Heinrich Schenker counterpoint: A translation ofKontrapunkt

Abstract

Abstract This publication, a translation of two ‘half volumes’ published in Stuttgart and Vienna in 1910 and 1922 respectively, fulfils the goal of making Schenker's principal theoretical work accessible in English. Volume I of his Neue musikalischen Theorien und Phantasien, the Harmonielehre of 1906, appeared in an English translation by Elisabeth Mann Borgese in 1954; volume III, Der freie Satz of 1935, was Englished by Ernst Oster and appeared in 1979. In the preface to the book under review, John Rothgeb remarks that Kontrapunkt is “published here for the first time in English translation.” While this is the first complete translation, portions of Kontrapunkt were “translated and adapted for class use” in the University of Edinburgh by John Petrie Dunn in a series of Handbooks “printed by J. and A. L. Petrie Dunn on the Opalograph Duplicator” in the 1920s, a circumstance of which the present translators seem unaware.