch, Ernst 169 Tomaschek, Johann 215 Ulpian (Domitius Ulpianus) 210 Unger, Josef 212 Violin, Moriz 251, 271–72 Vogler, Georg Joseph 3–8
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I N DE X OF SU BJ EC T S 5–6 technique 14–15, 78, 80, 106, 128–29 Aesthetic justice 210, 216, 228–29, 232 Aesthetic qualities of music corporeality (Körperlichkeit) 191 spirituality (Geistigkeit) 192 Artwork fundamental truths of (Urtatsachen) 193 sensual manifestation of (sinnliche Erscheinung) 193 Basso continuo 3 Bildung 213, 247 Black Americans 276–77 Bodleian Library 74 Central Powers 253 Christianity 243, 250, 259, 268 Combined species 95 Composing-out (Auskomponierung) 4, 7, 9, 22, 28–34, 117, 128, 199 Conflicting downbeats 78, 80 Consonant support (CS) 90, 102, 106 Constitutional law (Staatsrechtslehre) 218 Continuous one-part structure 108–11 Corpus Juris Civilis 210 Deutschtum (Germanness) 248, 253 Development (Entwicklung) 32 Digest of Justinian 210 Displacement 119–24 Divisions (Gliederungen) 10, 40–41, 44
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Dominant–tonic axis 56 Der Dreiklang 145 Dreyfus Affair 255–56, 262 Dual monarchy 244, 249, 250, 253–54, 259, 285 Foreground music 193–94 Fractal structure 26–27, 31–34 Fühlungnahme (contact or rapport) 81 Functionality basic concepts 166 theoretical background 168 Fundamental bass 2–3, 8–12, 16, 21–26, 34, 87, 90–91, 95–96 Galant recapitulation 57 Genius 149, 151, 187, 190, 193, 197, 247, 256, 258, 263–66, 271, 276, 280 German individuality (germanischer Individualismus) 221 Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie (GMTH) 161, 163, 165 Gesetz des nächsten Weges (principle of least motion) 23 Gesetzlichkeit (sovereignty of law) 222 Gleichschaltung (enforced conformity), Nazi concept of 273 Habsburg Empire 221, 247, 264 Jews 253, 259
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Index of Subjects monarchy 260 society 221, 229 state 259 Harmonic expansion 81 Harmonic state 7 Heiliges Dreieck (sacred triangle) 55 Hierarchy musical 11, 15, 32, 39, 40, 164, 20–83 racial 282 Horizontal fulfillment (horizontale Erfüllung) 32 Horizontalization (Horizontalisierung) 32, 153 Ideal types (Idealtypen) 218 Intermediate examinations (Zwischenexamen) 214 fundamentals (Zwischenfundamente) 25 harmonies 12–14 Interruption 63, 66, 100–110, 136 free 40–43, 46–52 strict 40, 43, 44–46 Institutes of Justinian 209–11, 232 Intervallic spaces (Tonräume) 230 Intervening spaces (Zwischenräume) 230 Jewish identity, Schenker’s 243, 250–52, 269, 275 Judaism (Judentum) 231, 250, 252–53, 259, 285 Jüdische Korrespondenz 256 Jurisprudence (Rechtstheorie) 212–13, 217, 222, 226, 228 Jus suum cuique tribuere (to give each his due) 229, 232 Justice (Gerechtigkeit) 210, 216 arithmetic 223, 225–26 classical theory of 223 corrective 226 distributive 226 for all (Justitia omnibus) 233 proportional 211, 223, 225–26 Schenkerian 232
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Just proportionality (Verhältnismäßigkeit) 221 Konsonantmachung 153 Law school transcript (Meldungsbuch), Schenker’s 213 Leaping passing tone 16 Legal consciousness (Rechtsbewusstsein) 215 philosophy (Rechtsphilosophie) 217 relationships (Rechtsverhältnisse) 216 spirit (Rechtsgeist) 220 Lineares Modell 170 Lower-fifth divider (Unterquintteiler) 7 Melodic fluency (fließender Gesang) 210 Menschenhumus 247–48 Metric expansion 77 Minority consciousness (Minoritätsgefühl) 220, 229 Modulation to the mediant 55, 73, 77, 82, 100 Motivic connection 78 content 28 elaboration 135 parallelisms 60, 88, 125 relationships 29, 119, 130 repetitions 29, 136 Musical relationships (Tonverhältnisse) 216 Musik-“Braunhemden” (musical brownshirts) 272 National Socialists 149–50, 272–73 Naturgegebenes (given by nature) 272 Nazis 145, 243, 246, 251, 261, 268–75, 277, 283 Nodal points (Knotenpunkte) 230 Non-tonic Stufen 56 Order civic (Rechtsordnung) 217 tonal (Tonordnung) 216
