Schenkerian analysis?

I want to gather opinions on this, as I find it amazing that in all the time I've studied musicology and analysis overall I have never even heard anyone taking Schenker seriously except for people from North America.

Hell, you can go look at Wikipedia in other languages, there's nothing on Schenker except in English, Italian and Japanese (and in the Schenkerian analysis wiki's talk page someone mentions the fact that it's almost unknown everywhere else...)

I'll post something from the wiki's talk page as a reason why it may be so famous in the US despite the obvious problems:

Pursuant to 'be bold', I might as well add that I have hypothesized the Schenkerization of North America to be explicable by two factors:

1)The prevailing pattern of emigration of Schenker disciples to North America, where they were automatically credited as having special Europeanish insight into European music and special authority as to how European music scholars were alleged to be advancing beyond the primitive analytic methods of the backwards ex-colonials struggling to establish themselves as relevant in the 'real world' of music academia (Europe, that is).

2)A perecived but generally unstated need to de-Nazify Germanic music in the minds of American music students in the postwar era. The Jewishness of Schenker remains seemingly indispensable to mention in any discussion of Schenker's orientation to the larger culture associated with the works he selected for analysis, and the spread of North American interest in Schenker is timed historically in such a way as to correspond with scholars of Germanic music possibly finding themselves feeling a bit defensive about their subject.

Here's an experiment:

Ask as many Schenkerians as possible these two questions:

1) Was Schenker Jewish?

2) How does the second tone of the Ursatz derive from the Klang?

The speed and accuracy of the answers you'll get will do a bit to show how Schenker's political importance compares to the importance of his contribution to clear analytical thinking.

From what I've actually seen of the whole Schenker theory, I consider it absolutely irrelevant to academic study and analysis overall since all you can get out of it are interpretations which can have some rather glaring flaws, as shown in this quote from a page apparently about Bob Dylan (!?) Frequently Asked Questions

...This method of analysis, at least as utilized in this case, draws on what is called Schenker analysis, which is taught ad nauseam at every american musicological department. One of the main problems with Schenker analysis is that it favors pitch content, and that it tends to conceal details of the music belonging to other parameters, such as rhythm, phrasing etc. The late Bo Alphonse, former professor in musicology at the McGill Univ. in Montreal, has lucidly demonstrated the consequences of this bias, by showing that two pieces that sound completely different (a Chopin prelude and a Beetoven movement, I think it was), are virtually identical already on the first level of reduction (i.e. the level that corresponds most closely to Dr Green

I think Schenkarian analysis is good for what it is. Analysis is not a science, you can't write a book on how to analyse music (although you can write a book on how to think about how to analyse music on your own).

Salzter and Schachter take a nice view on Schenker's analysis and show how counterpoint is used in composition (using Schenkerian analysis and reductions) in various styles (from Bach to Brahms). There is a second book by Salzer, called "Structural Hearing" (I think), which attempts to do the same in more contemporary compositions but without success, since the principles according to which people composed form and music since the beginning of the 20th century has changed a lot and the focus has shifted from organising material according to a tonality to other things.

But in any case, I think Schenker was good, and his theories and methods have pros and cons -like Bolanos pointed out- just like any other analytical method or theory. However, he was absolute in that he thought his analysis method was the best and only one that should be used - and I think everyone who comes up with an analysis method/theory does that, because if they didn't then they wouldn't be able to get across (if I said "I have a new analysis method!! Yes! Come use it! But it's not true. I mean, it is sometimes. Well, in some cases and not in all kinds of music. Yeah, and there are exceptions. And I do agree with other methods too, but I made my own. Well, yeah, it's not absolute" then no one would really go for it), but on the other hand this limits them a lot.

Just as an example, according to Schenker, in the fourth movement from Bach's Partita No.2 in C minor ( http://imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/6/6d/IMSLP00790-BWV0826.pdf - page 8, last two measures of the page, right hand), there is a line at the top going from E natural to E flat, and then to C. According to Schenker, all longer-term melodic motion happens stepwise, therefore our ear is "hearing" a D in that melody, in between the E-flat and the C, but my God does Bach go all over the place without hitting that D... Why should we assume that our ears imagine that a D is there when there isn't, and we don't physically hear it? The music makes sense without that D, but according to Schenker it doesn't. Maybe in some other cases (maybe arguably, in most other cases) the D *is* there somewhere, and Schenker would be right in these cases. But formulating a theory and then trying to apply it to everything blindly without bending your theory and shaping it according to each piece is just stupid (and I'm not saying that that's what Schenker did, but what most people following "Schenkerian analysis" -or any other kind of analysis, in fact, as long as they're following someone else's method instead of taking a new approach to each piece- do). But it's "easy" and reductionistic - which is why I think it's been popular in the US.

