Does it really make sense that a bunch of composers...would all suddenly decide to stop doing an interesting thing and start doing a non-interesting thing? Because “times have changed”?
The thing is—it might, for certain values of “interesting” and “not interesting”. After all, if you take Gjerdingen’s POV seriously, this is precisely what happened in the Romantic art-music of the 19th century.
I submit that anyone who thinks this is what happened in the Romantic art-music of the 19th century should notice their confusion in exactly the same way I was suggesting above. And I’m quite willing to believe that Gjerdingen understands 19th-century music a lot less well than he understands 18th-century music; in fact, that’s almost obvious. (He could find his schemata—or maybe others—in 19th-century music if he looked, but he doesn’t look because he’s committed to the Pennsylvania-school paradigm wherein only the surface of music exists.)
(A seemingly-tangential but potentially important remark: there are two senses of “concreteness” that may come up here, one good and one bad. The good kind is Horus as opposed to Ra, which is something like specificity as opposed to vagueness, or near mode as opposed to far; the bad kind is S as opposed to N in the Myers-Briggs sense, which is like a failure, or refusal, to see patterns—its opposite is what I usually mean by abstraction when I use that as a positive-affect word. Penn-school-style music theory is bad because it is too “concrete” in this S-sense, and lacks or strongly discourages the N-style “abstraction” which is at the core of Schenkerian theory, and absolutely necessary for understanding 19th- and 20th-century art music in anything like a reasonable way.)
The “modernist” impulse itself was quite consistent with that earlier memeplex.
This is false if what you mean is that the modernist impulse was about undoing the 19th century in some sense.
It matters little that these composers were “steeped in tradition”, when the memeplex itself was pushing to reject slowly- and collectively-accreted tradition, and embrace innovation and the individual composer.
This, again, is wrong, perhaps in an important way worth explaining. In brief, it’s a far-mode narrative obscuring the near-mode truth.
Consider this question: was Schenker “steeped in tradition”, or did he embrace the “individual composer”? Obviously, the question is wrong. The whole way that this tradition works is that there is this vast edifice of cultural knowledge against which the individual work, or individual composer, is thrown into relief. Semper idem sed non eodem modo.
A common and misguided criticism of Schenkerian analyses is that they “don’t capture” this or that “salient” detail. This is wrong, because the analytical content of a Schenkerian reduction does not lie in the reduction itself, but in the contrast between the reduction and the score. You, the reader of the analysis, are supposed to be able to infer the operations that lead from the former to the latter, and these operations are the content of the analysis. So, a generic Schenkerian basic structure is always specifically informative about the details of the piece; one chooses between different candidate Schenkerian structures not on the basis of quantified “informativeness”, but rather on aesthetic grounds partially intrinsic to the structures themselves. (This is why performing a Schenkerian analysis is a creative act that feels similar to composition.)
Can you even ‘try harder’ to find interesting structure, in a way that will do more than ‘simply’ pick up on random noise?… Is there any hope for doing better than that, and finding some truly unexpected “signal”?
I don’t think you quite appreciate the degree to which people really, really haven’t been trying—or perhaps, to put it more charitably, haven’t been looking at things in the right way (though I strongly feel that the work of Schenker ought to have been sufficient to suggest the right way).
If you think that the appreciation of 20th-century music (but not 18th- or 19th-century music) consists of picking up patterns in random noise (as opposed to patterns that were designed by humans to be picked up), you are missing something huge.
he’s committed to the Pennsylvania-school paradigm wherein only the surface of music exists.
I’m pretty sure that this is not literally the case—there are lots of primary sources (from the 18th c. and earlier) which clearly refer to the process of elaboration from a “simple” to a “complex” musical surface, and he points to some of these sources. Moreover, he does deploy something quite close to analytical reduction in his work on schemata.
Your remarks about Schenkerian analysis might be more on point—the real failure in that paradigm would then be the focus on a single level of reduction as the “real” one, whereas one should consider the analysis as a whole as well as the operations leading from one level to the next. That’s certainly an interesting point of view. It should be noted though that Gjerdingen does discuss these processes of elaboration from the bare “schema” to the musical surface in a rather detailed way—he just does so in the text, without using a layered notation like Schenker. Moreover, there’s some reason to think that the very existence of well-known middle-ground “schemata”, and the widespread practice of improvising further layers of elaboration in performance, might have resulted in these operations being quite salient to the 18th-c. listener, in a way that we aren’t fully aware of today. Thus, I actually think that there’s plenty of room for both perspectives!
there are lots of primary sources (from the 18th c. and earlier) which clearly refer to the process of elaboration from a “simple” to a “complex” musical surface
For example, C.P.E. Bach’s Essay on the Right Way to Play the Keyboard, which, along with Fux’ Gradus ad Parnassum, is claimed by Schenker as one of his two principal antecedents.
It should be noted though that Gjerdingen does discuss these processes of elaboration from the bare “schema” to the musical surface in a rather detailed way
Which is why Gjerdingen’s work is as interesting as it is—because, in other words, he’s reinventing Schenkerian theory. Make no mistake, it’s a tour de force on Gjerdingen’s part that he was able to start from Pennsylvania and work his way toward Schenker, sort of. No doubt it would be too much to ask of him to carry this process through to completion, or at least to the point where he could make sense of the 19th century. And I do think his book can be worth reading, so long as one approaches it as history and not theory (and one remains aware of the inherent art-destroying tendency of institutionalized historical scholarship).
But it is striking how often anyone who seems to be doing anything at all interesting in music theory turns out to be reinventing Schenkerian theory, usually in an inferior form. Another example is Daniel Harrison, author of Harmonic Function in Chromatic Music, who announces at the beginning of his book that Schenker’s “coin” won’t do to pay back our “debt” with respect to analyzing the late-Romantic chromaticism of Reger, Strauss, Mahler, etc.; and then a scant few pages later is excitedly telling us about his brilliant new theory that “harmonic function” resides in individual tones rather than “chords”. Who would have thought?! Who, that is, except …
But it is striking how often anyone who seems to be doing anything at all interesting in music theory turns out to be reinventing Schenkerian theory
Well, maybe. Don’t get me wrong, I think Schenkerian theory should be required reading for any serious theorist, but it’s all too easy to think that any theorists who have some worthwhile points outside of Schenkerian theory are “just doing music history”, or “just talking about ‘surface’ variation” that’s supposedly irrelevant to ‘deep’ forms of the art, or “just nitpicking” the finer points of this or that style. To take just one example, Neo-Riemannian and transformational theory is as far from Schenker as anything could be, but it still describes features of music that can be perceived quite readily upon listening, and this arguably makes it worthy of study. Even Dmitri Tymoczko’s work is not that bad if you ignore the hype about it and simply read it as a sensible extension on the earlier Neo-Riemannian/transformational perspective.
I think Schenkerian theory should be required reading for any serious theorist, but it’s all too easy to think that any theorists who have some worthwhile points outside of Schenkerian theory are “just doing music history”, or “just talking about ‘surface’ variation” that’s supposedly irrelevant to ‘deep’ forms of the art, or “just nitpicking” the finer points of this or that style.
This is a good example of a sentence that sounds written in the voice of Ra: “Yes, your faction is important, but surely we’re not going to entertain specific arguments that it’s actually strictly more important than these other Powerful Factions, are we? The Invisible Hand of Coolness has already bestowed its blessing upon these various factions, including yours, thereby obviating the need for any explicit power struggle!”
The intellectual reality is this: Schenker in music theory is a figure of comparable importance to Darwin in biology. People before him really weren’t even doing the subject yet, and people after him who act as if he hadn’t existed are doing the subject even less.
The fact that, in the case of music, the sociological reality doesn’t reflect this intellectual reality is nothing less than a pathology.
The fact that saying this breaks the rules is arguably an even greater meta-pathology (Ra).
“All too easy”? Yes, and just why is it so easy? It’s easy because Gjerdingen isn’t actually doing anything other than
(1) music history, i.e. documenting shared stylistic features of a chronological cluster of music; and
(2) anti-artistic polemic, viz. undermining the Western art-music tradition by promoting a narrative that severs the 18th century from the 19th (and thus from us in the 20th and 21st, as well).
(1) could perfectly well be done inside of Schenkerian theory (and Gjerdingen’s feeble semblance of an attempt to argue against this claim on pp. 33-39 falls far short), and (2) is just an outright bad thing to do.
Even Dmitri Tymoczko’s work is not that bad
You have to be kidding me.
To come to that conclusion, you have to do more than ignore the hype. You have to ignore the subtext, which is so apparent as to not actually be subtext at all, but text. That book is a populist tract. The agenda is laid out plainly at the beginning.
For Tymoczko, all music is pop music. In particular, modernist art music is just very strange pop music that nobody likes. To the extent it has value it all, its value lies in its shocking weirdness. He is completely incredulous of, if not oblivious to, any notion that any other mode of listening or approach to music is possible. His orientation is thoroughly anti-intellectual, and the fact that he has been able to acquire such prestige (we’re talking about a Princeton professor who uses the word “cerebral” as a pejorative) is a perfect illustration of the malfunction of contemporary academia.
Ultimately, however, people like Tymoczko are, I regret to say, perhaps the unintended consequence of something that looked healthy and productive, once upon a time, including to me: the epistemological positivism of Babbitt, Westergaard, et al. I now realize that the reason it seemed fine in their case was the cultural capital in the background: they took the Western art music tradition, and its value, for granted. I now suspect that Tymoczko and the Penn School are what it looks like when positivism is deployed without that assumption. This has caused me to update strongly against positivism.