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Index of Subjects Pandects 210 Partimento perspective 13 Phenomenal accent 79 Phrase overlap 81 Phrase structure 76, 125, 191 Physiognomic characteristics 156 Primordial plan (Urplan) 31 tone row (Ton-Urreihe) 30 Professional practice of law (Rechtspraxis) 213 Prolongational span 15 Race, Schenker’s use of the term 246, 249, 251, 279 Rechtsstaat (law state) 222, 311 Gothic 222 principle 222 Teutonic 221, 222 Rigorosum (oral legal examinations) 214 Rhythmic normalization 119 Rule of the octave 12–13 Satzmodell 170–71 Scheindissonanz 128 Schenker Documents Online 2, 21,160, 164, 246 Schenker Lehrgang 145–47 Schenker reception 152, 164, 166, 173–74, 188 Schichtenlehre 147, 160–61, 165, 171–73 Scientificity 172 Sechter’s chain (sechtersche Kette) 4 Seufzer (“sigh”) figure 85 Sonata form minor variants 101–2 non-tonic return 101, 107, 110 Schenker’s conception of 102 tonic return functioning as V of IV 111 State examinations (Staatsprüfungen) 214 Steigerungspassage 129 Structural accents 79
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311
Stufe, Stufen 6, 9, 11, 13–15 Stufengang 6, 25, 42–43 Stufenkreis (harmonic circle/circuit) 7–8 Subdominant recapitulation 99, 108, 113 Superimposition 126–29 dissonant 119–20, 127, 129 Systematicity 153, 155, 157 Tension spans 278 Three theme/three key exposition 99, 106, 113 Tonal framework polar 55–56, 63, 66 solar 56–57, 61, 63, 66–67 Tonal lawgiver (musikalischer Gesetzgeber) 231 Tonicization 5–6, 47–48, 139–40 Treaty of St. Germain 251 Treaty of Versailles 281 Truth content 155, 157 Undivided structure 101, 112–13 Unfolding (Ausfaltung) 31–32, 34, 119, 123, 126 Unfurling (Auswicklung) 30, 32 Universal leveling (allgemeine Nivellirung) 220 Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien (mdw) 160 Upper-fifth divider (Oberquintteiler) 7, 11 Urlinie 10–14, 29–32, 34, 103, 155–56, 170, 188, 190, 192–93, 197, 199–200, 271, 274 Urpflanze 29 Vertauschung 24 Voice-leading transformation (Stimmführungsverwandlung) 13 Völkerpsychologie 246–47 Völkisch ideology 247, 269, 272, 281, 285 Volksverbundenes (connected to the people) 272–73 Wechseldominanten 7
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310 2
Index of Subjects World War I 1, 187, 249–50, 252–53, 256, 258–59, 261–63, 268, 281, 284 World War II 146, 151, 162 Zeugma 45–46, 53 Zufällige Accorde 24
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New Horizons in
Schenkerian Research Edited by
Allen Cadwallader • Karen M. Bottge Oliver Schwab-Felisch
OLMS
New Horizons in Schenkerian Research Vol. 2 Examples
New Horizons_Vol. 2_f.indb 1
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Studien und Materialien zur Musikwissenschaft Band 115.2
New Horizons_Vol. 2_f.indb 2
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New Horizons in Schenkerian Research Edited by Allen Cadwallader, Karen M. Bottge, Oliver Schwab-Felisch
Georg Olms Verlag Hildesheim | Zürich | New York
2022
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Titelei etc..indd 6
01.05.22 23:57
Vol. II Examples
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New Horizons_Vol. 2_f.indb 4
