Becoming Heinrich Schenker: Music Theory and Ideology. By Robert P. Morgan

Abstract

‘Music and Music’s laws lay hid in night; God said, Let Schenker be! and all was light.’ No one at all familiar with the writings and opinions of Heinrich Schenker—the eightieth anniversary of whose death (13 January) as well as the posthumous publication of his final theoretical text, Der freie Satz, falls in 2015—would be much surprised were such a self-penned reworking of Alexander Pope’s epitaph for Isaac Newton to be found among his unpublished papers. The thought is prompted by Robert P. Morgan’s comparison, towards the end of this book, of the scientist and the music theorist, though Morgan is quick to point out that ‘Schenker’s musical universe did not, like Newton’s physical one, achieve instantaneous equilibrium, nor did it then maintain a perpetual steady state’ (p. 224). The comparison arises within a discussion of the ‘scientific orientation’ of Schenker’s work, part of the concluding chapter of the volume. This, together with a ‘critical assessment’ of Schenker’s ‘final theory’ and a similar assessment of his ideology, makes up Part III (‘Reconsideration’: pp. 183–229). The book begins with an Introduction and an ‘overview of Schenker’s mature theory’ (Part I: ‘Theory’, pp. 3–37 at p. 14) and proceeds (Part II: ‘Development’, pp. 41–180) to a chapter-by-chapter exposition of the publications through which his development as a music theorist can be charted: the 1895 essay ‘Der Geist der musikalischen Technik’; Harmonielehre (published in 1906 without the definite article that Morgan’s chapter heading erroneously supplies); the two chronologically separated volumes of Kontrapunkt; the ‘monographs’, from the early study (1903) of C. P. E. Bach through to the Erläuterungsausgabe of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in A, Op. 101 (1921); then Der Tonwille and Das Meisterwerk in der Musik, and finally back to Der freie Satz. Extensive quotation from Schenker’s writings is conspicuous in these and the chapters of the flanking parts (the German-language original texts are collected together on pp. 230–63), and several graphs are reproduced, in whole or in part, along with other music examples.