The intellectual reality is this: Schenker in music theory is a figure of comparable importance to Darwin in biology. People before him really weren’t even doing the subject yet, …
That’s kind of pushing it, I think. The main and most robust insights of Schenkerian theory were actually known centuries earlier than Schenker; nevertheless he can be credited for rediscovering these insights and rephrasing them in something closer to a positivistic way, as opposed to the resolutely pragmatic stance taken by many earlier theorists. His work as a music editor and critic probably had something to do with that.
This is a good example of a sentence that sounds written in the voice of Ra: “Yes, your faction is important, but surely we’re not going to entertain specific arguments that it’s actually strictly more important than these other Powerful Factions, are we?
--And yet even biology has its own “stamp-collecting” subfields happily coexisting besides the “evolutionary” specialties—and we usually don’t attribute this arrangement to nefarious influence by the Powerful Faction of young-earth creationists within the biology department.
(1) could perfectly well be done inside of Schenkerian theory …
Look, you’re right that Gjerdingen’s attitude about Schenker is mostly a matter of the intra-academic politicking that you deplore in this comment. But this is hardly a novel claim, or something that “breaks the rules” inside academia: David Temperley effectively said as much in his 2006 review of Music in the Galant Style! And at this point, I think we’ll just agree to disagree about (2); I think there’s room for plenty of “narratives” about 18th-c. music, of which the ‘mainstream’ one emphasizing the purported links to what would later coalesce as the Romantic and Modernist tradition is one of many.
[Tymoczko’s] book is a populist tract.
I regard the ‘populist’ subtext of the book as part of the unimportant “hype” about it, and I suspect that many music theorists would do the same.
To the extent it has value it all, its value lies in its shocking weirdness.
I thought it was in fact a consensus point of view in the core “modernist” period that music had to be shocking and weird, and that any music that wasn’t shocking and weird would be considered “reactionary” (in a rather politicized sense)? It’s hard to see how this once-widespread stance is meaningfully different from a claim that “shocking weirdness” is exactly what gives that music its value.
The main and most robust insights of Schenkerian theory were actually known centuries earlier than Schenker
Not only would I deny that, I would further assert that the main insights of Schenkerian theory are basically still not known by the music theory community. This is why Daniel Harrison can write about viewing chords as collections of individual scale-degrees—literally one of the foundational premises of Schenkerian theory—as if he is proposing something radical: because in point of unfortunate fact, he is.
To be sure, tacit knowledge of the phenomena Schenker describes long predates him. But making the tacit explicit is a large part of what Schenker is about.
nevertheless he can be credited for rediscovering these insights and rephrasing them in something closer to a positivistic way
I would certainly not credit Schenker (who was adamant that he was doing “art” and not “science”) with being “positivistic”—that’s a label one would reserve for someone like Westergaard. And you’ll recall that in my previous comment I expressed doubt about positivism being good anyway. I no longer think that the “epistemic” or “methodological” criticisms of Schenker (typically coming precisely from “positivist” quarters) are of any particular importance.
(In terms of Clark Glymour’s taxonomy, I have switched from being a logical positivist to being an “English professor”.)
And yet even biology has its own “stamp-collecting” subfields happily coexisting besides the “evolutionary” specialties—and we usually don’t attribute this arrangement to nefarious influence by the Powerful Faction of young-earth creationists within the biology department.
That’s because the stamp collectors aren’t writing anti-Darwin polemics; they simply accept Darwinism as the background paradigm (at least as far as I understand). The fact that Schenkerian theory does not enjoy similar background-paradigm status—and, perhaps even more, the fact that it is not infrequently asserted that it does even though it clearly doesn’t—is a sign of dysfunction in the field, as far as I am concerned.
Look, you’re right that Gjerdingen’s attitude about Schenker is mostly a matter of the intra-academic politicking that you deplore in this comment. But this is hardly a novel claim, or something that “breaks the rules” inside academia: David Temperley effectively said as much in his 2006 review of Music in the Galant Style!
As far as I could tell, David “[n]o one would call me a Schenkerian” Temperley said nothing like what I said. His criticism of Gjerdingen was more like the mirror image of your argument to me: Gjerdingen shouldn’t be so dogmatically attached to his own paradigm, and should realize that Schenkerian theory, too, has “something to contribute”. No, thank you—Schenker is better off without the (false) protection of Ra.
(Incidentally, the example he offers at the end of the review to illustrate “how a cooperative and open-minded
engagement between schema theory and other approaches might illuminate
music-theoretical issues”—doesn’t that sound like political boiler-plate to you? -- is an exercise in vacuity. He starts off by complaining that Schenkerian theory “is unable to explain why descending-
fifths sequences are so much more common than ascending-fifths ones”, which is the wrong kind of question to begin with—if anything it suggests that the phenomenon in question is probably not best understood simply as “descending- fifths sequences”, but rather in a more, ahem, Schenkerian way. But let’s run with it. What does Temperley propose as the answer?
Gjerdingen’s examples show us that the Prinner pattern had a life of its own and very often occurred without the descending-fifths progression. This historical evidence gives new credence to the contrapuntal view of descending-fifths sequences: Perhaps such sequences did arise, in part, as harmonic elaborations of a con-
trapuntal pattern
In other words, Gjerdingen dug up a bunch of examples of the unelaborated version, and not only was this enough to convince Temperley that it constitutes an “explanation” of the elaborated version, where the evident inherent relationship of the two hadn’t been, but it suddenly relieved him of his curiosity with regard to the alleged statistical disparity between the ascending and descending variants, despite the fact that Gjerdingen himself makes no attempt to explain why the Prinner is so much more common than its ascending counterpart which failed to make it into his catalog. Such piffle!)
I think there’s room for plenty of “narratives” about 18th-c. music, of which the ‘mainstream’ one emphasizing the purported links to what would later coalesce as the Romantic and Modernist tradition is one of many
You may be content with a detached view from afar, where it seems like everybody ought to be able to just get along, but I make no apology for the fact that I, as an artist, have skin in the game; and, in the face of the ever-tempting, corrupting mind-viruses of complacency and anti-ambition, the narrative I believe in will not survive—much less as the ‘mainstream’ one—without a fight.
[Tymoczko’s] book is a populist tract.
I regard the ‘populist’ subtext of the book as part of the unimportant “hype” about it, and I suspect that many music theorists would do the same
The anti-intellectual orientation is reflected in the very methodology (an extremely concrete—in the bad sense—and superficial mode of listening is assumed throughout), and in the choice of questions considered fit for study. (E.g., “why do most people prefer tonal to atonal music?” Even aside from the whiff of “9 out of 10 dogs prefer our brand of dog food” commercialism, what a thoroughly stupid question! You might as well ask why most people “prefer” arithmetic to calculus, or some such.)
I thought it was in fact a consensus point of view in the core “modernist” period that music had to be shocking and weird, and that any music that wasn’t shocking and weird would be considered “reactionary” (in a rather politicized sense)?
This is a caricature at best and a rank equivocation at worst. Similar views were attributed to Beethoven by his contemporaries, with about as much justifiability. Problematicity, and perhaps even a certain kind of “unpleasantness” at first glance were an important parts of the aesthetic of modernism, but (as with Beethoven) a deeper sense of beauty and continuity of tradition were always underlying. It was always still art; never was it shock for shock’s sake.
To be sure, tacit knowledge of the phenomena Schenker describes long predates him. But making the tacit explicit is a large part of what Schenker is about.
I was indeed pointing to the extent to which the description of ‘Schenkerian’ phenomena was quite explicit. (Taking elaboration/‘composing out’ as one example, you pointed out C.P.E. Bach’s work about the keyboard already, but Quantz’s treatise on playing the flute is also significant, as well as the many, many treatises and other sources which expressly discuss “diminution” around the 17th c. - the EarlyMusicSources website gives a helpful list of those.)
(In terms of Clark Glymour’s taxonomy, I have switched from being a logical positivist to being an “English professor”.)
Yeah, Clark Glymour has been criticized for that particular contention of his—see this review of his book. It’s not at all clear that taking an aesthetic attitude towards the world, like many English professors, literary critics and art critics more generally do, involves any real ‘rejection’ of logical positivism stricto sensu—as opposed to merely ‘rejecting’ a naïve sort of philistine and overenthusiastic ‘scientism’! Most “positivists” would probably regard such a contention as a blatant category error.
But it’s debatable that this should concern the Music department, which is after all not primarily charged with creating new art, but with explaining and making sense of the musical traditions that are already out there—including, to be sure, romantic music and modernism.
I make no apology for the fact that I, as an artist, have skin in the game; and, in the face of the ever-tempting, corrupting mind-viruses of complacency and anti-ambition, the narrative I believe in will not survive—much less as the ‘mainstream’ one—without a fight.
Choosing your own narrative is of course your prerogative in what’s clearly an artistic context, as opposed to a more detached retelling of history. Surely though the best defense against ‘complacency and anti-ambition’ involves recognizing the value of musical ambition itself.
That’s because the stamp collectors aren’t writing anti-Darwin polemics; they simply accept Darwinism as the background paradigm (at least as far as I understand). …
That’s a problem to be sure, but ISTM that the field is slowly improving. “Anti-Schenkerian polemics” are becoming increasingly rare, and they increasingly debate only the most marginal and contentious aspects of Schenker such as his epistemic stance, or to what extent his “organicism” should be applied to earlier music. The introductory curriculum is still not chosen in a way that would reflect Schenkerian theory as the ‘background paradigm’, but that’s one of the hardest things to change in any academic field.