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Contents
1 Schenker and the Fundamental Bass
William Rothstein
2 Schenker and Sechter: A Discontinuous History
1
15
Martin Eybl
21
4 The “heilige Trapezoid ” and the Galant Recapitulation
43
L. Poundie Burstein
Carl Schachter
New Horizons_Vol. 2_f.indb 7
7 Schenker, Sonata Form, and the Schubert Symphonies
83
8 Displacement, Superimposition, and Dissonance in Ravel’s Late Style
93
Frank Samarotto
5 Chopin’s Mazurka, Op. 59, No. 2: A Tribute to Mendelssohn?
61
3 Schenker’s “Free Forms of Interruption” and the Strict: Toward a General Theory of Interruption
6 J. S. Bach’s Fugue in B minor, BWV 869: Rameau oder Schenker?
55
Eric Wen
David Beach
Sigrun Heinzelmann
9 Motivic Elaboration and Chromaticism in the Andante cantabile of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in B! Major, K. 333
107
11 Heinrich Schenker and August Halm
111
Roger Kamien
Patrick Boenke
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1 New Horizons_Vol. 2_f.indb 1
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2
William Rothstein
Example 1.1 Schenker, Fundamental Bass (Scarlatti, Sonata in D Minor, K. 1; Schenker 1906, 313)
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Schenker and the Fundamental Bass
Example 1.2
Example 1.3
Weber, Fundamental Bass Notated with Large and Small Roman Numerals (Weber [1830–32] 1846, Fig. 232)
Sechter, “Chain” of Descending Fifths (Sechter 1853, 21)
3
Example 1.4 Sechter, “Chain” of Descending Fifths with Chromaticism (Sechter 1853, 134)
New Horizons_Vol. 2_f.indb 3
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4
William Rothstein Example 1.5 Sechter, “Theme” with Variations (Sechter 1853, 158–59)
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Schenker and the Fundamental Bass
5
Example 1.6 Schenker, Root Motion by Descending Fifths (Schenker 1906, 346) Example 1.7 Schenker, Stufenkreise (Beethoven, Sonata Op. 31, No. 1, Adagio grazioso, bars 98–103; Schenker 1906, 348–49)
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6
William Rothstein Example 1.8 Schenker, Stufenkreise with Fundamental Bass (Bach, Prelude in C Minor, BWV 546, arr. Liszt, bars 17–25; Schenker 1906, 188)
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Schenker and the Fundamental Bass
7
Example 1.9 Schenker, Analysis of Mozart, K. 310, Andante (Schenker [1921–24] 2004–5, 1:58)
Example 1.10 Schenker, Auxiliary Cadences (Schenker [1935] 1979, Fig. 110/e1)
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8
William Rothstein Example 1.11 Schenker, Excerpt from a graph of Bach, BWV 1005, Largo (Schenker [1925] 1994, 33)
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Schenker and the Fundamental Bass
9
Example 1.12 Schenker, Graphs of Chopin, Op. 10, nos. 8 and 12 (Schenker [1932] 1969, 47, 55)
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10
William Rothstein Example 1.13 Schenker, Structural Bass Lines, 1926 (Schenker [1926] 1996, 8)
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Schenker and the Fundamental Bass
11
Example 1.14 Schenker, Structural Bass Lines, 1935 (Schenker [1935] 1979, Fig. 14)
New Horizons_Vol. 2_f.indb 11
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12
William Rothstein Example 1.15 Schenker, Graphs of Beethoven’s Eroica, finale (Schenker [1930] 1997, 52, Figs. 44–45)
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Schenker and the Fundamental Bass
Example 1.16
Example 1.17
Schenker, Graph of Haydn, Emperor Hymn (Schenker [1935] 1979, Fig. 39/3)
Schenker, Graph of Haydn, Emperor Hymn (Schenker [1935] 1979, Fig. 120/6a)
New Horizons_Vol. 2_f.indb 13
13
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14
William Rothstein Example 1.18 Damschroder, Analysis of Beethoven, Sonata Op. 28, first movement, bars 1–39 (Damschroder 2016, 7)
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2 New Horizons_Vol. 2_f.indb 15
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16
New Horizons_Vol. 2_f.indb 16
Martin Eybl Example 2.1
Example 2.2
Schenker (1906, 185, Fig. 149)
