Schenkerian analysis is a method of analyzing tonal music based on the theories of Heinrich Schenker (1868–1935). The goal is to demonstrate the organic coherence of the work by showing how the "foreground" (all notes in the score) relates to an abstracted deep structure, the Ursatz. This primal structure is roughly the same for any tonal work, but a Schenkerian analysis shows how, in each individual case, that structure develops into a unique work at the foreground. A key theoretical concept is "tonal space".Schenker described the concept in a paper titled Erläuterungen ("Elucidations"), which he published four times between 1924 and 1926: Der Tonwille vol. 8–9, pp. 49–51, vol. 10, pp. 40–42; Das Meisterwerk in der Musik, vol. 1, pp. 201–205; 2, pp. 193–197. English translation, Der Tonwille, vol. 2, pp. 117–118 (the translation, although made from vols. 8–9 of the German original, gives as original pagination that of Das Meisterwerk 1; the text is the same). The concept of tonal space is still present in Free Composition, especially §13 where Schenker writes: "By the concept of tonal space, I understand the space of the horizontal fulfillment of the Urlinie. ... The tonal space is only to be understood horizontally." The intervals between the notes of the tonic triad in the background form a tonal space that is filled with passing and neighbour tones, producing new triads and new tonal spaces that are open for further elaborations until the "surface" of the work (the score) is reached.
The analysis uses a specialized symbolic form of musical notation. Although Schenker himself usually presents his analyses in the generative direction, starting from the Ursatz to reach the score and showing how the work is somehow generated from the Ursatz, the practice of Schenkerian analysis more often is reductive, starting from the score and showing how it can be reduced to its fundamental structure. The graph of the Ursatz is arrhythmic, as is a strict-counterpoint cantus firmus exercise.Free Composition, § 21. Even at intermediate levels of reduction, rhythmic signs (open and closed noteheads, beams and flags) display not rhythm but the hierarchical relationships between the pitch-events.
Schenkerian analysis is an abstract, complex, and difficult method, not always clearly expressed by Schenker himself and not always clearly understood. It mainly aims to reveal the internal coherence of the work – a coherence that ultimately resides in its being tonal.Schenker writes: "In the distance between the Urlinie and the foreground, between the diatony and the tonality, the spatial depth of a musical work expresses itself, the distant origin in the utter simple, the transformation through subsequent stages, and the diversity in the foreground" (Im Abstand von der Urlinie zum Vordergrund, von der Diatonie zur Tonalität, drückt sich die Raumtiefe eines Musikwerkes aus, die ferne Herkunft vom Allereinfachsten, der Wandel im späteren Verlauf und der Reichtum im Vordergrund.). Der freie Satz, 1935, p. 17; Free Composition, p. 5 (translation modified). In some respects, a Schenkerian analysis can reflect the perceptions and intuitions of the analyst.Robert Snarrenberg, Schenker's Interpretive Practice, Cambridge Studies in Music Theory and Analysis 11, 1997.
Fundamentals
Goals Schenker intended his theory as an exegesis of musical "genius" or the "masterwork", ideas that were closely tied to German nationalism and monarchism.Free Composition, pp. xxi–xxiv, 158–162. Der Tonwille, English translation, Vol. I, 17. The canon represented in his analytical work therefore is almost entirely made up of German music of the common practice period (especially that of Johann Sebastian Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, and Johannes Brahms),For a complete list of the works discussed by Schenker, see Larry Laskowski, Heinrich Schenker. An Annotated Index to his Analyses of Musical Works, New York, Pendragon, 1978. Influential early exponents of Schenker's theory in the United states, Adele T. Katz and Felix Salzer, opposed Schenker's musical conservatism and expanded the analytical method to more modern repertoire. See and he used his methods to oppose more modern styles of music such as that of Max Reger and Igor Stravinsky.Das Meisterwerk in der Musik, vol. II, pp. 17–18, 192 (English translation, p. 1–22, 117) This led him to seek the key to an understanding of music in the traditional disciplines of counterpoint and figured bass, which was central to the compositional training of these composers. Schenker's project was to show that free composition (freier Satz) was an elaboration, a "prolongation", of strict composition (strenger Satz), by which he meant species counterpoint, particularly two-voice counterpoint. He did this by developing a theory of hierarchically organized levels of elaboration (Auskomponierung), called prolongational levels, voice-leading levels (Stimmführungsschichten), or transformations (Verwandlungen), the idea being that each of the successive levels represents a new freedom taken with respect to the rules of strict composition.See Schenker's "instructional plan" described in his Introduction to Free Composition, pp. xxi–xxii. The steps of this plan are: "Instruction in strict writing (according to Fux-Schenker), in thorough-bass (according to J.S. and C.P.E. Bach) and in free writing (according to Schenker), that finally combines all studies and places them in the service of the law of organic coherence as it reveals itself in the Ursatz (Urlinie and bass arpeggiation) as background, in the voice-leading transformations as middelground and ultimately through the foreground." (Translation modified following Der freie Satz, 1935, p. 2.)