...despite the fact that Gjerdingen himself makes no attempt to explain why the Prinner is so much more common than its ascending counterpart which failed to make it into his catalog. Such piffle!
I really don’t understand this. Why should we even expect the “ascending Prinner” to be as common as the “descending one” within any specific style? Explaining this sort of stylistic variation is just not something you can sensibly do with a general model of tonal music like the one Schenker gives you. Moreover, as Gjerdingen makes abundantly clear, the Prinner itself did not exist in a vacuum; it interacted with other patterns in a complex way. Perhaps the “ascending Prinner” simply didn’t feature the same affordances, and this explains why it was neglected.
I was indeed pointing to the extent to which the description of ‘Schenkerian’ phenomena was quite explicit
“Diminution” was known, yes, but reversing it as a general analytical method, much less following this to its ultimate conclusion (the Ursatz), certainly was not. Here are some other concepts that were not explicit before Schenker:
the hierarchy of structural levels (Schichten);
the specific relationship of strict counterpoint to free composition (and, in particular, the distinction between them—see the introduction to Counterpoint);
Stufen as “spiritual” entities, as opposed to concrete sonorities;
Stufen as generators of musical content (motives);
the strict distinction between “harmony” (the theory of Stufen) and “counterpoint” (the theory of voice leading) -- in particular, the dubious relevance of traditional “harmony exercises” with their “doubling rules” etc.;
the concept of “organic coherence”, i.e. tonal closure as achieved in the Ursatz;
the “law of the passing tone”, i.e. linear progressions (Züge) being the true explanation of “harmonic motion”;
the “line model” of music (as opposed to the “chord model”; this is admittedly more explicit in Westergaard than Schenker); in particular, the hierarchy of lines (more explicit in Schenker than Westergaard!); in particular, the fact that a single line can give rise to other, subordinate, lines that depend on it at later levels (absolutely essential to the proper understanding of highly chromatic or “atonal” music).
If only these ideas were widely known even today!
In general, Schenker is special because he knew how to theorize. I have never encountered anyone before or since, at least in the realm of music, with a better sense of the aesthetics of theory-construction. (Part of this, though only part, involves an interest in taking ideas to their logical conclusion—thus seeking understanding—as opposed to contenting oneself with the “pragmatic”.)
But it’s debatable that this should concern the Music department, which is after all not primarily charged with creating new art, but with explaining and making sense of the musical traditions that are already out there
I completely disagree—or, to the extent I agree, I regard this as an argument against music departments. I reject the ideology of detachment as a virtue—the idea that it’s fine for the “kids” to play, but the job of the “adults” is to study their play patterns.
And notice the devious work being done by the word “already” in your sentence! If artists aren’t going to have a primary role in music departments, why on Earth should they cede the right to those departments to decide what is “already” the case?
If mathematics departments are supposed to be about creating mathematics, then music departments should be about creating music. Of course, academia doesn’t actually work, so the antecedent is probably false.
(Also, I dislike the framing of “creating new X”. As you hopefully realize by now, I don’t consider novelty per se—note the spelling of that Latin phrase—to be the point. “Continuing to actively create X” would be better.)
“Anti-Schenkerian polemics” are becoming increasingly rare
I see no particular evidence of this—Gjerdingen doesn’t strike me as an exemplar of a dying trend. In any case my concern is not so much explicit polemics as the shifting of the Overton Window to include people like Tymoczko, who would have been happily unthinkable at a place like Princeton back in the old days. This trend is real, and I think inherent to the incentive structure of academia (of which “technically-impressive-looking validations of political correctness and intellectual laziness/complacency” is about as close to a description of the optimization target as one can explicitly articulate).
Why should we even expect the “ascending Prinner” to be as common as the “descending one” within any specific style?
Who knows? Ask Temperley—he was the one who seemed to think this was some kind of anomaly that Schenkerian theory was obligated to explain (but, somehow, Gjerdingen’s theory mysteriously wasn’t).
“Diminution” was known, yes, but reversing it as a general analytical method, much less following this to its ultimate conclusion (the Ursatz), certainly was not.
I get your point—and “diminution” obviously stands out as one loosely-‘Schenkerian’ notion that’s especially well attested in old sources—but “certainly” is a strong word! This video. posted as recently as a week ago by the Society for Music Theory, gives an intriguing example of the sort of analysis that could be done in the late 18th century. One could also quibble about the degree to which some of these notions were actually well-known, if with a different terminology: for example, the idea of Stufen (i.e. triads) as generators of musical content is arguably implied in the Rameauvian notion of “fundamental bass” which was at first adopted in a quite subsidiary role, to be used alongside the more traditional notions of thoroughbass and counterpoint. (Even W. A. Mozart used this “Basso fondamentale” in his teaching). And this concurrent use of so-called “harmony” and the earlier thoroughbass and counterpoint seems to only have been lost as an educational practice sometime in the 19th century.
In general, Schenker is special because he knew how to theorize.
I do agree about this, but one problem with Schenker is that he’s extremely inconsistent about showing this ability in his writings. I can’t help suspecting that one reason why there are so many anti-Schenkerians in even the most “positivistic” music departments has to be the fear of a bait-and-switch argument, where the die-hard Schenkerians “hook” you with sensible talk of diminution and “good abstraction” and the importance of “lines”… but before you know it, they’ve switched to talking about fluffy notions like “organic coherence” and the “generating power” of the tonic triad, and for all you know they’ll soon start to go on and on and on about how the moral decay of Austria totally explains why it lost WWI, and how the sorry state of classical music is somehow relevant to this “decay”!
I reject the ideology of detachment as a virtue—the idea that it’s fine for the “kids” to play, but the job of the “adults” is to study their play patterns.
Making sense of music does not have to involve the philistine “detachment” you seem to fear so much, though. It can be a kind of artistic activity in itself. And indeed, Schenker seems to have been especially aware of this.
If mathematics departments are supposed to be about creating mathematics...
Mathematicians are especially lucky because creating new math is among the best ways, and perhaps the only real way of comprehensively explaining and “curating” previous math work in a way that makes sense to their fellow professionals. People in music departments don’t have quite the same luxury! Albeit the practice of “recomposition” can in many ways be illuminating and provide good proofs of concept for theoretical ideas about music, which makes this sort of new compositional activity especially valuable.
...I don’t consider novelty per se—note the spelling of that Latin phrase -- …
Latin phrase? Now that’s the sort of nonsensical linguistic prescriptivism up with which I shall not put!
In any case my concern is not so much explicit polemics as the shifting of the Overton Window to include people like Tymoczko, who would have been happily unthinkable at a place like Princeton back in the old days.
Is Tymoczko’s work all that different in character from, e.g. David Lewin’s (which famously involved the application of mathematical group theory to explaining chord changes)? When you’re aware of previous lines of work and the extent to which Tymoczko is in many ways following in the footsteps of previous theorists, it’s really hard to regard him as such a big “shift of the Overton window”.
Yes, I realize saying this contradicts what I wrote in Wikipedia a decade ago. But the fact of the matter is that Stufen are more abstract (“spiritual”) than that. They are not triads themselves, but rather assignments of functionality to tones (e.g. “root”, “third”, and “fifth”—hence the confusion with triads—but also “second”, “fourth”, and “seventh”, as we see when Schenker uses figured-bass numerals with reference to the root of the Stufe). Their type signature is thus that of a key, or tonality, not a set. As with keys, there exists a natural mapping from Stufen to triads; but the key of C major is distinct from the triad of C major, and likewise, so is the Stufe of C major (which is in fact more similar to the former).
(I believe I have also explained elsewhere the relationship between modes and Stufen: e.g. the Dorian mode corresponds to a II Stufe in major.)
Schenker didn’t quite grasp this, unfortunately—but it follows a lot more closely from his concepts than his concepts do from Rameau’s (heavens!).
And let’s take a step back, because we’re talking past each other in an fairly absurd way. You’re basically trying to argue that Schenker’s ideas were already understood in the past by people like Rameau; yet even while you’re arguing this, I claim that Schenker’s ideas are not in fact currently understood by you (or the music theory profession generally, which, again, you do an admirable job of representing, whether or not you’re a member of it). So from my perspective, your argument doesn’t even type-check, much less convince.
In general, Schenker is special because he knew how to theorize.
I do agree about this, but one problem with Schenker is that he’s extremely inconsistent about showing this ability in his writings...the die-hard Schenkerians “hook” you with sensible talk of diminution and “good abstraction” and the importance of “lines”… but before you know it, they’ve switched to talking about fluffy notions like “organic coherence” and the “generating power” of the tonic triad
I have apparently not succeeded in communicating what I attempted to communicate above.
When I said I had jumped ship from logical positivism to English-professorship, this is what I was talking about. Schenker was doing it right. Those “fluffy notions”—which are not actually all that fluffy—are what good discourse on music looks like. It’s music, for goodness’ sake.. Schenker talks that way because he actually cares—it’s the way one talks when one has something to protect.
I wasn’t kidding above, when I said
I no longer think that the “epistemic” or “methodological” criticisms of Schenker … are of any particular importance.