Sechter (1853, 37) (“statt”: instead of)
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Schenker and Sechter: A Discontinuous History 17
Example 2.3
Example 2.4
Schenker (1906, 338, Fig. 285) Johann Sebastian Bach, Italian Concerto, I, bars 30–34; “gleichsam B-dur”: quasi B-flat major
Schenker (1921, 35, Fig. 25: “Urlinie”) Beethoven Op. 101, II, bars 1–8; “Ausführung”: elaboration
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18
Martin Eybl Example 2.5 Schenker (1921, 52–53, Fig. 38) Beethoven Op. 101, III
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Schenker and Sechter: A Discontinuous History 19
Example 2.6 Schenker (1923, 3, Fig. 1 a–c) “The ground-plan of the prelude” BWV 924
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3 New Horizons_Vol. 2_f.indb 21
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22
Frank Samarotto Example 3.1 Two derivations of strict interruption (after Smith) a) derivation a) Type-1 Type-1 derivation ^ 3
I
New Horizons_Vol. 2_f.indb 22
b) derivation b) Type-2 Type-2 derivation ^ 2
V
^ 1
^ 3
^ 2
( ^3
^ 2
) ^1
I
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Toward a General Theory of Interruption
23
Example 3.2 Free Composition, Figure 91
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24
Frank Samarotto Example 3.3a
Example 3.3b
An unpublished note on Bach’s E minor Fugue, BWV 855
Bar 15 of the Fugue 15
schöner Durchgang im Zwisch[en]sp[iel] schöner Durchgang im Zwisch[en]sp[iel]
*
gis — gisg— g
New Horizons_Vol. 2_f.indb 24
*
*
Example 3.4.a
Example 3.4.b
Free Composition, Figure 131, 2
Free Composition, Figure 40, 7
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Toward a General Theory of Interruption
25
Example 3.4.c Free Composition, Figure 152, 3
Example 3.5a Free Composition, Figure 72
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Frank Samarotto
Example 3.5b Free Composition, Figure 87, 5
Example 3.5c The Masterwork in Music III, excerpt from the Eroica essay
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3^3
2^2
Toward a General Theory of Interruption
27
Example 3.6a
^1 1
V — II — – V – II
A generalized model of interruption
Bifurcation
3^3
^2 2
^1 1
II — – VV —– I I
3^3
(Equivalent structures)
2^2
^1 1
V — II — – V – II
Deletion
3^3 – ^22
II —– VV
(Interdependent structures)
^ 33
^ 22
^ 11
II — – VV —– I I
Prozeugma (repetition of opening element[s]) Prozeugma (repetition of opening element[s])
1) 1)
2) 2)
3) 3) (=division) (=division)
Mesozeugma (repetition of middle element[s]) Mesozeugma (repetition of middle element[s])
5) 5)
Example 3.6b
(=division?) (=division?)
Interruption as the rhetorical figure of zeugma
Hypozeugma (repetition of closing element[s]) Hypozeugma (repetition of closing element[s])
6) 6)
7) 7)
(=division?) (=division?)
New Horizons_Vol. 2_f.indb 27
4) 4)
8) 8)
I I
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28
Frank Samarotto Example 3.7a Beethoven, Für Elise, WoO 59
Example 3.7 b Mozart, K. 575, III
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Toward a General Theory of Interruption
29
Example 3.7c Mozart, K. 576, II
Example 3.7d Handel, Op. 7, No. 1, I
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30
Frank Samarotto Example 3.7e Liszt, “Der du von dem Himmel bist,” S. 279
Example 3.8a Mozart, K. 279, II
I
New Horizons_Vol. 2_f.indb 30
^ 5
^ 4
1
2
^ 3
^ 4
^ 2
4=2!
3
II
^ 3
6
6
V4
5 3
^ 2
^ 1
3
I
6
4
6
II V 4
5 3
I
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Toward a General Theory of Interruption
31
Example 3.8b Beethoven, Piano Sonata, Op. 14, No. 2, III ^ 5 ^ 5
38 3 8 3 38 8
9
^ 5 ^ 5 ^ ^
1 1
( ) (
2 2
3 3
4
1
4
1
2 2
3
4
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
3
4
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
)
V7 V7
I I 17
^ 5 ^ 5
17
1 1
New Horizons_Vol. 2_f.indb 31
^ 4 ^ 4
9
2 2
^ 4 ^ 4
^ 3 ^ 3
^ 2 ^ 2
(
)
(
)
^ 1 ^ 1
3
4
5
6
3
4
5
6
I I
II V4 6 6 II V4
6
6
5 3 5 3
I I
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32
Frank Samarotto Example 3.8c Beethoven, Symphony No. 5, Op. 67, III 20
60
38
^ 5
72
^ 4
^ 4
^ 5
130
^ 4
^ 3
^ 2
^ 1
D C
div.