I personally think that another reason Schenkerian analysis is really wide-spread in Northern America because of the same reasons Behaviourism was quickly liked by Americans back in the beginning of the century - because Behaviourism provided people a nice, scientific approach based on experiments and evidence to talk about people rather than ambiguous and vague (in their concept) terms such as "conscious", "unconscious" or even "mind" and "thought" (which the behaviourists claimed did not exist, or if they existed they said that it is impossible to measure them, thus they have no scientific value).

I think the USA is the apex of the western approach of attempting to rationalise everything, and the general idea that if it cannot be rationalised it is unscientific and therefore not in our interest or a valuable/valid source of "knowledge"/"truth". Which is an approach I personally dislike greatly. I am very fascinated by things I don't understand or don't know how they work, and I don't always want to find out how they're being done. There was a Rothko exhibition at the Tate Modern recently, and in the exhibition they had a small set of photographs and series of text which explaining how Rothko painted his paintings (a mystery until that research and study of his paintings, whose results were that set of photographs and text). And I just walked by it, because if Rothko wanted us to know how he made his paintings, that would've been evident in the paintings themselves, or he wouldn't have forbidden people to take photographs of his when he was working. I enjoy Rothko paintings without knowing how they're made, but just by seeing what they've come to be. I also enjoy Xenakis' music without knowing how he wrote it, or I enjoy a theatrical play without knowing all the technical stuff that go behind it (scenes, props, costumes, curtains, lighting, sound effects, doubling etc), or a magic trick without knowing how it's done, or accupuncture therapy without knowing what it does exactly (while no one in a western hospital would prescribe "accupuncture therapy, twice a week").

I was never a big fan of Schenkerian analysis, but then again, my opinion doesn't matter because I never really quite figured out what it is.

(As for behaviorism: Skinnerian behaviorism has been mostly discredited, but behavorist and physiological approaches to psychology have, in my opinion, been (or will be) most successful in explaining the workings of the mind. Psychoanalysis has had a lot more literary influence and wasn't bad overall, but a lot of neo-Freudians these days just spout BS.)

(about psychology, I think it's more cognitive and biological psychology that has had more popularity in recent years - behaviourist psychology was as extreme as freud's psychosexual theories, one in reducing everything to stimuli and responses the other spouting a lot of "truths" with little to no evidence through case studies, which are looked down upon from scientists as a method of achieving reliable and credible results) (I think neo-Freuidians are quite out of fashion today, although psychoanalysis is still proving to be one of the prominent ways of therapy even today)

^Yeah, basically. Skinner was a radical (and, incidentally, wrong), but his contributions were still very valuable to later studies of conditioning and its effects on behavior; later behaviourists were more accurate.[/off-topic]

Schenker didn't originally create this method of reduction to become a famous theorist. It was a tool he used to study the endless amounts of classical music. It just so happened that, in studying the theories of Riemann, Bach, and Fux, Schenker grabbed hold of the Urline, Urzatz, and other elements he saw "consistently occurring" in the music he was studying.

After all, he was a composer, performer, theorist, copyist, philosopher (to some extent), and musicologist. His interest wasn't purely in theory. The 2nd and 3rd generation Schenkerians were really the ones to try to 'establish' Schenkerian Analysis as a standard form of understanding formal organization at the macro-harmonic level (as someone stated before). Why people use it today is purely a matter of choice over necessity. We have multiple ways to analyze any piece of music, and whatever level of understanding one hopes to gain in studying music really decides the type of analytical method to employ.

I think the real problem for many is the subjective area of the analysis that exists in Schenker. I learned a pretty comprehensive way of performing this type of analysis, but it only serves a few distinct purposes. You can discover motivic development by reducing complex linear content into the more basic, structural pitches in the rhythmic reduction (I'm often interested in the motivic juxtaposition revealed from the reduction - a longer representation of the motive that is otherwise only heard, on the surface, in shorter isolated moments). There are other neat things you can find through the technique (especially where similar linear relationships tend to appear in both melody and harmony, a sort of synthesis of ideas - I like this kind of stuff, anyway), but it's not supposed to be a singularly authoritative form of analysis (a catch-all).

I don't see how any 'other' form of analysis is any 'more' relevant to academic study than Schenker, either. Harmonic analysis, I would assume from the OP, is considerably 'more' relevant to academic study because of less glaring flaws in interpretation? Or not, since there can be any number of 'glaring flaws' with interpreting a harmonic analysis (debating how the Tristan Chord resolves, for example). So, by the logic of the OP as stated, harmonic analysis is not relevant to academic study. The point being, one single analytical tool, used correctly, provides valuable knowledge. I'd be happy to teach anyone here how a Schenkerian Analysis is constructed (start to finish), for anyone that's interested.

like any and every analytical reduction it has its pros and cons. You seem to have already made up your mind about it (despite never having used it?), so there's not much else to be said. It's primary use is for clarifying macro harmonic form and direction, it does not pretend to be the end-all mother of all analytical styles. I think it's most useful for post tonal music, to get a sense of the pitch material a composer uses

Well I've seen how it's used and I end up thinking to myself "why bother with all this???" So, yeah, seems to be an US thing only.