What makes someone a good theorist is not methodological propriety (which basically means adherence to a particular set of communicational norms—see how much of an English professor I’m being?), but rather a quality that might be called relentless seeing (by analogy with “original seeing”). It involves things like curiosity, bullet-biting, and abstraction (in the sense of pattern-recognition I discussed above); as well as, of course, caring—having something to protect, a sense of directionality.
So yes, someone with these qualities is likely to see a connection between the lack of “background structure” (i.e. agency, directionality, “moral sense”, etc.) in the “lives of the masses” and the political disasters of their time, if they’re inclined to take any interest in politics to begin with.
Schenker’s sense of how to theorize is actually better than (any particular version of) his theory. He’s the kind of person from whom the right way to learn is by imitation, even more than appropriation of specific ideas. Basically, the postwar anglophone reception of Schenker has it exactly backwards!
Making sense of music does not have to involve the philistine “detachment” you seem to fear so much!
Indeed not, but Schenker is what it looks like when it doesn’t, and the Penn School is what it looks like when it does. These are like the two ends of the “philistine detachment” spectrum, according to which others can be measured.
Mathematicians are especially lucky because creating new math is among the best ways, and perhaps the only real way of comprehensively explaining and “curating” previous math work… People in music departments don’t have quite the same luxury!
In case you haven’t noticed, I deny this.
nonsensical linguistic prescriptivism
There is nothing nonsensical about linguistic prescriptivism! Once again we see the perversity of the academic mindset according to which all explicit normativity is to be banished from life. (Of course, a surfeit of implicit normativity is encouraged, leading to a hypocrisy ratchet.)
When the linguists said “don’t confuse us with grammarians”, there was nothing in that statement that needed to imply that being a grammarian was somehow wrong, as opposed linguistics simply being a different subject from prescriptive grammar. Yet, that was how everybody seemed to take it, to the point where we now have linguists running around thinking that combatting “prescriptivism” is part of their professional identity. That is nonsensical.
At this point, I’m about ready to declare that grammarianism (linguistic aesthetics, a.k.a. “prescriptivism”) is more interesting than linguistics. (By analogy to Schenkerian theory being more interesting than ethnomusicology.)
When you’re aware of previous lines of work and the extent to which Tymoczko is in many ways following in the footsteps of previous theorists, it’s really hard to regard him as such a big “shift of the Overton window”.
Yes, I agree that Tymoczko can reasonably be regarded as a consequence of Lewin! I have therefore updated against Lewin.
It is much, much more obvious that Tymoczko is bad than it ever was that Lewin was good. In retrospect, the reasons Lewin seemed good were largely sociological: he was interested in the right sort of music. But this is only a necessary condition, not a sufficient one, and it is (obviously) not true of Tymoczko.
You’re basically trying to argue that Schenker’s ideas were already understood in the past by people like Rameau
Um, I’m expressly not trying to say this (i.e., that “Schenker’s ideas” as a whole were extant), much less about Rameau himself (whose theoretical outlook was in fact quite wrong—his ‘fundamental bass’ simply wasn’t the sort of basic principle of music he thought it was). But the way some elements of Rameau’s theory were adopted practically (by a comparative elite of folks with pre-existing expertise about music, not the middle-class pure amateurs who mostly stuck with Rameau’s simplified treatment in its entirety) is rather more interesting.
This is also why the distinction between “triad” and “modality” is rather beside the point, in practical usage. You can hopefully see how the “modal” point of view practically follows from the “triad as a generator of musical content”, just as it follows from Schenker’s presentation. Indeed, jazz theorists have rediscovered this link in a largely independent fashion, which is why they like to talk about modes so much.
As for whether Schenkerian theory as a whole was “already understood in the past”, one would have to answer in the negative, simply because of its reliance on a clever yet remarkably successful synthesis of 18th-c. (see above) and 19th-c. ideas (organicism, complex “form”, music as an emotionally-connoted ‘journey’ across distant tonal areas, etc.) that could not realistically be developed before the late-19th or early-20th c. That much is clear enough. But this also makes the theory historically dependent in a rather unorthodox way for a figure on a par with Darwin! (For instance, Schenker’s ideas in and of themselves have little to say about orchestration and texture. If Schenker’s works were all we had to go on, we would never know to hear, say, the start of KV332(I), 1st mvmt., as much more than stereotypically “pretty” music prolonging the tonic sonority—and would entirely miss the veritable “journey” involved in the truly remarkable variety of textures and styles Mozart lets us sample in these measures! (And arguably in the entire movement. Also, this is a brief description and probably fails to convey the real mastery in what Mozart’s doing—which requires a fairly in-depth knowledge of these “styles” and their extra-musical implications to really appreciate.) This clarifies as well why I am somewhat skeptical of claims about “the right sort of music” to be interested in scholarly. If all that means is “music that a Schenker-like outlook happens to jive with”, that can justify a purely artistic choice, not so much a broadly stated claim about what theories are “good” or “bad” for the development of art music.)
Those “fluffy notions”—which are not actually all that fluffy—are what good discourse on music looks like. … it’s the way one talks when one has something to protect.
I definitely agree about this, but I’m not quite sure about the implication that non-Schenkerian theorists could not possibly have ‘something to protect’ of their own. (It’s very possible that you’re right about most of the ‘Penn School’, though!) Of course, their underlying interests might not be coincident with the ones Schenker had. They needn’t even do em any good, especially in the longer run—as arguably shown by the case of Rameau, who is on record as stating that he cared a lot more about his theoretical pursuits than the (rather impressive) music he actually composed!
There is nothing nonsensical about linguistic prescriptivism!
(Sure, but the “nonsense” I was talking about is specifically the prescriptivist tendency to take rules from a radically different language, and one that has been dead for thousands of years, viz. Latin—whether involving lexicon, syntax or grammar—and apply them wholesale to English. In this case, using the form “per say” has the benefit of adding some transparency about what the idiom actually means—something like “(just) in accordance with what’s being said; as an aside” in a way that just parroting per se doesn’t, unless you have studied Latin before!)
what the idiom actually means—something like “(just) in accordance with what’s being said; as an aside”
But that isn’t at all what the idiom actually means. Well, maybe there’s been a shift I’m unaware of and that’s what many people mean by it now, and on any particular occasion it may be used or abused in any way its user fancies. But what the Latin means, and what the phrase has always meant in English use when I’ve seen it, is more like “as such” or “in itself”. It doesn’t have anything to do with asides, and while I can see the connection between “just in accordance with what’s being said” and the actual meaning it would never occur to me to express it in such a way.
(I’d thought komponisto’s remark was referring back to a recent instance of “per say” in one of your comments, but I can’t find it now. Maybe it was someone else, or maybe you corrected it, or maybe I just imagined the whole thing. The comment I thought it was in has been edited but now doesn’t contain either “per say” or “per se”.)
This is also why the distinction between “triad” and “modality” is rather beside the point, in practical usage.
Not at all. It strongly implicates the distinction between the chord model and the line model of musical data; thinking of the Stufe as a triad has the severely unfortunate effect of encouraging the chord model. This is why almost no one has noticed that Schenkerian theory, like Westergaardian theory, uses the line model. It is for this reason that I am so insistent on the distinction between Stufen and triads, and what you call the “‘modal’ point of view”.
You’re basically trying to argue that Schenker’s ideas were already understood in the past by people like Rameau
Um, I’m expressly not trying to say this (i.e., that “Schenker’s ideas” as a whole were extant
The phrase “as a whole” is absent from my statement. You were trying to argue that some of Schenker’s ideas were extant, and I was disputing this in the important cases that were mentioned, in particular the Stufe as generator of content. While it was certainly related to things that had been said earlier by others (including Rameau), neither Schenker’s particular idea of Stufe nor, indeed, his idea of content were part of the standard music theory he inherited; had they been, no one would have been struck by the originality and importance of his Harmony.
In retrospect, of course, it is nearly always possible to trace the ancestry even of original ideas; and, in fact, contrary to the current “historical” Zeitgeist which has so strongly influenced your comments, I think this is exactly how earlier ideas should be looked at—from the perspective of their later descendants (provided the latter are actually a development or improvement of the earlier, which is markedly the case here). However, the consequence of this in this case is that, to whatever extent (e.g.) Rameau anticipated Schenker, it is a credit to Rameau, not a diminishment of Schenker.
But this also makes the theory historically dependent in a rather unorthodox way for a figure on a par with Darwin!
The reason Schenker is on a par with Darwin is not because of the novelty of his ideas; it is because of their fundamentality. As with Darwin’s ideas in the case of biology, Schenker’s ideas in music are a starting point, a core background assumption, for any reasonable view of music after him.
For instance, Schenker’s ideas in and of themselves have little to say about orchestration and texture. If Schenker’s works were all we had to go on, we would never know to hear, say, the start of KV332(I), 1st mvmt., as much more than stereotypically “pretty” music
This is a perfect example of what I am talking about when I say that Schenker’s ideas have not been understood.
I could just reply by pointing out that the first sentence is simply false. Read the Ninth Symphony monograph; you will find (just for instance) Schenker arguing at length against Wagner’s re-orchestrations of Beethoven. Already at that early stage, Schenker seemed to be under the impression that a lot of specific points about orchestration and texture followed from his ideas.