III
I
New Horizons_Vol. 2_f.indb 32
=5
VII
6
V7
I
IV V
6 5 4
I
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Toward a General Theory of Interruption
33
Example 3.9a Beethoven, Sehnsucht, WoO 134 8
5
^ 5
^ 5
I
New Horizons_Vol. 2_f.indb 33
7
III
^ 5
I
I6
^ 4
^ 3
IV V
^ 2
8 7 6 5 4
^ 1
I
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34
Frank Samarotto Example 3.9b
Details of B Section
Details of B Section in C major, Op. 10, No. 1. Above: Details of B Section. Below: Overview of Whole Piece Chopin, Details of BEtude Section
A A A ^ 3 ^ ^3 3
B B 17 B
A' 25
17 17
25 25
7
B B
A' ^ A' 3
3 ^ ^3 3
I I I
New Horizons_Vol. 2_f.indb 34
III III III
I
65
^ ^3 3
I I
65 65
III III III
10
10 10 10
III
III III III
Overview of Whole Piece Overview of Whole Piece Overview PieceA' A of Whole B
A A ^
7=6 7 =6 7 =6
6 6
I II
47 47
35 35
6 7 7
47
35
Coda Coda Coda ^ 3
^ ^3 3
^ 2
^ ^2 2
^ 1
^ 3
A' A' ^ ^3 3
10 10
III III
I
II
^ ^1 1
II V I V I II V V II V V II II
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Toward a General Theory of Interruption
35
Example 3.9c Mendelssohn, Song without Words, Op. 53, No. 4 B B
A A
A A
10 10
^ (3) ^ (3)
^ ^5 5
NN NN
II 6 II 6
I I
V V
I I
^ (3) ^ (3)
I I
New Horizons_Vol. 2_f.indb 35
^ (3) ^ (3)
^ (3) ^ (3)
6 46 4
III III
5 5
I I
Coda Coda 26
A A 18 18
18 18
26
^ ^5 5
NN NN
II 6 II 6
V V
I I
III III
^ (3) ^ (3)
7 IV 7 V IV V
^ ^2 2
^ ^1 1
I I
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36
Frank Samarotto Example 3.10a Handel, Gigue, HWV 437 7
10
^ 5
^ 5 ^ 4
^ 3
^ 2
^ 1
(V)
I
III
6
I
6 5 3
IV V 4
I
Example 3.10b J. S. Bach, Invention in D minor, BWV 775 18 18
^ ^3 3
29 29
46 46
38 38
^ 3^ 3
^ ^3 3
V V
I I
New Horizons_Vol. 2_f.indb 36
III III
III III
I I
51 51
^ 3^ 3
6
V 46 V4
^ 2^ 2
5 5
^ 1^ 1
I I
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Toward a General Theory of Interruption
37
Example 3.10c J. S. Bach, Fugue in C minor, WTC I, BWV 847
^ 3
^ 3
9
9
^ 3
^ 3
13
I I
22
22
^ 3
^ 3
25
I I
29
25
^ 2
(III)(III)
7 10 107
17
V V
III III
10 107
New Horizons_Vol. 2_f.indb 37
17
13
^ ^ 2 1
22
22
^ 3
^ 3
NN NN
I I
29
^ 1
7
V 7V 7
I I
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38
Frank Samarotto A Antecedent
A Example Antecedent
Consequent
5
10
^ 3.11 3
^ 2 5
^ 3
Consequent
IN
cover tones Brahms, Intermezzo, Op 117, No. 3, middle section ^ ^ ^
3
cover tones
A
2
^ 3
^ 3
^ Antecedent3
1
cover tones 1
2 2
^ 3
^ 3
3 3
I1
1
2
4
3 3
6 4 2 4
6 4 42 expansion
(
IB B
10
10
^ (3)
^ 3
B B
expansion
[
^ (3) ^ (3)
V
V
New Horizons_Vol. 2_f.indb 38
7 5
V 6 III
V III
6
7 5
(
)
I
(
)
[
V
15
^ (3)
^ 2
6
NN
6
^ 2
NN
^ (3)
A'
25
^ 3
^ 2
25
NN
^ 3
^ 2
^ 2
^ 2
A'
^ 1
^ 1
25
A'
20
NN
^ 3
^ 2
6-
V
64-
V 4-
V
64-
I
6
II I
6
V
I
V
II I
6
V
I
V
I II
^ 1
^ 1
I II
V 4-
^ 2
^ 2
I
6-
III
^ 3
^ 2
25
NN
III
III
III
7
20
20
^ (3)
NN
III
7
NN
NN
III
V
A'
20
^ (3)
15
7
]
I
^ 2
V 7
V
]
15
10
7 5
]
I
10
7 5
]
IN
^ 3
15
^ 2
IN
[
IN
^ 3 ^ 3
I
^ (3)
IN
10
expansion
^ 3
6 4 2 6 4 2
10
)
[
I
) IN
(
^ 2 expansion
^ 2
2
I
^ 2
4
^ 3 ^ 3
^ 2 ^ 3 Consequent
5
cover tones
^ 3
^ 2
IN
^ Consequent 3 ^ 3 ^ 3
5
^ 3
IN
^ 3
3
^ 2
^ Antecedent 3
A
10
6
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Toward a General Theory of Interruption
39
Example 3.12a Part 1 Brahms, Symphony No. 3, Op. 90, III, Intermezzo 5
A ^ 3
Antecedent
A
^ 3
^ 3
Antecedent
NN 5
^ 3
NN
^ 3 ^ 3
^ 2 ^ 2
ant.
^ 2
NN 3rd
ant.
ant.
NN ( )
3rd
^ 2
ant.
ant. ant.
