Introduction to Schenkerian analysis PDF

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“AN INTRODUCTION TO SCHENKERIAN ANALYSIS ” Text (slightly revised here)1 and description of a long lecture given on 3 April 2003 in Istanbul at the Borusan Culture and Art Center (Borusan Kültür Sanat Merkesi). The audience consisted mainly of accomplished and culturally sophisticated Turkish music...

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“AN INTRODUCTION TO SCHENKERIAN ANALYSIS ” Text (slightly revised here)1 and description of a long lecture given on 3 April 2003 in Istanbul at the Borusan Culture and Art Center (Borusan Kültür Sanat Merkesi). The audience consisted mainly of accomplished and culturally sophisticated Turkish musicians who knew practically nothing about this topic.

Heinrich Schenker was a Viennese music theorist and pianist and composer in the first 35 years of the last century. As a theorist he developed some new insights into the work of several great composers, from Bach and Domenico Scarlatti through Brahms. His ideas have been controversial, but in the North American academic community today their status is such that every prestigious music faculty includes at least one “Schenkerian” (who is more or less influential in regard to the music-theory curriculum). Different kinds of music theory have different purposes. Schenker’s theory was primarily for performers of certain music – and as such it was evidently useful to Wilhelm Furtwängler: “Paul Hindemith believed that Furtwängler 'possessed the great secret of proportion,' and Furtwängler’s penetrating sense of structural unification, a concept that influenced all he did on the podium, was supported by his friendship and work with the Viennese theorist Heinrich Schenker. A means of graphically reducing an entire symphony or sonata to its core elements – to fundamental linear and harmonic progressions – had been devised by Schenker.... These resources... enabled [Furtwängler] to 'speak' in paragraphs and chapters rather than merely in sentences.” (John Ardoin, in The Furtwängler Record) “Furtwängler constantly was trying to put what he learned from Schenker into practice, and he occasionally mentioned him during rehearsals.... The characteristics of interpretation that have come to be associated with Furtwängler – the sense of ...a work’s totality, the mastery in achieving seamless chains of transitions culminating in an organic unity – are the very objectives which Schenker strove to elucidate in his brand of analysis.... Furtwängler... helped finance the publication of the third volume [of Schenker’s Das Meisterwerk in der Musik] with a contribution of 3,000 marks.” (S. H. Shirakawa, in The Devil’s Music Master. The Controversial Life and Career of Wilhelm Furtwängler)

It seems to me that the main problem with Schenker can be summarized by the following nursery rhyme: “There was a little girl / Who had a little curl / Right in the middle of her forehead. / When she was good, / She was very, very good, / But when she was bad, she was horrid.” It is of course the good things in his work, not the horrid ones – his grotesque rhetoric and mysticism – which have made him famous. Some of his analyses are therefore than others, because he was not a cautious academic theorist but an inventive and probing one. In my opinion, we should appreciate and take advantage of whatever in them we like, while ignoring or correcting the rest. Rather than to discuss how an analysis by Schenker might help enable the performer of a long piece to “speak in paragraphs and chapters rather than merely in sentences,” this essay will describe Schenkerian analyses of five pieces ranging in length from about 15 seconds to seven or eight minutes. I will start with an analysis of my own (since the master himself never published one of this particular composition) of “Jingle Bells,” in C-major. [The delivery of the rest of this paragraph included suitable musical illustrations.] It seems to me that the function (in regard to tonal structure) of the first quarter of the tune – “Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way” – is to establish that the first note is the third degree of the major scale. In harmonizing the rest of the first half, if I keep C in the bass under the F in the tune, this helps show why I-IV-I is regarded by Schenkerians as a “contrapuntal” progression, here supporting F as neighbor-note to E, and not “really” a harmonic one. In fact you can play I-IV-I progressions in root position all day long and still maybe not achieve a sense of tonal completion; you can achieve that by bringing the tune down from E to D – with D harmonized by subdominant and dominant chords – and then on down to C harmonized by I; only then would you have, according to Schenker, a complete tonal structure: you need a I-V-I in the bass and, sup1. I owe thanks to Charles Burkhart and William Rothstein, neither of whom, however, bears any responsibility. -1-