But really, the correct response is of a more general, meta-level character. The source of this type of complaint is a basic failure to understand what it is that one is supposed to be learning when one reads a music theorist—most of all Schenker. Even if Schenker had not bothered to spell out the specific orchestrational or textural consequences of his ideas on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or any other particular work, even if his only surviving writings were those devoted to the general presentation of his “theory” ( Harmony, Counterpoint, and Free Composition), it would still be entirely wrong to make the claim that you have, whether in general or about K. 332 in particular.
Your criticism is basically analogous to telling a nearsighted person that, if their eyeglasses were “all they had to go on”, they would never notice the beauties of the landscape. Well, of course, but eyeglasses are never all that a given individual has to go on; they also have the entire human visual system and cognitive apparatus, not to mention a lifetime’s worth of experience that will have imprinted itself upon these latter. The problem is that they’re nearsighted, and a distant landscape will, by default, appear as a nondescript blur, limiting their ability to make use of their interpretive and appreciative faculties. Hence, what they need most urgently are corrective lenses. Not a verbal description of the landscape, a textbook on natural history, or research in computer vision that might lead to commercially useful animal- and plant-classification algorithms.
Schenkerian theory is a framework. By default, people do not perceive music; they perceive only a distant, distorted shadow that hints at what music might be. A good music theory is like a corrective lens that allows them to perceive music in its full, vivid glory. The difference between perceiving a piece of music only superficially, as opposed to “all the way through” to the Urlinie, is like the difference between seeing a blurry smear of color, on the one hand, and a picturesque panorama of detail, on the other.
This isn’t a perfect analogy, but I hope it conveys something of the reason that “Schenker has little to say about orchestration or texture (or rhythm or …)” is just the wrong type of criticism of Schenker, even if were true (which it virtually never is). If you learn to hear music the way that Schenkerian theory aims to teach (as in, hearing this way is a skill), you notice more about a piece of music, not less.
There seems to be a certain kind of personality trait, a certain kind of over-concrete literal-mindedness, that prevents people from understanding this, in the specific case of Schenkerian theory, and from expecting this kind of thing of a theory in general. What is remarkable about Schenker is that he possessed the kind of personality that did expect this of a theory, and, as a result, presented a theory of this kind. This is what I mean by he knew how to theorize.
One could also perhaps make an analogy to programming. A theory of music should, in fact, be something like a programming language for music. Saying something of the form “this theory has nothing to say about orchestration (etc.)” is like criticizing a programming language on the grounds that it lacks good libraries. This is a superficial criticism, because if the core of the language is well designed, good libraries can always be written. Similarly, if you have a good theory of music, understanding the various details that might be involved in a given piece of music, such as orchestration, texture, or any number of other things, will take care of itself in the hands of a dedicated listener.
Sure, but the “nonsense” I was talking about is specifically the prescriptivist tendency to take rules from a radically different language, and one that has been dead for thousands of years, viz. Latin—whether involving lexicon, syntax or grammar—and apply them wholesale to English
That’s not what was going on here. I wasn’t doing something like advocating against “split infinitives” on the grounds that infinitives are a single word in Latin (actually they’re a single word in English as well and do not include the word to, a point that few understand but that can be confirmed by comparison with German, where the English preposition to corresponds to the German preposition zu, not to the infinitive ending -en).
Rather, I was correcting apparent ignorance of an actual piece of Latin being used in English. It is a feature of literate discourse that phrases from other languages are used; in such a speech community, one is expected to either have familiarity with the languages, or to learn the foreign vocabulary items (ahem) ad hoc. Something like “per say” is the result of somebody unfamiliar with the phrase in Latin misconstruing it as a phrase in English; this is simply a failure of literacy, nothing more—which can, of course, be easily corrected (even without studying the rest of Latin). As you may be able to gather, I am rather big on literacy. (As I have already indicated, I am not a fan of Richard Taruskin’s version of music history, but his framing of the nature of art music as being basically about a kind of literacy is something I find more or less spot on.)
I submit that anyone who thinks this is what happened in the Romantic art-music of the 19th century should notice their confusion in exactly the same way I was suggesting above. And I’m quite willing to believe that Gjerdingen understands 19th-century music a lot less well than he understands 18th-century music; in fact, that’s almost obvious. (He could find his schemata—or maybe others—in 19th-century music if he looked, but he doesn’t look because he’s committed to the Pennsylvania-school paradigm wherein only the surface of music exists.)
(A seemingly-tangential but potentially important remark: there are two senses of “concreteness” that may come up here, one good and one bad. The good kind is Horus as opposed to Ra, which is something like specificity as opposed to vagueness, or near mode as opposed to far; the bad kind is S as opposed to N in the Myers-Briggs sense, which is like a failure, or refusal, to see patterns—its opposite is what I usually mean by abstraction when I use that as a positive-affect word. Penn-school-style music theory is bad because it is too “concrete” in this S-sense, and lacks or strongly discourages the N-style “abstraction” which is at the core of Schenkerian theory, and absolutely necessary for understanding 19th- and 20th-century art music in anything like a reasonable way.)
This is false if what you mean is that the modernist impulse was about undoing the 19th century in some sense.
This, again, is wrong, perhaps in an important way worth explaining. In brief, it’s a far-mode narrative obscuring the near-mode truth.
Consider this question: was Schenker “steeped in tradition”, or did he embrace the “individual composer”? Obviously, the question is wrong. The whole way that this tradition works is that there is this vast edifice of cultural knowledge against which the individual work, or individual composer, is thrown into relief. Semper idem sed non eodem modo.
A common and misguided criticism of Schenkerian analyses is that they “don’t capture” this or that “salient” detail. This is wrong, because the analytical content of a Schenkerian reduction does not lie in the reduction itself, but in the contrast between the reduction and the score. You, the reader of the analysis, are supposed to be able to infer the operations that lead from the former to the latter, and these operations are the content of the analysis. So, a generic Schenkerian basic structure is always specifically informative about the details of the piece; one chooses between different candidate Schenkerian structures not on the basis of quantified “informativeness”, but rather on aesthetic grounds partially intrinsic to the structures themselves. (This is why performing a Schenkerian analysis is a creative act that feels similar to composition.)
I don’t think you quite appreciate the degree to which people really, really haven’t been trying—or perhaps, to put it more charitably, haven’t been looking at things in the right way (though I strongly feel that the work of Schenker ought to have been sufficient to suggest the right way).
If you think that the appreciation of 20th-century music (but not 18th- or 19th-century music) consists of picking up patterns in random noise (as opposed to patterns that were designed by humans to be picked up), you are missing something huge.
I’m pretty sure that this is not literally the case—there are lots of primary sources (from the 18th c. and earlier) which clearly refer to the process of elaboration from a “simple” to a “complex” musical surface, and he points to some of these sources. Moreover, he does deploy something quite close to analytical reduction in his work on schemata.
Your remarks about Schenkerian analysis might be more on point—the real failure in that paradigm would then be the focus on a single level of reduction as the “real” one, whereas one should consider the analysis as a whole as well as the operations leading from one level to the next. That’s certainly an interesting point of view.
It should be noted though that Gjerdingen does discuss these processes of elaboration from the bare “schema” to the musical surface in a rather detailed way—he just does so in the text, without using a layered notation like Schenker. Moreover, there’s some reason to think that the very existence of well-known middle-ground “schemata”, and the widespread practice of improvising further layers of elaboration in performance, might have resulted in these operations being quite salient to the 18th-c. listener, in a way that we aren’t fully aware of today. Thus, I actually think that there’s plenty of room for both perspectives!
For example, C.P.E. Bach’s Essay on the Right Way to Play the Keyboard, which, along with Fux’ Gradus ad Parnassum, is claimed by Schenker as one of his two principal antecedents.
Which is why Gjerdingen’s work is as interesting as it is—because, in other words, he’s reinventing Schenkerian theory. Make no mistake, it’s a tour de force on Gjerdingen’s part that he was able to start from Pennsylvania and work his way toward Schenker, sort of. No doubt it would be too much to ask of him to carry this process through to completion, or at least to the point where he could make sense of the 19th century. And I do think his book can be worth reading, so long as one approaches it as history and not theory (and one remains aware of the inherent art-destroying tendency of institutionalized historical scholarship).
But it is striking how often anyone who seems to be doing anything at all interesting in music theory turns out to be reinventing Schenkerian theory, usually in an inferior form. Another example is Daniel Harrison, author of Harmonic Function in Chromatic Music, who announces at the beginning of his book that Schenker’s “coin” won’t do to pay back our “debt” with respect to analyzing the late-Romantic chromaticism of Reger, Strauss, Mahler, etc.; and then a scant few pages later is excitedly telling us about his brilliant new theory that “harmonic function” resides in individual tones rather than “chords”. Who would have thought?! Who, that is, except …
Well, maybe. Don’t get me wrong, I think Schenkerian theory should be required reading for any serious theorist, but it’s all too easy to think that any theorists who have some worthwhile points outside of Schenkerian theory are “just doing music history”, or “just talking about ‘surface’ variation” that’s supposedly irrelevant to ‘deep’ forms of the art, or “just nitpicking” the finer points of this or that style. To take just one example, Neo-Riemannian and transformational theory is as far from Schenker as anything could be, but it still describes features of music that can be perceived quite readily upon listening, and this arguably makes it worthy of study. Even Dmitri Tymoczko’s work is not that bad if you ignore the hype about it and simply read it as a sensible extension on the earlier Neo-Riemannian/transformational perspective.
