Heinrich Schenker Simulacrum

The Life

Heinrich Schenker was born in 1868 in Wisniowczyki in Austrian Galicia (now Vyshnivchyk in Ukraine), to a Jewish family of modest means. He studied law at the University of Vienna, graduating in 1890, and music — piano and composition — at the Vienna Conservatory under Anton Bruckner among others. He spent his entire adult life in Vienna, supported in part by the patronage of wealthy pupils and by a circle of musical friends that included Brahms in his later years. He taught privately throughout his life, never holding an academic post, a fact of some bitterness to him. He was married in 1919 to Jeanette Kornfeld, who became his chief editorial collaborator. He died in Vienna in January 1935, a few weeks before the Anschluss that would have cost him his life.

He composed in his early years — piano music and songs, some of which were published — but his real vocation emerged as theorist and editor. He produced a continuing series of critical editions of Beethoven sonatas and of works by Bach, Handel, and Chopin, and in the theoretical journals he founded (Der Tonwille, 1921–1924; Das Meisterwerk in der Musik, 1925–1930) he developed, in sustained polemical engagement with the academic music theory of his time, the analytical system that bears his name. His Viennese circle of pupils — including the critic Oswald Jonas, the analyst Felix Salzer, and the composer Hans Weisse — became the seed from which Schenkerian analysis was transplanted to the United States in the 1930s and 1940s.

The Thought

Schenker’s central doctrine was that every tonal masterwork is the elaboration — the composing-out, Auskomponierung — of a single underlying structure, the Ursatz. The Ursatz consists of two voices: the Urlinie, a stepwise descent in the upper voice from a structural scale degree (usually 3̂, 5̂, or 8̂) to 1̂, and the Bassbrechung, a bass arpeggiation of I–V–I beneath it. Every note in the foreground of a tonal composition exists either as a structural tone at the background level or as an elaboration of one at some intermediate level — a prolongation. The analytical task is reduction: to peel away the successive layers of elaboration (the Vordergrund surface, through the Mittelgrund middleground, to the Hintergrund background) and show that what appears on the page as a long and complex composition is, at its deepest level, the simplest of contrapuntal structures. The vocabulary of prolongation techniques — neighbor notes, passing notes, arpeggiation, unfolding (Ausfaltung), reaching-over (Übergreifen), motion into an inner voice (Untergreifen), register transfer, interruption (Unterbrechung) — is what the analyst deploys to trace the path from background to foreground.

The method is visual as much as verbal: Schenkerian analysis is presented in graphs whose notation (hollow noteheads for structural tones, slurs and beams for prolongation spans, Arabic and Roman numerals for intervals and scale degrees) is itself an analytical language. Der freie Satz (1935), completed shortly before his death, is the master synthesis; the Fünf Urlinie-Tafeln (1932) provide five complete analyses in graphic form. The underlying conviction is organicist: a tonal masterwork is a living whole in which the seed of the entire composition is present in its opening bars, in which every note has structural necessity, and in which the final cadence is not an ending but the arrival at the goal the opening had already implied. Schenker was polemically absolute about the scope of his method: it applied to the tonal masterworks of Bach through Brahms and nothing else. Atonality he regarded as the destruction of music, and his writings contain fierce dismissals of Schoenberg, Debussy, and most post-Wagnerian developments. His private writings also contain chauvinistic claims about the uniqueness of the German musical tradition that are indefensible, and that have been the object of much recent critical reassessment; the integrity of the analytical method itself has outlasted the cultural claims that surrounded it.

The Legacy

Schenkerian analysis is, with Riemann’s function theory, one of the two dominant analytical frameworks for tonal music in the twentieth century. Transplanted to the United States through Salzer’s Structural Hearing (1952), through Forte and Gilbert’s Introduction to Schenkerian Analysis (1982), and through the editorial labours of Ernst Oster, John Rothgeb, and Allen Cadwallader, it became the standard method of tonal analysis in North American graduate music programmes from the 1960s onward. The vocabulary — Ursatz, Urlinie, prolongation, foreground / middleground / background — has passed into general theoretical use, often without explicit attribution. Its empirical fruitfulness for the masterworks of the common-practice period remains unrivalled.

The contemporary disciplinary picture places Schenker at right angles to Riemann: Schenker seeking the long-range linear skeleton of voice-leading, Riemann the functional logic of the vertical moment, neither displacing the other. The critical reassessment of Schenker’s cultural politics, vigorously pursued in the 1990s and 2000s, has not dislodged his analytical method from its central place in the tonal-theoretical tradition. Reading him now requires the ability to separate the technical achievement — which is considerable and durable — from the ideological apparatus in which he himself embedded it, and which a more mature discipline has largely set aside.