ported by it (in addition to whatever other chords may fit in well), an Urlinie (a “fundamental line” descending stepwise to the tonic) in the tune. “Jingle Bells” has those things and provides also an example of an Urlinie “interrupted,” as it goes from 3 to 2 in the first half, and then, in the second half, from 3 to 2 again before going on to 1.2 Let us look now at Schenker’s analysis of the first prelude from Das wohl-temperirte Clavier. [Graph, piano-playing and explanations, starting as follows:] The initial Dehnung is rhythmically interesting. Whereas the fourth- and third-from-last bars of the piece form a macro-metrical trochee, the suspended C of Bar 2 makes that bar rhythmically as least as strong as Bar 1 (pace Gounod in his appropriation of these same chords for his setting of “Ave maria”). And then even if Bar 3 may be rhythmically as strong as Bar 2, Bar 4 is stronger, so that the following pairs: 4 and 5, 6 and 7 (and so on until rather later in the piece) are trochaic.... [Explanations of the rest of the graphic analysis.] Let us examine now some of Schenker’s analysis of Chopin’s “Revolutionary Etude.” [Graph, performance and explanation. In this and the subsequent examples, my explanations of the graphs involved playing on the piano the notes of Schenker’s most detailed middle-ground graph while a recording of a performance was heard and an assistant traced (with a pointer) the notes on the graph on a very large reproduction of it (about ten feet long in this instance; about twenty feet long for the graph shown last in the lecture). My explanation of Schenker’s analysis of this this piece focused upon the Quartzüge and, in regard to the one supporting the second of the four main steps in the tune from 3 to 2, upon the 6th in the bass from A= up to the F which prompts the A= go on down to G.] Let us turn now to an example – Schenker’s graph of the fugue in C-minor from Part I of the “48" – which is particularly useful because Lawrence Dreyfus in his very worthwhile book, Bach and the Patterns of Invention (Harvard, 1996) has presented it as exemplifying that Schenkerian analysis is altogether mistaken and useless. Here are some remarks from Chapter 6 (“Figments of the Organicist Imagination”) of the book: “Since Schenker is sensitive to the foreground manipulations of invertible counterpoint, I try to read his analysis as if it made 'intentionalist' statements about 'what Bach did.' The resulting propositions make the composer seem either exceedingly arbitrary or superhuman in his abilities.... One does not need Schenker’s Bass-Brechung when one can invoke the recommended Baroque cadenceschemes described by J. G. Walther, J. A. Scheibe, and Nichelmann in which keys and types of cadences proper to beginnings, middles and ends [of pieces] are discussed.... [It is] unnecessary – not to mention logically and historically unjustified – to maintain that the entire work of the fugue rests upon a coherent large-scale voice-leading structure, as Schenker wants to claim. Naturally, given the highly restricted vocabulary of the tonal system, it will always be easy to concoct such a voice-leading structure... [but] the absence of any kind of possible falsification of this method, which gives rise to the most intricate and elegant set of ad-hoc adjustments known to music theory, ought to be a matter of grave methodological concern.”

Dreyfus was interested in the thematic three-voice complex of invertible counterpoint – i.e. the subject and the two counter-subjects – which was, no doubt, devised “mechanically” (his term3) by Bach and which recurs five times in the piece. Dreyfus believed that it would have been arbitrary or superhuman of the composer to have a large-scale voice-leading structure (such as Schenker attributed to the piece) progress forward, as Schenker made out, sometimes in one and yet sometimes in another way in relation that recurring complex; so he felt that Schenker had read into the piece something “quirky” which is not really there.

2. I mentioned these points in order to prepare for some aspects of certain analyses discussed later. For instance, the concept of I-IV-I as a contrapuntal rather than a harmonic progression underlies Salzer’s designation of C-minor as a “contrapuntal-structural” element in the recapitulation of a sonata movement in G by Hindemith which was my last main example. 3. I did not mention in the lecture the fact that mechanical theories of music fail, unlike Schenker’s theory, to show due regard for the fact that it normally sounds better when played forward than backward. -2-