This is a good example of a sentence that sounds written in the voice of Ra: “Yes, your faction is important, but surely we’re not going to entertain specific arguments that it’s actually strictly more important than these other Powerful Factions, are we? The Invisible Hand of Coolness has already bestowed its blessing upon these various factions, including yours, thereby obviating the need for any explicit power struggle!”
The intellectual reality is this: Schenker in music theory is a figure of comparable importance to Darwin in biology. People before him really weren’t even doing the subject yet, and people after him who act as if he hadn’t existed are doing the subject even less.
The fact that, in the case of music, the sociological reality doesn’t reflect this intellectual reality is nothing less than a pathology.
The fact that saying this breaks the rules is arguably an even greater meta-pathology (Ra).
“All too easy”? Yes, and just why is it so easy? It’s easy because Gjerdingen isn’t actually doing anything other than
(1) music history, i.e. documenting shared stylistic features of a chronological cluster of music; and
(2) anti-artistic polemic, viz. undermining the Western art-music tradition by promoting a narrative that severs the 18th century from the 19th (and thus from us in the 20th and 21st, as well).
(1) could perfectly well be done inside of Schenkerian theory (and Gjerdingen’s feeble semblance of an attempt to argue against this claim on pp. 33-39 falls far short), and (2) is just an outright bad thing to do.
You have to be kidding me.
To come to that conclusion, you have to do more than ignore the hype. You have to ignore the subtext, which is so apparent as to not actually be subtext at all, but text. That book is a populist tract. The agenda is laid out plainly at the beginning.
For Tymoczko, all music is pop music. In particular, modernist art music is just very strange pop music that nobody likes. To the extent it has value it all, its value lies in its shocking weirdness. He is completely incredulous of, if not oblivious to, any notion that any other mode of listening or approach to music is possible. His orientation is thoroughly anti-intellectual, and the fact that he has been able to acquire such prestige (we’re talking about a Princeton professor who uses the word “cerebral” as a pejorative) is a perfect illustration of the malfunction of contemporary academia.
Ultimately, however, people like Tymoczko are, I regret to say, perhaps the unintended consequence of something that looked healthy and productive, once upon a time, including to me: the epistemological positivism of Babbitt, Westergaard, et al. I now realize that the reason it seemed fine in their case was the cultural capital in the background: they took the Western art music tradition, and its value, for granted. I now suspect that Tymoczko and the Penn School are what it looks like when positivism is deployed without that assumption. This has caused me to update strongly against positivism.
That’s kind of pushing it, I think. The main and most robust insights of Schenkerian theory were actually known centuries earlier than Schenker; nevertheless he can be credited for rediscovering these insights and rephrasing them in something closer to a positivistic way, as opposed to the resolutely pragmatic stance taken by many earlier theorists. His work as a music editor and critic probably had something to do with that.
--And yet even biology has its own “stamp-collecting” subfields happily coexisting besides the “evolutionary” specialties—and we usually don’t attribute this arrangement to nefarious influence by the Powerful Faction of young-earth creationists within the biology department.
Look, you’re right that Gjerdingen’s attitude about Schenker is mostly a matter of the intra-academic politicking that you deplore in this comment. But this is hardly a novel claim, or something that “breaks the rules” inside academia: David Temperley effectively said as much in his 2006 review of Music in the Galant Style!
And at this point, I think we’ll just agree to disagree about (2); I think there’s room for plenty of “narratives” about 18th-c. music, of which the ‘mainstream’ one emphasizing the purported links to what would later coalesce as the Romantic and Modernist tradition is one of many.
I regard the ‘populist’ subtext of the book as part of the unimportant “hype” about it, and I suspect that many music theorists would do the same.
I thought it was in fact a consensus point of view in the core “modernist” period that music had to be shocking and weird, and that any music that wasn’t shocking and weird would be considered “reactionary” (in a rather politicized sense)? It’s hard to see how this once-widespread stance is meaningfully different from a claim that “shocking weirdness” is exactly what gives that music its value.
Not only would I deny that, I would further assert that the main insights of Schenkerian theory are basically still not known by the music theory community. This is why Daniel Harrison can write about viewing chords as collections of individual scale-degrees—literally one of the foundational premises of Schenkerian theory—as if he is proposing something radical: because in point of unfortunate fact, he is.
To be sure, tacit knowledge of the phenomena Schenker describes long predates him. But making the tacit explicit is a large part of what Schenker is about.
I would certainly not credit Schenker (who was adamant that he was doing “art” and not “science”) with being “positivistic”—that’s a label one would reserve for someone like Westergaard. And you’ll recall that in my previous comment I expressed doubt about positivism being good anyway. I no longer think that the “epistemic” or “methodological” criticisms of Schenker (typically coming precisely from “positivist” quarters) are of any particular importance.
(In terms of Clark Glymour’s taxonomy, I have switched from being a logical positivist to being an “English professor”.)
That’s because the stamp collectors aren’t writing anti-Darwin polemics; they simply accept Darwinism as the background paradigm (at least as far as I understand). The fact that Schenkerian theory does not enjoy similar background-paradigm status—and, perhaps even more, the fact that it is not infrequently asserted that it does even though it clearly doesn’t—is a sign of dysfunction in the field, as far as I am concerned.
As far as I could tell, David “[n]o one would call me a Schenkerian” Temperley said nothing like what I said. His criticism of Gjerdingen was more like the mirror image of your argument to me: Gjerdingen shouldn’t be so dogmatically attached to his own paradigm, and should realize that Schenkerian theory, too, has “something to contribute”. No, thank you—Schenker is better off without the (false) protection of Ra.
(Incidentally, the example he offers at the end of the review to illustrate “how a cooperative and open-minded engagement between schema theory and other approaches might illuminate music-theoretical issues”—doesn’t that sound like political boiler-plate to you? -- is an exercise in vacuity. He starts off by complaining that Schenkerian theory “is unable to explain why descending- fifths sequences are so much more common than ascending-fifths ones”, which is the wrong kind of question to begin with—if anything it suggests that the phenomenon in question is probably not best understood simply as “descending- fifths sequences”, but rather in a more, ahem, Schenkerian way. But let’s run with it. What does Temperley propose as the answer?
In other words, Gjerdingen dug up a bunch of examples of the unelaborated version, and not only was this enough to convince Temperley that it constitutes an “explanation” of the elaborated version, where the evident inherent relationship of the two hadn’t been, but it suddenly relieved him of his curiosity with regard to the alleged statistical disparity between the ascending and descending variants, despite the fact that Gjerdingen himself makes no attempt to explain why the Prinner is so much more common than its ascending counterpart which failed to make it into his catalog. Such piffle!)
You may be content with a detached view from afar, where it seems like everybody ought to be able to just get along, but I make no apology for the fact that I, as an artist, have skin in the game; and, in the face of the ever-tempting, corrupting mind-viruses of complacency and anti-ambition, the narrative I believe in will not survive—much less as the ‘mainstream’ one—without a fight.
The anti-intellectual orientation is reflected in the very methodology (an extremely concrete—in the bad sense—and superficial mode of listening is assumed throughout), and in the choice of questions considered fit for study. (E.g., “why do most people prefer tonal to atonal music?” Even aside from the whiff of “9 out of 10 dogs prefer our brand of dog food” commercialism, what a thoroughly stupid question! You might as well ask why most people “prefer” arithmetic to calculus, or some such.)
This is a caricature at best and a rank equivocation at worst. Similar views were attributed to Beethoven by his contemporaries, with about as much justifiability. Problematicity, and perhaps even a certain kind of “unpleasantness” at first glance were an important parts of the aesthetic of modernism, but (as with Beethoven) a deeper sense of beauty and continuity of tradition were always underlying. It was always still art; never was it shock for shock’s sake.
I was indeed pointing to the extent to which the description of ‘Schenkerian’ phenomena was quite explicit. (Taking elaboration/‘composing out’ as one example, you pointed out C.P.E. Bach’s work about the keyboard already, but Quantz’s treatise on playing the flute is also significant, as well as the many, many treatises and other sources which expressly discuss “diminution” around the 17th c. - the EarlyMusicSources website gives a helpful list of those.)
Yeah, Clark Glymour has been criticized for that particular contention of his—see this review of his book. It’s not at all clear that taking an aesthetic attitude towards the world, like many English professors, literary critics and art critics more generally do, involves any real ‘rejection’ of logical positivism stricto sensu—as opposed to merely ‘rejecting’ a naïve sort of philistine and overenthusiastic ‘scientism’! Most “positivists” would probably regard such a contention as a blatant category error.
But it’s debatable that this should concern the Music department, which is after all not primarily charged with creating new art, but with explaining and making sense of the musical traditions that are already out there—including, to be sure, romantic music and modernism.
Choosing your own narrative is of course your prerogative in what’s clearly an artistic context, as opposed to a more detached retelling of history. Surely though the best defense against ‘complacency and anti-ambition’ involves recognizing the value of musical ambition itself.
That’s a problem to be sure, but ISTM that the field is slowly improving. “Anti-Schenkerian polemics” are becoming increasingly rare, and they increasingly debate only the most marginal and contentious aspects of Schenker such as his epistemic stance, or to what extent his “organicism” should be applied to earlier music. The introductory curriculum is still not chosen in a way that would reflect Schenkerian theory as the ‘background paradigm’, but that’s one of the hardest things to change in any academic field.