( )
I
II 56
I
II 56
VII 7
I
II
II 56
I
II 56
VII 7
I
I
13
Consequent
13
Consequent
IV 6
6
6
6
IV
^ 3
^ 3
NN
^ 3
^ 2
NN
^ 3
^ 3
NN
^ 3
^ 2
NN
(IV
VII III )
V
IV 6 (IV
VII III )
V
IV 6
( )
6 6
^ 2
^ 1
^ 2
^ 1
V V
( )
New Horizons_Vol. 2_f.indb 39
I
IV 6
6
V
IV 6
6
I
IV 6
6
V
IV 6
6
8—7
6—5 V 4— 8—7
6—5 V 4—
I I
8— 5— 8— 5—
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40
Frank Samarotto Example 3.12a Part 2 Brahms, Symphony No. 3, Op. 90, III, Intermezzo ^
^ 3
25
B
41 3
^ 7
Reprise of A
ant. NN
(
(= 7 — 6)
10
I
(= 7 — 6)
10
(= 7 — 6)
10
6
G
)
—A
III
I
Example 3.12b Brahms, Symphony No. 3, Op. 90, III, Trio Trio
^ 3
^ 2
A : I V
VI
New Horizons_Vol. 2_f.indb 40
87
ant.
reaching over
I6
6 5 ant.
^ 3
98
Reprise of Intermezzo
6
I
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Toward a General Theory of Interruption
41
Example 3.12c Brahms, Symphony No. 3, Op. 90, III, Overview Intermezzo A ^ 3
B
A
Intermezzo ^ 3
^ 3
Trio
Intermezzo ^ 3
=
I
III
I
I
VI
interrupted form of complete harmonic progression:
I
I
III
VI
V
I
Example 3.12d Brahms, Symphony No. 3, Op. 90, III, Coda ^ 3
^ 3
^ 2
^ 1
^ 3
^ 2
^ 1
Coda
=
I
New Horizons_Vol. 2_f.indb 41
III
7 6
VI 6
6—5 V 4— I
III
7 6
VI
II 7
6—5 V 4— I
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44
L. Poundie Burstein Example 4.1
Example 4.2
Schenker’s depiction of the “sacred triangle,” from Schenker (1935, Fig. 7)
Depictions of “sacred trapezoids” (N. B.: these structures were not mentioned by Schenker)
Example 4.3 Depictions of possible bass-line structures for sonata-form movements in which the development modulates to the submediant, followed by a retransition that concludes on V (a) Polar tonal structure (based on the “sacred triangle”) in which the submediant serves as a neighbor harmony within a prolongation of V
New Horizons_Vol. 2_f.indb 44
(b) Solar tonal structure (based on a “sacred trapezoid” framework) in which V embellishes motion from VI to I
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The “heilige T r apezoid ” and the Galant Recapitulation
45
(c) Solar tonal structure in which an inverted V supports passing bass motion from VI to I
Example 4.4 Excerpts from selected Galant-era movements in which a non-dominant harmony immediately precedes the recapitulation (a) Anna Bon, Sonata for Cembalo in B!, Op. 2, No. 2, I, bars 67–70 (1756): recapitulation is preceded by cadence in VI followed by short lead-in
New Horizons_Vol. 2_f.indb 45
(b) G. M. Rutini, Sonata for Cembalo in E, Op. 2, No. 5, II, bars 66–70 (1754): recapitulation is preceded by cadence in III followed by a rest
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46
L. Poundie Burstein
(c) G. C. Wagenseil, Sonata for Harpsichord (with violin accompaniment) in E!, Op. 1, No. 1, III, bars 63–68 (1753): recapitulation is preceded by cadence in VI, with no silence between
Example 4.5 Joseph Riepel (1755), sample C-major compositions in which recapitulation is immediately preceded by cadence in the mediant or submediant (a) Excerpt from p. 92, in which recapitulation is immediately preceded by cadence in E minor
New Horizons_Vol. 2_f.indb 46
(b) Excerpt from p. 98, in which recapitulation is immediately preceded by cadence in A minor
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The “heilige T r apezoid ” and the Galant Recapitulation
47
Example 4.6 Works in which retransition concludes on I immediately before recapitulation, rather than V (a) Joseph Riepel (1755, 98): Riepel’s variant of Example 5b
New Horizons_Vol. 2_f.indb 47
(b) Joseph Haydn, Symphony No. 23, II, bars 61–67 (1764); cf. Example 6a
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48
L. Poundie Burstein Table I Examples of major-key movements in which the recapitulation is directly preceded by a non-dominant harmony H a rm o n y th a t d irectly p re c e d e s reca p itu la tio n i m in o r I 1 = V o flV II II# (= V o f V ) III III# (V o f V I) IV m in o r V VI VI# (= V o f II) V II VII# (= V o f III)
New Horizons_Vol. 2_f.indb 48
C o m p o ser a n d p ie c e
C o m m en ts
J. H ay d n , S y m p h o n y N o. 8 in C /I; G . C . W ag en seil D iv ertim en to O p. 2/4/1 F. A . D. P h ilid o r, O v ertu re to J a r d in e r e t so n se ig n e u r A. L u chesi, S y m p h o n y in C m ajo r/III
A p p a ren t h a lf cad en ce in su b d o m in an t k ey fo llo w ed im m ed ia te ly b y rep rise.