But in any case, I think Schenker was good, and his theories and methods have pros and cons -like Bolanos pointed out- just like any other analytical method or theory. However, he was absolute in that he thought his analysis method was the best and only one that should be used - and I think everyone who comes up with an analysis method/theory does that, because if they didn't then they wouldn't be able to get across (if I said "I have a new analysis method!! Yes! Come use it! But it's not true. I mean, it is sometimes. Well, in some cases and not in all kinds of music. Yeah, and there are exceptions. And I do agree with other methods too, but I made my own. Well, yeah, it's not absolute" then no one would really go for it), but on the other hand this limits them a lot.

Actually you can postulate theories without saying they're absolute or that they "work every time in every case," and obviously people have done that. Analysis can well be something scientific in context with establishing what a piece is in contrast to other parameters, comparing and categorizing it. Though, in that case, you don't use any singular analysis method, you use whatever gives you objective results within a reasonable margin of error. It depends on what objectives you have. You can analyze a piece to make out which things in it are possibly "new" in historical context, which are part of the tradition and so on. There's not much left to interpretation there since the chords/notes/rhythms either are there or they aren't, either they are used in X or Y specific ways or they aren't.

I think the USA is the apex of the western approach of attempting to rationalize everything, and the general idea that if it cannot be rationalized it is unscientific and therefore not in our interest or a valuable/valid source of "knowledge"/"truth". Which is an approach I personally dislike greatly. I am very fascinated by things I don't understand or don't know how they work, and I don't always want to find out how they're being done.

Been to Germany much? This Schenker stuff is quite esoteric compared to all the musicology material often used in Germany, which is often very much simpler at rationalizing "everything." If people in the US were really trying to rationalize it, why are they using something which needs extra rationalizing on its own just for it to make any sense? Adding layers of complexity, really, without getting anything substantial out of them.

That's the thing I don't get, nevermind that people laugh at you if you bother to mention Schenker analysis over here (so I haven't been able to really see it much in practice at all,) but is it at all useful for anything? What do you get out of it that you can't get out of it just by, uh, doing a good'ol harmonic analysis? Or even pointing out chord anatomy relationships, if we're talking about traditional tonal music. Maybe I'm missing something?

PS: Oh, from the article I posted the link to, I think this is VERY, VERY, VERY important, if a little unrelated:

Just knowing the As and Os of source criticism, being able to rabble 50 archive codes from memory and having a source material that is 200 years old, obviously doesn’t make anyone a historian, anymore than speaking bantu fluently and owning a set of genuine gamelan gongs makes anyone an anthropologist. Rather it is the questions, theories and methods specific for a certain disciplinary tradition—the means and ends for which the sources are being used—that makes someone a sociologist, psychologist, or a historian. A sociologist who studies youth culture, will naturally consider music as one element of this, but if his questions deal with socialization processes, the meaning and internal structure of the music itself will be irrelevant. In short: writing about music isn’t an excuse for theoretical sloppiness about history, ethnology, sociology or any other discipline.

That is not to say that the internal structure of the music itself couldn’t make an interesting study in its own right, and this is a sword that can be directed against musicology: that writing about music in all its multifarious, elusive incarnations, easily becomes an excuse for theoretical sloppiness about music itself. This may manifest itself on the one hand by scholars avoiding any closer examining of music at all, sticking to the safe ground or extra-musical empirical facts. Or on the other by formalistic analysis of musical works, without any clear aim, and with "ready-made" methods of analysis taken over without any deeper knowledge of, or even reflection upon, the theoretical foundation of the method used.

(further down)

Laying out the structure of a Mozart sonata or determining the tone material of a Sch

What do you get out of it that you can't get out of it just by, uh, doing a good'ol harmonic analysis? Or even pointing out chord anatomy relationships, if we're talking about traditional tonal music. Maybe I'm missing something?

Harmonic analysis really only applies to moments in music, not the whole work. Chord anatomy relationships... google pulls up this post and some guitar lesson on Anatomy of a Chord, which is more or less a tab diagram of guitar chords. Maybe we're missing the description of this analytical technique you're talking about. Obviously I've never heard of this Chord Anatomy Relationship technique of analysis, but maybe someone else has.

