SchenkerGUIDE

A Brief Handbook and Website for Schenkerian Analysis

Thomas Pankhurst

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781135871024
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Theory & Appreciation

SchenkerGUIDE is an accessible overview of Heinrich Schenker's complex but fascinating approach to the analysis of tonal music. The book has emerged out of the widely used website, www.SchenkerGUIDE.com, which has been offering straightforward explanations of Schenkerian analysis to undergraduate students since 2001.

Divided into four parts, SchenkerGUIDE offers a step-by-step method to tackling this often difficult system of analysis.

• Part I is an introduction to Schenkerian analysis, outlining the concepts that are involved in analysis
• Part II outlines a unique and detailed working method to help students to get started on the process of analysis
• Part III puts some of these ideas into practice by exploring the basics of a Schenkerian approach to form, register, motives and dramatic structure
• Part IV provides a series of exercises from the simple to the more sophisticated, along with hints and tips for their completion.

Part I
An overview of Schenkerian analysis

Chapter 1
An introduction to the concepts of Schenkerian analysis

Analysis, one way or another, is an integral part of musical life. On a purely practical level, sight-reading or memorizing music would be impossible if we were not able to identify simple patterns and their repetition. Our response to music as listeners is also analytical in this broad sense: we cannot help but compare melodic, rhythmic and textural ideas to those we have already heard—either in the piece at hand, or in other works with which we are familiar. The moment we move beyond an unreflective, moment-by-moment apprehension of music, whether as performers or listeners, we have entered the realm of analysis.

Up until about 1800 the description and explanation of this practical analytical understanding of music was most often found in treatises on such topics as counterpoint, figured bass, harmony, and embellishment. Analysis was, in other words, primarily a tool for explaining how to write or perform music. In the nineteenth century, however, scholars became much more interested in music of previous eras, and analysis increasingly played a part in the attempt to understand the essence of, for example, Bach or Palestrina. Most of the areas of analytical interest that developed during this period still persist today: studies of form and genre; explorations of the creative process, particularly through composers’ sketchbooks; theories of harmony and counterpoint; and, finally, various attempts to describe musical works in terms of their “meaning.” It is not, however, until around the turn of the twentieth century that scholars started to do the really detailed, comprehensive and systematic work characteristic of formal music analysis.

Heinrich Schenker is in many ways the high priest of twentieth-century music analysis; there are not many scholars who have managed to gain as wide an acceptance for such a novel and ambitious theory. Schenker, who was born in 1868 in Galicia (now part of Poland but then ruled by Austria), initially went to Vienna to study law but eventually enrolled at the music conservatory, where he studied, among other things, composition with Anton Bruckner. He earned his living primarily as an accompanist, teacher, and music critic, and his analytical and theoretical interests grew out of these other activities.

Schenker’s writings

The most widely read of Schenker’s theoretical works is Free Composition, the final volume of a series of books called New Musical Theories and Fantasies. The first in this series, published in 1906, offered a fresh perspective on harmonic theory, while the second two discussed the theory and practice of the strict (or species) counterpoint that is still taught in some universities. Free Composition (published in 1935) aimed to show that freely composed music was still essentially based on the principles of strict counterpoint; the way in which Schenker brings together harmonic and contrapuntal theory is one of his major contributions to music analysis. As the title of the series suggests, however, Schenker’s work is as imaginative and visionary (even mystical) as it is technical. Those not familiar with Schenker sometimes caricature him as interested only in reducing music to simplistic abstract structures; it is all too easy to get this impression from Free Composition, which was compiled in relative haste towards the end of his life. We get a much better picture of how he puts his ideas into practice from his other two major series of analytical publications, Der Tonwille (which translates as something like “the will of the tone”) and The Masterwork in Music.

Schenker focuses on the music of a fairly small number of Baroque, Classical and Romantic composers, from Bach through Beethoven to Brahms. His approach to this repertoire is encapsulated in a motto inscribed at the beginning of several of his most influential works: Semper idem sed non eodem modo (always the same but not in the same way). In this light, Schenker’s theories can be understood as a development of the simple observation that a highly restricted set of elementary tonal building blocks (scales, triads etc.) gives rise to apparently limitless possibilities. Among other things, his analyses show how tonal compositions can be seen as the elaboration of a small number of basic patterns; it is by understanding these patterns that we can begin to identify what is distinctive about a given piece.

Heinrich Schenker’s work is original and fascinating—it offers profound insights into the way tonal music works. Schenkerian analysis is, however, controversial, and those who have developed it since Schenker’s death in 1935 have done so in a wide variety of different ways. In this short guide to Schenkerian analysis, I have presented its main ideas as concisely and simply as possible. I have also tried to anticipate some obvious objections to Schenker’s ideas, occasionally discussing the problems and advantages of particular aspects of his approach. Analysis, like performance, is ultimately an interpretative act—it invites its readers to hear a piece of music in a particular way. Whereas Schenker lived at a time when knowledge tended to be presented as absolute truth, we tend today to view it as somewhat more provisional. The task for a student of Schenker is to be open to understanding music the way that he suggests, but at the same time keeping critical faculties intact and alert. The reward is a language for articulating musicality that no other theory offers so richly. Pursued in the right spirit, it can be a revelation.

Schenkerian analysis: some key ideas

Schenker shows that although tonal music is richly complex, it can be understood as the elaboration of simple structures that lie beneath the surface; it is this essentially simple idea of music as the art of elaboration that lies at the heart of Schenkerian analysis. Improvised embellishment has historically occupied a much more important position in classical music making than it does today. Central to realizing a keyboard accompaniment, ornamenting the vocal part of a Baroque aria, or extemporizing a virtuosic cadenza is the ability to improvize around a melody or a series of chords. In praising the “improvizatory long-range vision”¹ of the composers he particularly admired, Schenker explicitly links improvisation and composition, believing that the successful practice of both of these arts is rooted in an understanding that goes beyond the surface in order to grasp the large-scale structures of a piece of music.

In cases where there is a clearly established or pre-existing melody, the recognition of composed embellishment is an important part of the listening experience; this is the case in, for example, cantus firmus masses, Baroque arias, or virtuosic concert preludes. Schenkerian theory, however, suggests that there is always a simpler idea lurking under the surface of tonal music, even when it is not explicit in this way. The idea of music as elaboration is the starting point for the next chapter, in which the main features of Schenkerian theory are outlined. The remainder of the current chapter offers a brief informal introduction to some of the ideas that underpin Schenkerian thought.

A good analogy for the way in which Schenker suggests music works can be found in language. We process the sounds of speech by (only half-consciously) organizing them into meaningful units. No one who knows English would read or hear the following two sentences (the first two of John Steinbeck’s The Moon is Down) as an unconnected series of vowels and consonants; understanding language involves forming relationships between its separate units:

By ten-forty-five it was all over. The town was occupied, the defenders defeated.

At the most basic level, syllables are grouped into words, but many of those words are themselves dependent on being grouped with others for their meaning. For example, the definite article at the beginning of Steinbeck’s second sentence (‘the’) only ful...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of figure and examples
• Preface
• PART I An overview of Schenkerian analysis
• PART II Getting started on an analysis
• PART III Analysis in practice
• PART IV Exercises
• Group A—Foreground analysis
• Group B—Middleground analysis
• Group C—Longer extracts
• Group D—Problematic extracts
• Group E—Schenker’s analyses
• Glossary
• Notes
• Select bibliography