Tremendously Tedious and Incredibly Overblown
As the first harrowing week of classes recedes, I’m moved to reflect on my first encounter with one of the all-time greats of Western music theory: Heinrich Schenker. We’re fortunate to have at the University of Minnesota a recognized Schenker expert who has devoted decades to the pursuit of Schenkerian analysis; I’m confident that the instruction I’ll be getting is some of the best available. But I have to admit that my first impression of Schenkerian theory is that it’s essentially a form of witchcraft.
The claims that Heinie S. makes in the Introduction of Der freie Satz (trans. Ernst Oster), his composition handbook-cum-theoretical treatise, sound very familiar to me: I often ran into the same overblown rhetoric in treatises on tuning in the course of writing my aforementioned article thereupon. If you’ve perused a few such treatises, you know the drill: Characterize the current musical status quo as a smallpox blanket of low-minded deceit and pitiable benightedness that settled o’er the land to fill the vacuum left by men (always men) of true talent (“[…]dazzled by the tremendous outburst of genius which had come before them, they sought, as mediocrity usually does, to cut the shortest possible path to genius”). Declare that this is an especially critical historical moment for the truth to finally be unveiled (“In our day it seems that this betrayal is no longer acceptable”). Then, like the frontier snake-oil salesman, reveal the panacea (“In opposition to this theory, I here present a new concept, one inherent in the works of the great masters; indeed, it is the very secret and source of their being: the concept of organic coherence”). Bonus points if you can squeeze in a dig at the Untermenschen (“Thus, so-called exotic music […] senses and strives for octaves, fifths, thirds, and other intervals, but one can also hear how it falls short of attaining them with the definiteness that nature demands”).
My gut instinct on reading such passages is that I could not possibly care less what Schenker has to say about anything, ever; if he were alive today, I would happily key his Mercedes-Benz. On one level, Schenker’s contention that there are notes—imaginary, abstract notes, notes that heretically pair open noteheads with flags and beams—hidden behind the notes one actually hears is pure voodoo. Whether it’s out of some perverse Lovecraftian (speaking of wily old racists) drive to know more than is good for me or simply due scholarly conscientiousness, though, I have a genuine thirst to know more about Schenkerian theory, to inscribe those cursed runes and summon contrapuntal demons myself. My better half, who is already a seasoned acolyte in this particular brand of analytical sorcery, has an uncanny intuition for “what’s really happening” in a piece of classical music circa 1750-1880; I don’t know that just anyone can pick up that kind of nose for background harmonic activity, and it may well be the case that my mundane psyche lacks the arcane spark necessary to read the tea leaves and sheep guts accurately. But I have a semester to give it a shot, and if I can choke down my impatience with Schenker the man (at least as he presents himself in freie Satz), perhaps I can come to terms with Schenker the magician.