Because the first principle of the elaboration is the filling in of the tonal space by passing notes, an essential goal of the analysis is to show linear connections between notes which, filling a single triad at a given level, remain closely related to each other but which, at subsequent levels, may become separated by many measures or many pages as new triads are embedded in the first one. The analyst is expected to develop a "distance hearing" (Fernhören),Der Tonwille 1 (1921), p. 23; 2 (1922), pp. 31 and 35; Der Tonwille, English translation, vol. I, pp. 22, 77 and 82. The term has been taken over by Wilhelm Furtwängler, Wort und Ton, Wiesbaden, Brockhaus, 1954, pp. 201–202. a "structural hearing".Felix Salzer, Structural Hearing, New York, Boni, 1952.
Harmony The tonic triad, that from which the work as a whole arises, takes its model in the harmonic series. However, the mere duplication of nature cannot be the object of human endeavour. Therefore ... the overtone series ... is transformed into a succession, a horizontal arpeggiation, which has the added advantage of lying within the range of the human voice. Thus the harmonic series is condensed, abbreviated for the purposes of art".Free Composition, p. 10, §1. See also Harmony, pp. 26–29, §13.
Linking the (major) triad to the harmonic series, Schenker merely pays lip service to an idea common in the early 20th century.The same link is made, for instance, in Schoenberg's Harmonielehre, Wien, Universal, 1911, 7/1966, p. 16. He confirms that the same derivation cannot be made for the minor triad: Any attempt to derive even as much as the first foundation of this [minor] system, i.e., the minor triad itself, from Nature, i.e., from the overtone series, would be more than futile. [...] The explanation becomes much easier if artistic intention rather than Nature herself is credited with the origin of the minor mode".Harmony, pp. 49–50, §23
The basic component of Schenkerian harmony is the Stufe (scale degree, scale-step), i.e. a chord having gained structural significance. Chords arise from within chords, as the result of the combination of passing notes and arpeggiations: they are at first mere embellishments, mere voice-leading constructions, but they become tonal spaces open for further elaboration and, once elaborated, can be considered structurally significant: they become scale-steps properly speaking. Schenker recognizes that "there are no rules which could be laid down once and for all" for recognizing scale-steps,Harmony, p. 141, §79. but from his examples one may deduce that a triad cannot be recognized as a scale-step as long as it can be explained by passing or neighboring voice-leading.
Schenkerian analyses label scale-steps with Roman numerals, a practice common in 19th- and 20th-century Vienna, developed by the theoretic work of Georg Joseph Vogler and his student Gottfried Weber, transmitted by Simon Sechter and his disciple Anton Bruckner, the classes of whom Schenker had followed in the Konservatorium in Vienna.Robert E. Wason, Viennese Harmonic Theory from Albrechtsberger to Schenker and Schoenberg, Ann Arbor, London, UMI Research Press, 1982/1985.
Schenker's theory is monotonal: the Ursatz, as the diatonic unfolding of the tonic triad, by definition cannot include modulation. Local "tonicisation" may arise when a scale-step is elaborated to the point of becoming a local tonic, but the work as a whole projects a single key and ultimately a single Stufe (the tonic).Matthew Brown, Explaining Tonality. Schenkerian Theory and Beyond, Rochester, University of Rochester Press, 2005, p. 69, reproduces a chart showing that the "tonality of a given foreground can be generated from the diatony of the given background through various levels of the middleground".
Counterpoint, voice-leading Two-voice counterpoint remains for Schenker the model of strict writing. Free composition is a freer usage of the laws of strict counterpoint. One of the aims of the analysis is to trace how the work remains subject to these laws at the deepest level, despite the freedom taken at subsequent levels.Heinrich Schenker, Counterpoint, vol. I, p. 12: "In the present day, when it is necessary to distinguish clearly between composition and that preliminary school represented by strict counterpoint, we must use the eternally valid of those rules for strict counterpoint, even if we no longer view them as applicable to composition".
One aspect of strict, two-voice writing that appears to span Schenker's theory throughout the years of its elaboration is the rule of "fluent melody" (fließender Gesang), or "melodic fluency". Schenker attributes the rule to Luigi Cherubini, who would have written that "fluent melody is always preferable in strict counterpoint."Counterpoint, vol. I, p. 74. J. Rothgeb and J. Thym, the translators, quote Cherubini from the original French, which merely says that "conjunct motion better suits strict counterpoint than disjunct motion", but Schenker had written: der fliessende Gesang ist im strengen Stile immer besser as der sprungweise (Kontrapunkt, vol. I, p. 104) ("the fluent melody is always better in strict style than the disjunct one"). Fliessender Gesang not only appears in several 19th-century German translations of Cherubini, but is common in German counterpoint theory from the 18th century and might go back to Fux' description of the flexibili motuum facilitate, the "flexible ease of motions" (Gradus, Liber secundus, Exercitii I, Lectio quinta) or even earlier. Melodic fluency, the preference for conjunct (stepwise) motion, is one of the main rules of voice leading, even in free composition. It avoids successive leaps and produces "a kind of wave-like melodic line which as a whole represents an animated entity, and which, with its ascending and descending curves, appears balanced in all its individual component parts".Counterpoint, vol. I, p. 94. This idea is at the origin of that of linear progression (Zug) and, more specifically, of that of the Fundamental Line (Urlinie).
Ursatz