I really don’t understand this. Why should we even expect the “ascending Prinner” to be as common as the “descending one” within any specific style? Explaining this sort of stylistic variation is just not something you can sensibly do with a general model of tonal music like the one Schenker gives you. Moreover, as Gjerdingen makes abundantly clear, the Prinner itself did not exist in a vacuum; it interacted with other patterns in a complex way. Perhaps the “ascending Prinner” simply didn’t feature the same affordances, and this explains why it was neglected.
“Diminution” was known, yes, but reversing it as a general analytical method, much less following this to its ultimate conclusion (the Ursatz), certainly was not. Here are some other concepts that were not explicit before Schenker:
the hierarchy of structural levels (Schichten);
the specific relationship of strict counterpoint to free composition (and, in particular, the distinction between them—see the introduction to Counterpoint);
Stufen as “spiritual” entities, as opposed to concrete sonorities;
Stufen as generators of musical content (motives);
the strict distinction between “harmony” (the theory of Stufen) and “counterpoint” (the theory of voice leading) -- in particular, the dubious relevance of traditional “harmony exercises” with their “doubling rules” etc.;
the concept of “organic coherence”, i.e. tonal closure as achieved in the Ursatz;
the “law of the passing tone”, i.e. linear progressions (Züge) being the true explanation of “harmonic motion”;
the “line model” of music (as opposed to the “chord model”; this is admittedly more explicit in Westergaard than Schenker); in particular, the hierarchy of lines (more explicit in Schenker than Westergaard!); in particular, the fact that a single line can give rise to other, subordinate, lines that depend on it at later levels (absolutely essential to the proper understanding of highly chromatic or “atonal” music).
If only these ideas were widely known even today!
In general, Schenker is special because he knew how to theorize. I have never encountered anyone before or since, at least in the realm of music, with a better sense of the aesthetics of theory-construction. (Part of this, though only part, involves an interest in taking ideas to their logical conclusion—thus seeking understanding—as opposed to contenting oneself with the “pragmatic”.)
I completely disagree—or, to the extent I agree, I regard this as an argument against music departments. I reject the ideology of detachment as a virtue—the idea that it’s fine for the “kids” to play, but the job of the “adults” is to study their play patterns.
And notice the devious work being done by the word “already” in your sentence! If artists aren’t going to have a primary role in music departments, why on Earth should they cede the right to those departments to decide what is “already” the case?
If mathematics departments are supposed to be about creating mathematics, then music departments should be about creating music. Of course, academia doesn’t actually work, so the antecedent is probably false.
(Also, I dislike the framing of “creating new X”. As you hopefully realize by now, I don’t consider novelty per se—note the spelling of that Latin phrase—to be the point. “Continuing to actively create X” would be better.)
I see no particular evidence of this—Gjerdingen doesn’t strike me as an exemplar of a dying trend. In any case my concern is not so much explicit polemics as the shifting of the Overton Window to include people like Tymoczko, who would have been happily unthinkable at a place like Princeton back in the old days. This trend is real, and I think inherent to the incentive structure of academia (of which “technically-impressive-looking validations of political correctness and intellectual laziness/complacency” is about as close to a description of the optimization target as one can explicitly articulate).
Who knows? Ask Temperley—he was the one who seemed to think this was some kind of anomaly that Schenkerian theory was obligated to explain (but, somehow, Gjerdingen’s theory mysteriously wasn’t).
I get your point—and “diminution” obviously stands out as one loosely-‘Schenkerian’ notion that’s especially well attested in old sources—but “certainly” is a strong word! This video. posted as recently as a week ago by the Society for Music Theory, gives an intriguing example of the sort of analysis that could be done in the late 18th century. One could also quibble about the degree to which some of these notions were actually well-known, if with a different terminology: for example, the idea of Stufen (i.e. triads) as generators of musical content is arguably implied in the Rameauvian notion of “fundamental bass” which was at first adopted in a quite subsidiary role, to be used alongside the more traditional notions of thoroughbass and counterpoint. (Even W. A. Mozart used this “Basso fondamentale” in his teaching). And this concurrent use of so-called “harmony” and the earlier thoroughbass and counterpoint seems to only have been lost as an educational practice sometime in the 19th century.
I do agree about this, but one problem with Schenker is that he’s extremely inconsistent about showing this ability in his writings. I can’t help suspecting that one reason why there are so many anti-Schenkerians in even the most “positivistic” music departments has to be the fear of a bait-and-switch argument, where the die-hard Schenkerians “hook” you with sensible talk of diminution and “good abstraction” and the importance of “lines”… but before you know it, they’ve switched to talking about fluffy notions like “organic coherence” and the “generating power” of the tonic triad, and for all you know they’ll soon start to go on and on and on about how the moral decay of Austria totally explains why it lost WWI, and how the sorry state of classical music is somehow relevant to this “decay”!
Making sense of music does not have to involve the philistine “detachment” you seem to fear so much, though. It can be a kind of artistic activity in itself. And indeed, Schenker seems to have been especially aware of this.
Mathematicians are especially lucky because creating new math is among the best ways, and perhaps the only real way of comprehensively explaining and “curating” previous math work in a way that makes sense to their fellow professionals. People in music departments don’t have quite the same luxury! Albeit the practice of “recomposition” can in many ways be illuminating and provide good proofs of concept for theoretical ideas about music, which makes this sort of new compositional activity especially valuable.
Latin phrase? Now that’s the sort of nonsensical linguistic prescriptivism up with which I shall not put!
Is Tymoczko’s work all that different in character from, e.g. David Lewin’s (which famously involved the application of mathematical group theory to explaining chord changes)? When you’re aware of previous lines of work and the extent to which Tymoczko is in many ways following in the footsteps of previous theorists, it’s really hard to regard him as such a big “shift of the Overton window”.
This is wrong.
Yes, I realize saying this contradicts what I wrote in Wikipedia a decade ago. But the fact of the matter is that Stufen are more abstract (“spiritual”) than that. They are not triads themselves, but rather assignments of functionality to tones (e.g. “root”, “third”, and “fifth”—hence the confusion with triads—but also “second”, “fourth”, and “seventh”, as we see when Schenker uses figured-bass numerals with reference to the root of the Stufe). Their type signature is thus that of a key, or tonality, not a set. As with keys, there exists a natural mapping from Stufen to triads; but the key of C major is distinct from the triad of C major, and likewise, so is the Stufe of C major (which is in fact more similar to the former).
(I believe I have also explained elsewhere the relationship between modes and Stufen: e.g. the Dorian mode corresponds to a II Stufe in major.)
Schenker didn’t quite grasp this, unfortunately—but it follows a lot more closely from his concepts than his concepts do from Rameau’s (heavens!).
And let’s take a step back, because we’re talking past each other in an fairly absurd way. You’re basically trying to argue that Schenker’s ideas were already understood in the past by people like Rameau; yet even while you’re arguing this, I claim that Schenker’s ideas are not in fact currently understood by you (or the music theory profession generally, which, again, you do an admirable job of representing, whether or not you’re a member of it). So from my perspective, your argument doesn’t even type-check, much less convince.
I have apparently not succeeded in communicating what I attempted to communicate above.
When I said I had jumped ship from logical positivism to English-professorship, this is what I was talking about. Schenker was doing it right. Those “fluffy notions”—which are not actually all that fluffy—are what good discourse on music looks like. It’s music, for goodness’ sake.. Schenker talks that way because he actually cares—it’s the way one talks when one has something to protect.
I wasn’t kidding above, when I said
What makes someone a good theorist is not methodological propriety (which basically means adherence to a particular set of communicational norms—see how much of an English professor I’m being?), but rather a quality that might be called relentless seeing (by analogy with “original seeing”). It involves things like curiosity, bullet-biting, and abstraction (in the sense of pattern-recognition I discussed above); as well as, of course, caring—having something to protect, a sense of directionality.
So yes, someone with these qualities is likely to see a connection between the lack of “background structure” (i.e. agency, directionality, “moral sense”, etc.) in the “lives of the masses” and the political disasters of their time, if they’re inclined to take any interest in politics to begin with.
Schenker’s sense of how to theorize is actually better than (any particular version of) his theory. He’s the kind of person from whom the right way to learn is by imitation, even more than appropriation of specific ideas. Basically, the postwar anglophone reception of Schenker has it exactly backwards!
Indeed not, but Schenker is what it looks like when it doesn’t, and the Penn School is what it looks like when it does. These are like the two ends of the “philistine detachment” spectrum, according to which others can be measured.
In case you haven’t noticed, I deny this.
There is nothing nonsensical about linguistic prescriptivism! Once again we see the perversity of the academic mindset according to which all explicit normativity is to be banished from life. (Of course, a surfeit of implicit normativity is encouraged, leading to a hypocrisy ratchet.)
When the linguists said “don’t confuse us with grammarians”, there was nothing in that statement that needed to imply that being a grammarian was somehow wrong, as opposed linguistics simply being a different subject from prescriptive grammar. Yet, that was how everybody seemed to take it, to the point where we now have linguists running around thinking that combatting “prescriptivism” is part of their professional identity. That is nonsensical.
At this point, I’m about ready to declare that grammarianism (linguistic aesthetics, a.k.a. “prescriptivism”) is more interesting than linguistics. (By analogy to Schenkerian theory being more interesting than ethnomusicology.)
Yes, I agree that Tymoczko can reasonably be regarded as a consequence of Lewin! I have therefore updated against Lewin.
It is much, much more obvious that Tymoczko is bad than it ever was that Lewin was good. In retrospect, the reasons Lewin seemed good were largely sociological: he was interested in the right sort of music. But this is only a necessary condition, not a sufficient one, and it is (obviously) not true of Tymoczko.