Dreyfus’s use of the word “falsification” refers implicitly to Karl Popper’s philosophically important distinction between scientific statements, such as in Einstein’s theories, and non-scientific ones, such as in Freud’s: the scientific statements are those which are susceptible to disproof by evidence. I would say, however, that (a) Schenkerian theory is not scientific, but interpretive; (b) therefore, musicians who understand it know that the test for any particular application of it is not whether the application has withstood attempts at falsification by means of contrary objective evidence, but whether one as a performer finds it subjectively persuasive and hence useful; (c) so, the “absence of any kind of [general] falsification of the method” should not be a matter of grave methodological concern; and (d) in any particular analysis (or part thereof) that the performer does find to be persuasive and useful, the “ad-hoc adjustments” are considered (by those who know more than Dreyfus did about Schenkerian analysis) to have been occasioned by due regard for the beautiful peculiarities of the piece. Let us look now at Schenker’s graphic analysis of the fugue. [Graph, performance and explanations.] Dreyfus missed the significance of the “(5)” at the beginning of the graph. This “(5)” means that in Schenker’s opinion the initial ascent to 5 and the middle-ground 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 - 1 in Bars 3-9 establish 5 as being there as if from the outset. (The evidence that Dreyfus missed this point is that he did not mention it and that in representing (on pp.176-77 of the book) Schenker’s Urlinie, he omitted the “(5)”.) Also, I believe that it is neither superhuman nor arbitrary to make use of the fact that if the music is in C-minor and has a G in the tune, one can modulate to E=-major by taking the tune down from G to F to E=, and then modulate back by taking the tune on down from E=to D to C. So, this analysis of Schenker’s seems to me sensible – not quirky – and useful in the sense of helping the performer integrate details of interpretation. I see in the middle-ground 8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 - 1 a nice example of an ad-hoc finding – useful partly, for instance, in that it justifies a modicum of emphasis in Bar 29. Any knowledgeable Schenkerian can find graphs by him which are more vulnerable to criticism than this one. For example, Figure 116 in Schenker’s book, Der freie Satz, seems to me procrustean as it departs too much (in my opinion) from the material given by the composer (Hans Leo Hassler) and by the pre-existent tune. In order to accept the analysis, one has to (1) hear the high E as supported by the A which actually supports C and C>, to choose between (a) calling D the root of a 7th chord and (b) calling F the root of a major triad with an added 6th). Moreover, I don’t believe that only those insights into tonal structure which Schenker or Salzer could graph are valid; and even within Schenker’s own historical scope, some pieces are, in my opinion, better suited than others to his approach. For example, to limit (as Schenker and Salzer did) the term “harmonic” to V-I relations (allowing that “I” can here represent a temporarily tonicized degree) leaves one, in my opinion, without adequate terminology for what I consider to be a harmonic aspect in III-I relations (using “I” here with the same kind of allowance). I admit that V-I is more basic than III-I, but do not therefore exclude III-I from the realm of harmony. I think the term “contrapuntal” fits II-I and VII-I better than it does III-I. (In this regard some illustrative 18th- and early 19th-century uses of harmony are: (1) in pieces in A=-major, to slip directly and saliently into F=-major (alias E), in relation to which A= is, of course, III; this happens, for instance, in the “Trauerwalzer”, in the slow movement of Beethoven’s “Pathètique Sonata”, and in Chopin’s prelude in the same key), and (2) at a pivotal moment (e.g. at the Recapitulation) in pieces in F-major, to slip back to the tonic key rather directly from A-major (either as a secondary tonic or as dominant of D-minor); a good example is in the first movement of Beethoven’s “Spring” sonata. We have in Beethoven’s 7th symphony a remarkable exploitation of F- vs A-major (and of C- vs E-major) in various contexts. And then there are some notable pieces, e.g. by Brahms (the 1st symphony) and Sibelius (the 5th), exploiting in their overall tonal structure a cycle of three III-I relations, i.e. linking the main key of the work with two other keys that are linked to each other in the same harmonic way. Franck’s “Finale” for organ is another clear, though rather banal, example of such a tonal structure.) Beyond all the theoretical niceties, one characteristic of Schenkerian analysis is that it helps to defend, in musical academia, the “space” allotted to music such as that by Bach, Domenico Scarlatti, the Viennese classical composers and Chopin, now that so much other music – not just from the self-appointed avant-garde and from jazz etc. and “folkways” and from cheapo music-makers, but also from earlier periods of Western history and from altogether non-Western cultures – is competing for the space. It this light it seems to me that even though Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin in their very worthwhile book Wittgenstein’s Vienna [published in Chicago in 1996] portray Arnold Schönberg as a defender of enduring musical values against decadence, Schenker fits the bill better.9

9. There is good evidence that Schönberg didn’t much like Schenker’s ideas, but in a letter of 16 December 1931 he said: “...There are very few people indeed who have [nowadays] any notion of beauty of musical form. The older men, who still had an inkling of it, are partly intimidated, partly are gradually dying off. The few younger ones are doubtless in a position to know it from me (perhaps also from Schenker?). But there is precisely the snag: it’s so difficult to say it 'in modern terms'.” -6-...