J. A . H asse, O v ertu re I to A lc id e a l B ivio ; J. H ay d n , S y m p h o n y N o. 56 in C /IV
See ex am p les b elo w .
N . Jo m m elli, T rio s o n a ta N o . 6 in D /II
E x p o sitio n is cu t sh o rt afte r h a lf cad en ce in V , fo llo w ed im m ed ia te ly b y rep rise.
J. H ay d n , S y m p h o n y N o. 60/11
V e ry co m m o n in G a la n t m usic.
W . A . M o zart, S o n ata fo r K e y b o a rd in F, K . 280/1 an d III
V e ry co m m o n in G a la n t m usic.
E. F. W o lf, S y m p h o n y in G /1
A t the en d o f a retran sitio n th a t fo llo w s a cad en ce in II.
C. P. E. B ach , S o n ata fo r K e y b o a rd in F m inor, W q . 57 N o . 3, II
See E x. 7 b elo w .
G. Sarti S o n ata N o. 2 in C fo r F lu te an d C o n tin u o /II
V e ry co m m o n in G a la n t m usic.
A . L u ch esi, S y m p h o n y in G m ajo r, II
U n u su al larg e stru ctu re, y e t rea d ily p ercep tib le.
G. B ru n etti, S y m p h o n y no. 9 in D , L. 298/1
VII# lead s d irectly to recap itu latio n .
J. H aydn, S o n ata fo r K e y b o a rd in E -flat, H ob. X V L 2 5 /I
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The “heilige T r apezoid ” and the Galant Recapitulation
49
Example 4.7 C. P. E. Bach, Sonata for Keyboard No. 3 in F minor, Wq. 57, II (1781): recapitulation is preceded by minor V followed by a rest (a) Quotation of bars 23–28
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(b) Voice-leading sketch of entire movement: tonal motion is abruptly halted mid-stream— before reaching the expected cadence in C—followed by recapitulation in bar 28
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50
L. Poundie Burstein Example 4.8 Abstract voice-leading interpretations of a major-key sonata-form movement whose development concludes with a half cadence in the relative minor (a) Polar interpretation
(b) Solar interpretation
Example 4.9 Schenker (1935 [1979], Fig. 1198), analysis of Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony No. 6 in F (“Pastorale”), bars 275–85: point of recapitulation is read as lying within a larger tonal motion
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Example 4.10 Beethoven, Sonata for Piano in E!, Op. 81a, III, bars 108–10: unlike in Example 9, point of recapitulation marks deep-level tonal return, abruptly interrupting the tonal motion of development
The “heilige T r apezoid ” and the Galant Recapitulation
51
Example 4.11 Abstract voice-leading model showing solar interpretation of a sonata-form movement whose development concludes on VI
Example 4.13 Example 4.12
Hasse, Overture I to Alcide al Bivio, voice-leading sketch of entire movement
J. A. Hasse, Overture I to Alcide al Bivio (1760); bars 62–67: recapitulation directly preceded by II
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52
L. Poundie Burstein Example 4.14 Joseph Haydn, Symphony No. 56 in C, IV (1774) (a) Metric normalization of the opening two phrases (hypothetical)
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(b) Quotation of bars 1–10 (actual)
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The “heilige T r apezoid ” and the Galant Recapitulation
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Example 4.15 Haydn, Symphony No. 56 in C, IV (a) Voice-leading sketch of exposition, bars 1–48 (abbreviations: GA = Grundabsatz; QA = Quintabsatz; SS = Schlußsatz; th. = theme)
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(b) Quotation of bars 34–37, showing “deceptive half cadence”
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L. Poundie Burstein Example 4.16
Example 4.17
Haydn, Symphony No. 56 in C, IV, bars 79–87
Haydn, Symphony No. 56 in C, IV, voice-leading sketch of entire movement (cf. Example 11)
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5 New Horizons_Vol. 2_f.indb 55
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56
Carl Schachter Example 5.1a
Mendelssohn Op. 62, No. 1 a)
Antecedent 4 bars (2 + 2)
a)
Consequent 6 bars (2 + 2 + 1 )
Antecedent 4 bars (2 + 2)
G:
Consequent 6 bars (2 + 2 + 1 )
I
V
G:
b)
Antecedent 8 bars (4 + 4)
Ó
expansion
V/III
III
III
Consequent 12 bars (4 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2)
g
Af: I
I
V/III
Consequent 12 bars (4 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2)
8 bars (4 + 4)
Af: I
Ó
expansion
V
Antecedent Chopin, Op. 59, No. 2
b)
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I
Example 5.1b
I
g
h
h
V
I
V
from
I
g
h from
g
V/III h
V/III
expansion
expansion
III
III
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Chopin’s Mazurka, Op. 59, No. 2: A Tribute to Mendelssohn?
