Heinrich Schenker Information
Heinrich Schenker (June 19, 1868 - January 13, 1935) was a music theorist, best known for his approach to musical analysis, now usually called Schenkerian analysis.[1]
Schenker was born in Wisniowczyki (now Vyshnivchyk) in Galicia then in Austria-Hungary (now Ternopil oblast, Ukraine). His musical talent was recognized early on, and at the age of 13 he was sent to study with Carl Mikuli, a student of Chopin, in Lemberg (now Lviv). After a move to Vienna, he studied music under Bruckner and became known as a pianist, accompanying lieder singers (such as Johan Messchaert) and playing chamber music. He taught piano and music theory privately, and Wilhelm Furtwängler, Anthony van Hoboken (future cataloguer of Haydn's oeuvre), Felix Salzer, and Hans Wolf[2] were among his pupils.[3]
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Schenker's publications
Schenker's ideas on analysis were first explored in his Harmony (Harmonielehre, 1906) and Counterpoint (Kontrapunkt, 2 vols., 1910 and 1922), and were developed in the two journals he published, Der Tonwille (1921–24) and Das Meisterwerk in der Musik (1925–30), both of which included content exclusively by Schenker. Schenker regarded his analyses as tools to be used by performers for a deeper understanding of the works they were performing. This is demonstrated by his editions of Ludwig van Beethoven's late piano sonatas, which also include analyses of the works.
In 1932, Schenker published Five Graphic Music Analyses (Fünf Urlinie-Tafeln), analyses of five works using the analytical technique of showing layers of greater and lesser musical detail that now bears his name. Following Schenker's death, his theoretical work Free Composition (Der freie Satz, 1935) was published. It was first translated into English by T. H. Kreuger in 1960 as a dissertation at the University of Iowa; a second translation, by Ernst Oster, was published in 1979.
Philosophical and political origins of Schenker's theory
Some English translations of his work have deleted passages that could be considered politically incorrect and irrelevant to the topic. (For example, in the Preface to Counterpoint Schenker writes that "the man ranks above the woman, the producer is superior to the merchant or laborer, the head prevails over the foot," &c.) It is important to realize, however, that the genesis of Schenker's system lay in his philosophical and political views on the nature of the world. For Schenker, the natural hierarchies of music were part of a naturally ordered universe, and tonal music inherently reflects this order no matter what choices the composer makes to detail the music. Schenker considered music to be necessarily built on the principles of functional tonality (often attributed to Bach's chorale settings, but more strongly made manifest in Arcangelo Corelli's concerti grossi). His analytical system, therefore, yields its most productive results when applied to music of the common practice period. Schenker did not consider music any compositions that failed to follow traditional principles of tonality.
During the years in which Schenker devised his theory, he altered it to better fit the literature than the natural principles that inspired it. For example, Schenker's original conception of the Urlinie was of a line that rose from ^1 to reach its top note exactly midway through the piece, and then descended back to ^1.
Developments after Schenker's death
In the academic generations after Schenker, other music theorists have both added to and disseminated Schenker's ideas. In the second generation (Schenker himself being the first), the fierce philosophical opposition between Oswald Jonas and Felix Salzer set the stage for a conservative-liberal split among Schenkerians that persists to this day. Jonas, a traditional disciple who was more strict about the theory than Schenker himself, promoted the viewpoint that the analysis belonged only in the realm of triadic tonal music. This camp is generally responsible for the codification and clarification of the theory's principles, epitomized as the "New York" model by theorists such as Carl Schachter and recently Allen Cadwallader and David Gagne. Salzer, on the other hand, was the first Schenkerian to attempt to use elements of the theory to explain music that is not strictly tonal, an approach that has since engendered structural and linear analysis of early music as well as post-tonal music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Hampered by limited availability in and after the war years, by the 1960s Schenkerian analysis had begun to attract renewed interest, and by the 1980s it had become one of the main analytical methods used by many North American music theorists. While Schenker's theories have been increasingly challenged since the mid-century for their rigidity and organicist ideology, the wider analytical tradition that they inspired has remained central to the study of tonal music in North America.
Further reading
A thorough documentation of Schenker-related research and analysis is provided in David Carson Berry, A Topical Guide to Schenkerian Literature: An Annotated Bibliography with Indices (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2004). The largest Schenkerian reference work ever published, it has 3600 entries (2200 principal, 1400 secondary) representing the work of 1475 authors. It is organized topically: fifteen broad groupings encompass seventy topical headings, many of which are divided and subdivided again, resulting in a total of 271 headings under which entries are collected.
Notes
- ^ SchenkerGUIDE By Tom Pankhurst, p. 5 ff
- ^ http://www.soundfountain.org/rem/remwolf.html
- ^ These and other students and colleagues are discussed in Hellmut Federhofer, Heinrich Schenker: nach Tagebuchern und Briefen in der Oswald Jonas Memorial Collection, University of California, Riverside (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1985). Additionally, Schenker kept a lesson book from 1912-1931 in which he recorded the basic contents of many (but not all) of his students' lessons. This lesson book is housed in the Oster Collection, Music Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
External links
See also
Categories: 1868 births | 1935 deaths | Music theorists | Alumni of the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna | Austrian musicians | Galician Jews | Heinrich Schenker students | Jewish classical musicians
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