“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 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.)