What Schenker appears to do is take the isolated areas of harmony and connect them to the whole work in a context that usually always reduces, in classical music, to I-V-I. If this is the same thing Chord Anatomy Relationship analysis does, then how is it better? What does it offer to exploring the relationship of the parts to the whole in music? It seems like all Chord Anatomy will tell you is the consistency within the hierarchy of chords and will heavily rely on the vertical sounding elements instead of incorporating both vertical and linear elements.

What I mean is, the systems I know of are not designed to give any meaning to anything, just to organize and categorize what is already evident. Like I said, these are all ways of providing answers to musicology questions about a piece of music.

Say, if you're researching harmonic progression in cadences during the late 18th century, you have to go further back to get your examples as well or you have nothing to compare what you're studying with. So how do you compare them? You can do A: comparison of the chord anatomy and then the progressions and then optionally B: a harmonic analysis from that material.

It depends how far you're going. If the point is showing that harmonic material by the late 19th century is handled differently, then it's not enough that we're just looking at chords or harmony; we have to look at rhythm, voice movement, etc etc. There's no system that I know of that accounts for all of that nor there should be any. It's simply not necessary and in the end even if you try it's impossible to "sum up" hundreds of years of music history. You'll just generalize it to the point it makes no difference.

Despite using functional harmonic analysis when it's necessary (and it's good to remember that functions are quite a thing of interpretation sometimes,) I don't really think you can take a "short cut" with any given method, and all analysis has to be done from the ground up depending on what you're trying to find. And of course, the more specific the system is, the less you can move it around and expect it to be of any use.

Speaking of which, the "function harmonic analysis" thing I'm talking about is this: Diatonic function - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia which is a product of Hugo Riemann in 1893 (apparently.) Thing is, there was yet another theory before that one which got displaced (in some circles) in Germany called Stufentheorie, http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stufentheorie_(Harmonik) which is little more than a different way of organizing chords based on their anatomy (think figured bass.) The main difference is that functions are relative to harmonic context, where Stufentheorie is simply taken from chord to chord with no indication of their relationship and the symbols are only given based on what the chords are on their own given a much wider context.

But the thing to remember is that all this is just a single portion of any analysis. There's a ton more things to do with form that can be tied with (but not the same as) harmonic analysis, with instrumentation, etc etc that really are important things. Like I said, each analysis has to be tailored to fit a specific objective that must be accomplished. Say that you want to show how different the reprises are in the sonata Hauptsatzform between Brahms and Mozart; then it's not only a thing of harmonic analysis, but of comparison, historical context, etc.

In the article I posted about musicology the guy mentions that just talking about music is no excuse to be sloppy in all the other things which are necessary to actually treat musicology as a field humanistic study and this is precisely why. Some questions like "What were the Baroque affects and why did they fall into disuse later on?" are not simply musical questions, to answer them you have to know a good deal of history, culture and of course enough literature so you can show examples. You can analyze a couple of pieces in that context, but the main goal wouldn't be a harmonic analysis but instead to look for things the affects did, where they appeared, etc etc.

So in light of all that, I honestly have no idea what's the use of Schenker's dealie, considering everyone else uses the things Riemann set up anyway at least here. Though his method is known over here as "Reduktionsanalyse" I have never really seen it used at all over here (and I'm still searching...)

So in light of all that, I honestly have no idea what's the use of Schenker's dealie, considering everyone else uses the things Riemann set up anyway at least here. Though his method is known over here as "Reduktionsanalyse" I have never really seen it used at all over here (and I'm still searching...)

I guess the only problem I have with this is that my approach to theory must be different than yours... I dunno. I see analytical techniques as windows into a house (kinda vague, but go with it). Sure, a Harmonic Analysis of the Functionality of all Chords from the beginning to the end of the work might be akin to climbing to the roof of the house and looking into the home through a skylight. But some people don't see the point in taking it to that level of specificity.

Schenker's theory applies more to performance analysis than to actual theoretical principles upon which one would build some theoretical framework of some new idea. It may not make sense to someone to base a thesis on a Schenkerian Analysis, but it makes perfect sense to use a Schenkerian Analysis as a visual aid to explaining phenomena in a given piece. How do we find this phenomena? It's apparent in this Schenkerian reduction, as you can see... upon deeper analysis, you can see that this is reinforced with [insert your analytical technique].

I think the utility of Schenker reduction is a big picture sort of idea. It's macro-level analysis... seeing the whole picture and reducing it instead of starting with... 'Measure one - Chords are I-V, Measure two - Chords are I-V...' and so on. It's just a different approach. It doesn't have to be more than what it is to accomplish what it does. A performer 'could' do a detailed, measure by measure harmonic study, draw diagrams, form charts, make theoretical arguments for or against things... or they could take a piece, reduce it to it's fundamental background, and gain enough insight into the piece to brilliantly perform it. I think the latter would take much less time and still accomplish the same thing the former would. That's the purpose of reductive analysis.