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Example 5.2
Mendelssohn, Op. 62, No. 1. Metric Characteristics
etc. etc. etc.
??
??
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58
Carl Schachter Example 5.3 Chopin, Op. 59, No. 2. Chart of Bass Line
yg C Df
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K K yg fcy C
etc.
rd C Df C BfAf BfAf
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Example 5.4 Chopin Op. 59, No. 2. Clarification of !VI
Af: I
f: I
IV
“fVI”
V
Af: I I
IV
y
t
y
y
Á
i
t
Af: I “fVI”IV
(= upper 3rd of IV)
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#@!
“fVI”
#N
#N
t
IV
N
# #@!
N
#
V
I
#@ !
y
#@ ! t
y
y
Á
i
“fVI”
(= upper 3rd of IV)
V
I
V
I
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6 Wen_Examples_e.indd 61
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Eric Wen Example 6.1
Example 6.2
J. S. Bach’s use of all twelve notes of the chromatic scale in the fugue subject
Facsimile of Kirnberger’s analysis of bars 1–4
1 2 3 4
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5
6 7 8
9
10
11
12
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J. S. Bach’s Fugue in B minor, BWV 869: R ameau oder Schenker? 63
Example 6.2
Example 6.3
Facsimile of Kirnberger’s analysis (continued)
The alteration of B minor into B major over bars 1–2 N
a
b: I V
rs
Iy N
b
b: I
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V
rs
Iy
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Eric Wen Example 6.4
Example 6.5
The contrapuntal implication of the recurring sigh pattern in bar 2
Possible tonal structure of bars 1–2
# @ a
a
b
y
y
c
y
t
y
( )
td
yd
td
@
t
b
( )
b: I IV u V
b: I V
# @
d
yd
#
ud
td
ud
td
c
# @
d
b: I
IV u V
b: I IVsIV uA V
# @
# @ f
e
b: I iK
uA
IVsIV uA V
b: I iK
uA
IVsIV uA V # @
g
b: I iK
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uA
(IV) sIV uA V
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J. S. Bach’s Fugue in B minor, BWV 869: R ameau oder Schenker? 65
Example 6.6
Example 6.7
Hypothetical countersubject to fugue theme
Hypothetical 2-bar subject employing 10 notes of the chromatic scale 1 2 3 4
5
6 7 8
9
10
Example 6.8 Kirnberger’s analysis of bars 1–4
rd
uA
y
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u
u
uA
uA
f
A
A
K jo
u
i
uf
uA
oA
yd
t
rs
u
y
A
y
u
u
uA
uA
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66
Eric Wen Example 6.9 Reinterpretation of original tonic as pivot chord in modulation from I to V
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J. S. Bach’s Fugue in B minor, BWV 869: R ameau oder Schenker? 67
Example 6.10 Structural levels of subject (bars 1–4)
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Eric Wen Example 6.11
Example 6.12
Motivic parallelisms at beginning and end of fugue subject
Four possible answers to subject subject:
real answer:
tonal answer:
JSB’s answer:
Example 6.13 Tonal meaning of bar 4 fs: @
!
fs: $
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# % s& ! @
#
!
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J. S. Bach’s Fugue in B minor, BWV 869: R ameau oder Schenker? 69
Example 6.14
Example 6.15
Three combinations of fugue theme with countersubject in the exposition
Facsimile of Weisse’s analysis of bars 4–5
a
b
c
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Eric Wen Example 6.16 Analysis of bars 4–5 after Weisse
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J. S. Bach’s Fugue in B minor, BWV 869: R ameau oder Schenker? 71
Example 6.17 Kirnberger’s analysis of bars 4–7
y
uA
rs
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K
uA
ug
yg
A
f
A
K oj
u
i
uA
uf
oA
yd
t
Au
Au
A
A
y
u
u uA uA
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Eric Wen Example 6.18 Analysis of bars 4–5
Example 6.19 The octave displacement of f#1 to f#2 in bar 4
(V