Schenker's Mysterious Five

Abstract

This article focuses on Schenker's role in what Milton Babbitt has called the occupational malady of theorists of music, namely the desire to search for the origin or proof of a theory outside its own system.1 Babbitt uses the seventeenth-century theorist Marin Mersenne to illustrate his point. In seeking to explain the derivation of the major triad, Mersenne claimed that one must proceed through six divisions of the string; but he need only have busied himself with the first five divisions, whose notes CCGCE already yield the requisite pitches. If five were enough, why choose six? For consis-