Um, I’m expressly not trying to say this (i.e., that “Schenker’s ideas” as a whole were extant), much less about Rameau himself (whose theoretical outlook was in fact quite wrong—his ‘fundamental bass’ simply wasn’t the sort of basic principle of music he thought it was). But the way some elements of Rameau’s theory were adopted practically (by a comparative elite of folks with pre-existing expertise about music, not the middle-class pure amateurs who mostly stuck with Rameau’s simplified treatment in its entirety) is rather more interesting.
This is also why the distinction between “triad” and “modality” is rather beside the point, in practical usage. You can hopefully see how the “modal” point of view practically follows from the “triad as a generator of musical content”, just as it follows from Schenker’s presentation. Indeed, jazz theorists have rediscovered this link in a largely independent fashion, which is why they like to talk about modes so much.
As for whether Schenkerian theory as a whole was “already understood in the past”, one would have to answer in the negative, simply because of its reliance on a clever yet remarkably successful synthesis of 18th-c. (see above) and 19th-c. ideas (organicism, complex “form”, music as an emotionally-connoted ‘journey’ across distant tonal areas, etc.) that could not realistically be developed before the late-19th or early-20th c. That much is clear enough. But this also makes the theory historically dependent in a rather unorthodox way for a figure on a par with Darwin! (For instance, Schenker’s ideas in and of themselves have little to say about orchestration and texture. If Schenker’s works were all we had to go on, we would never know to hear, say, the start of KV332(I), 1st mvmt., as much more than stereotypically “pretty” music prolonging the tonic sonority—and would entirely miss the veritable “journey” involved in the truly remarkable variety of textures and styles Mozart lets us sample in these measures! (And arguably in the entire movement. Also, this is a brief description and probably fails to convey the real mastery in what Mozart’s doing—which requires a fairly in-depth knowledge of these “styles” and their extra-musical implications to really appreciate.) This clarifies as well why I am somewhat skeptical of claims about “the right sort of music” to be interested in scholarly. If all that means is “music that a Schenker-like outlook happens to jive with”, that can justify a purely artistic choice, not so much a broadly stated claim about what theories are “good” or “bad” for the development of art music.)
I definitely agree about this, but I’m not quite sure about the implication that non-Schenkerian theorists could not possibly have ‘something to protect’ of their own. (It’s very possible that you’re right about most of the ‘Penn School’, though!) Of course, their underlying interests might not be coincident with the ones Schenker had. They needn’t even do em any good, especially in the longer run—as arguably shown by the case of Rameau, who is on record as stating that he cared a lot more about his theoretical pursuits than the (rather impressive) music he actually composed!
(Sure, but the “nonsense” I was talking about is specifically the prescriptivist tendency to take rules from a radically different language, and one that has been dead for thousands of years, viz. Latin—whether involving lexicon, syntax or grammar—and apply them wholesale to English. In this case, using the form “per say” has the benefit of adding some transparency about what the idiom actually means—something like “(just) in accordance with what’s being said; as an aside” in a way that just parroting per se doesn’t, unless you have studied Latin before!)
But that isn’t at all what the idiom actually means. Well, maybe there’s been a shift I’m unaware of and that’s what many people mean by it now, and on any particular occasion it may be used or abused in any way its user fancies. But what the Latin means, and what the phrase has always meant in English use when I’ve seen it, is more like “as such” or “in itself”. It doesn’t have anything to do with asides, and while I can see the connection between “just in accordance with what’s being said” and the actual meaning it would never occur to me to express it in such a way.
(I’d thought komponisto’s remark was referring back to a recent instance of “per say” in one of your comments, but I can’t find it now. Maybe it was someone else, or maybe you corrected it, or maybe I just imagined the whole thing. The comment I thought it was in has been edited but now doesn’t contain either “per say” or “per se”.)
Not at all. It strongly implicates the distinction between the chord model and the line model of musical data; thinking of the Stufe as a triad has the severely unfortunate effect of encouraging the chord model. This is why almost no one has noticed that Schenkerian theory, like Westergaardian theory, uses the line model. It is for this reason that I am so insistent on the distinction between Stufen and triads, and what you call the “‘modal’ point of view”.
The phrase “as a whole” is absent from my statement. You were trying to argue that some of Schenker’s ideas were extant, and I was disputing this in the important cases that were mentioned, in particular the Stufe as generator of content. While it was certainly related to things that had been said earlier by others (including Rameau), neither Schenker’s particular idea of Stufe nor, indeed, his idea of content were part of the standard music theory he inherited; had they been, no one would have been struck by the originality and importance of his Harmony.
In retrospect, of course, it is nearly always possible to trace the ancestry even of original ideas; and, in fact, contrary to the current “historical” Zeitgeist which has so strongly influenced your comments, I think this is exactly how earlier ideas should be looked at—from the perspective of their later descendants (provided the latter are actually a development or improvement of the earlier, which is markedly the case here). However, the consequence of this in this case is that, to whatever extent (e.g.) Rameau anticipated Schenker, it is a credit to Rameau, not a diminishment of Schenker.
The reason Schenker is on a par with Darwin is not because of the novelty of his ideas; it is because of their fundamentality. As with Darwin’s ideas in the case of biology, Schenker’s ideas in music are a starting point, a core background assumption, for any reasonable view of music after him.
This is a perfect example of what I am talking about when I say that Schenker’s ideas have not been understood.
I could just reply by pointing out that the first sentence is simply false. Read the Ninth Symphony monograph; you will find (just for instance) Schenker arguing at length against Wagner’s re-orchestrations of Beethoven. Already at that early stage, Schenker seemed to be under the impression that a lot of specific points about orchestration and texture followed from his ideas.
But really, the correct response is of a more general, meta-level character. The source of this type of complaint is a basic failure to understand what it is that one is supposed to be learning when one reads a music theorist—most of all Schenker. Even if Schenker had not bothered to spell out the specific orchestrational or textural consequences of his ideas on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or any other particular work, even if his only surviving writings were those devoted to the general presentation of his “theory” ( Harmony, Counterpoint, and Free Composition), it would still be entirely wrong to make the claim that you have, whether in general or about K. 332 in particular.
Your criticism is basically analogous to telling a nearsighted person that, if their eyeglasses were “all they had to go on”, they would never notice the beauties of the landscape. Well, of course, but eyeglasses are never all that a given individual has to go on; they also have the entire human visual system and cognitive apparatus, not to mention a lifetime’s worth of experience that will have imprinted itself upon these latter. The problem is that they’re nearsighted, and a distant landscape will, by default, appear as a nondescript blur, limiting their ability to make use of their interpretive and appreciative faculties. Hence, what they need most urgently are corrective lenses. Not a verbal description of the landscape, a textbook on natural history, or research in computer vision that might lead to commercially useful animal- and plant-classification algorithms.
Schenkerian theory is a framework. By default, people do not perceive music; they perceive only a distant, distorted shadow that hints at what music might be. A good music theory is like a corrective lens that allows them to perceive music in its full, vivid glory. The difference between perceiving a piece of music only superficially, as opposed to “all the way through” to the Urlinie, is like the difference between seeing a blurry smear of color, on the one hand, and a picturesque panorama of detail, on the other.
This isn’t a perfect analogy, but I hope it conveys something of the reason that “Schenker has little to say about orchestration or texture (or rhythm or …)” is just the wrong type of criticism of Schenker, even if were true (which it virtually never is). If you learn to hear music the way that Schenkerian theory aims to teach (as in, hearing this way is a skill), you notice more about a piece of music, not less.
There seems to be a certain kind of personality trait, a certain kind of over-concrete literal-mindedness, that prevents people from understanding this, in the specific case of Schenkerian theory, and from expecting this kind of thing of a theory in general. What is remarkable about Schenker is that he possessed the kind of personality that did expect this of a theory, and, as a result, presented a theory of this kind. This is what I mean by he knew how to theorize.
One could also perhaps make an analogy to programming. A theory of music should, in fact, be something like a programming language for music. Saying something of the form “this theory has nothing to say about orchestration (etc.)” is like criticizing a programming language on the grounds that it lacks good libraries. This is a superficial criticism, because if the core of the language is well designed, good libraries can always be written. Similarly, if you have a good theory of music, understanding the various details that might be involved in a given piece of music, such as orchestration, texture, or any number of other things, will take care of itself in the hands of a dedicated listener.
That’s not what was going on here. I wasn’t doing something like advocating against “split infinitives” on the grounds that infinitives are a single word in Latin (actually they’re a single word in English as well and do not include the word to, a point that few understand but that can be confirmed by comparison with German, where the English preposition to corresponds to the German preposition zu, not to the infinitive ending -en).
Rather, I was correcting apparent ignorance of an actual piece of Latin being used in English. It is a feature of literate discourse that phrases from other languages are used; in such a speech community, one is expected to either have familiarity with the languages, or to learn the foreign vocabulary items (ahem) ad hoc. Something like “per say” is the result of somebody unfamiliar with the phrase in Latin misconstruing it as a phrase in English; this is simply a failure of literacy, nothing more—which can, of course, be easily corrected (even without studying the rest of Latin). As you may be able to gather, I am rather big on literacy. (As I have already indicated, I am not a fan of Richard Taruskin’s version of music history, but his framing of the nature of art music as being basically about a kind of literacy is something I find more or less spot on.)