Schenkerian analysis

The goal is to demonstrate the organic coherence of the work by showing how the "foreground" (all notes in the score) relates to an abstracted deep structure, the Ursatz.

[2] Even at intermediate levels of reduction, rhythmic signs (open and closed noteheads, beams and flags) display not rhythm but the hierarchical relationships between the pitch-events.

[4] Schenker intended his theory as an exegesis of musical "genius" or the "masterwork", ideas that were closely tied to German nationalism and monarchism.

[5] The canon represented in his analytical work therefore is almost entirely made up of German music of the common practice period (especially that of Johann Sebastian Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, and Johannes Brahms),[6] and he used his methods to oppose more modern styles of music such as that of Max Reger and Igor Stravinsky.

[7] This led him to seek the key to an understanding of music in the traditional disciplines of counterpoint and figured bass, which was central to the compositional training of these composers.

Therefore ... the overtone series ... is transformed into a succession, a horizontal arpeggiation, which has the added advantage of lying within the range of the human voice.

[11]Linking the (major) triad to the harmonic series, Schenker merely pays lip service to an idea common in the early 20th century.

[13]The basic component of Schenkerian harmony is the Stufe (scale degree, scale-step), i.e. a chord having gained structural significance.

[17] One aspect of strict, two-voice writing that appears to span Schenker's theory throughout the years of its elaboration is the rule of "fluent melody" (fließender Gesang), or "melodic fluency".

"[19] Melodic fluency, the preference for conjunct (stepwise) motion, is one of the main rules of voice leading, even in free composition.

It avoids successive leaps and produces "a kind of wave-like melodic line which as a whole represents an animated entity, and which, with its ascending and descending curves, appears balanced in all its individual component parts".

However, as a consonant combination, it defines at a further level a new tonal space, that of the dominant chord, and so doing opens the path for further developments of the work.

[30] Schenkerian graphs are based on a "hierarchic" notation, where the size of the notes, their rhythmic values and/or other devices indicate their structural importance.

[32] One aspect of graphic analyses that may not have been enough stressed is the desire to abolish time, to represent the musical work as something that could be apprehended at a glance or, at least, in a way that would replace a "linear" reading by a "tabular" one.

The first step of the analytic rewriting often takes the form of a "rhythmic" reduction, that is one that preserves the score, but "normalizes" its rhythm and its voice-leading content.

At first, he mainly relied on the size of the note shapes to denote their hierarchic level, but later abandoned this system as it proved too complex for contemporary techniques of musical engraving.

Allen Cadwallader and David Gagné propose a description of Schenker's system of graphic notation which, they say, "is flexible, enabling musicians to express in subtle (and sometimes different) ways what they hear and how they interpret a composition".

[37] The meat of a Schenkerian analysis is in showing how a background structure expands until it results in the succession of musical events on the surface of the composition itself.

Modern Schenkerians usually prefer the term "prolongation", stressing that elaborations develop the events along the time axis.

[40] From the very structure of triads (chords), it follows that arpeggiations remain disjunct and that any filling of their space involves conjunct motion.

The most elementary linear progressions are determined by the tonal space that they elaborate: they span from the prime to the third, from the third to the fifth or from the fifth to the octave of the triad, in ascending or descending direction.

It is the bass line that governs the passage as a whole: it is the "leading progression", on which all the other voices depend and which best expresses the elaboration of the E major chord.

[42] Schenker describes lines covering a seventh or a ninth as "illusory",[43] considering that they stand for a second (with a register transfer): they do not fill a tonal space, they pass from one chord to another.

The neighbor note of the first order is –– or ––: the harmony supporting it often is the IVth or VIth degree, which may give rise to a section of the work at the subdominant.

[56] Schenker himself mentioned in a letter of 1927 to his student Felix-Eberhard von Cube that his ideas continued "to be felt more widely: Edinburgh [with John Petrie Dunn], (also New York [probably with George Wedge]), Leipzig [with Reinhard Oppel], Stuttgart [with Herman Roth], Vienna (myself and [Hans] Weisse), [Otto] Vrieslander in Munich […], yourself [von Cube] in Duisburg, and [August] Halm [in Wickersdorf, Thuringia].

Oswald Jonas and Felix Salzer founded and edited together the short-lived Schenkerian journal Der Dreiklang (Vienna, 1937–1938).

[62] Victor Vaughn Lytle, who had studied with Hans Weisse in Vienna, wrote what may be the earliest English-language essay dealing with Schenkerian concepts, "Music Composition of the Present" (The American Organist, 1931), without however really crediting Schenker for them.

[63] Weisse himself, who had studied with Schenker at least from 1912, immigrated to the United States and began teaching Schenkerian analysis at the Mannes School of Music in New York in 1931.

One of his students, Adele T. Katz, devoted an article to "Heinrich Schenker's Method of Analysis" in 1935,[64] then an important book, Challenge to Musical Tradition, in 1945, in which she applied Schenkerian analytical concepts not only to some of Schenker's favorite composers, Johann Sebastian and Philipp Emmanuel Bach, Haydn and Beethoven, but also to Wagner, Debussy, Stravinsky and Schoenberg: this certainly represents one of the earliest attempts to widen the corpus of Schenkerian analysis.

[67] The most raging attack against Schenker came in the "Editorial" that Paul Henry Lang devoted in The Musical Quarterly 32/2 (April 1946) to the recently published book by Adele Katz, Challenge to Musical Tradition, which he opposed to Donald Tovey's Beethoven, also published in 1945; his attacks also target Schenker's followers, probably the American ones.