Five Graphic Music Analyses
64
Five Graphic Music Analyses
64Paperback(New Introduction Edition)
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Overview
These sketches study the musical architecture of five compositions from three stylistic periods: two compositions by Bach — " Ich bin's, ich sollte büssen" from the St. Matthew Passion and the Prelude No. 1 in C Major from Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier; the development section from the first movement of Haydn's Sonata for Piano in E-Flat Major; and two ètudes by Chopin — in F Major, Op. 10, No. 8, and in C Minor, Op. 10, No. 12. Each composition is analyzed in a series of sketches, with selective interpretations of chords, indications of voice leading, and other easily understood devices that demonstrate Schenker's theories and their expression.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780486222943 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dover Publications |
| Publication date: | 05/17/2012 |
| Series: | Dover Books on Music Series |
| Edition description: | New Introduction Edition |
| Pages: | 64 |
| Product dimensions: | 11.34(w) x 8.12(h) x 0.22(d) |
About the Author
Music theorist Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935) is best remembered for his approach to music analysis, now termed Schenkerian analysis. He studied under the composer Bruckner and taught music theory and piano privately to several noted musicians, conductors, and composers.
Read an Excerpt
Five Graphic Music Analyses
By Heinrich Schenker
Dover Publications, Inc.
Copyright © 1969 Dover Publications, Inc.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-486-31706-9
INTRODUCTION
BY FELIX SALZER
WITHIN the last ten years a decisive change in the evaluation of Heinrich Schenker's work has taken place. From an almost complete lack of understanding, via a respectful though somehow reluctant recognition, we have come all the way to a genuine and growing interest in his ideas. To some, however, it still seems strange that the output of a man who almost exclusively analyzed eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music has an ever-increasing appeal to students of music, performers and composers, whatever their outlooks on musical problems may be. To one who has worked for many years in the realm of these ideas the situation is less paradoxical than it may seem. For it appears that musicians are now discovering that Schenker, over and above his keen insights into the music with which he dealt, touches on problems of the entire tonal language. We have been hindered in recognizing this by clinging to age-old prejudices and certain self-imposed historical limitations which have frequently beclouded our judgments, leading thereby to a kind of historical "short-sightedness." One of these limitations as applied to Schenker stems from our obsession with specialization. Schenker analyzed eighteenth-and nineteenth-century music and was considered by many a "specialist" of this period, but should this imply that he could not make any contribution to music with a different stylistic outlook and that his insights had no validity for any period other than the classic and romantic?
Once one has been freed from this and similar, dated a priori assumptions, and approaches the history of music theory with an open mind, one may come to the conclusion that Schenker inaugurated a completely new trend in the theory and analysis of music. The questions he raised and the problems of musical motion he discovered and presented had been occasionally hinted at, but never before specifically considered, and hardly ever recognized as such. By going far beyond the goals of preceding theorists he probed the meaning of the musical utterance per se. He consequently explained and demonstrated for the first time, by means of revealing analyses in graphic form, the organic coherence of a composition taken as a whole. During the developmental process toward this achievement he found that the analytic penetration of music depends on hearing and understanding in depth. He demonstrated that musical structure can be understood on three levels: foreground—middleground—background. These are direct translations of Schenker's Vordergrund—Mittelgrund —Hintergrund; the equivalent terms immediate, intermediate, and remote levels of structure may also be used. Analysis is a continuous process of connecting and integrating these three levels of musical perception.
The "distance" between a composition and its fundamental structure (Ursatz) finds expression in voice-leading graphs which delineate the various structural levels (Schichten): remote, intermediate and immediate. In a specific work the contents of all graphs unfold simultaneously, but each structural level, taken by itself, presents a meaningful view from a different perspective. Together they constitute a picture of tonal organization in which each tone and each progression reveals its significance as an organic offshoot of the fundamental structure, as well as its individual role in forming a total organism. Every fundamental structure allows for practically limitless elaborations, modifications, or transformations of the foreground. For example, the fundamental linear progression 3–2—1 over an elaborated tonic constitutes the remote structural level of the four complete compositions analyzed in this publication. The foregrounds of these works, however, could not be more contrasting or heterogenous. It is in the middleground and foreground that the individuality and unique aesthetic beauty of each work are revealed.
This brings us to the novel idea of analytically demonstrating the musical contents of a composition by way of graphic notation. In music, the horizontal and vertical dimensions embracing melodic, harmonic, contrapuntal and rhythmic events form a single though very complex continuum. Words can only explain or describe one event at a time, but even the most elementary musical hearing must grasp, for example, a melody and its counterpoint at the same time. Schenker's ideas developed gradually into a contrapuntal-linear or voice-leading approach in which tone and chord function rather than description became a predominating characteristic. Consequently, he must have realized that the written word alone could not possibly take on the role of presenting and explaining his analytic experience and its results.
Although the actual sequence of musical events in a work can be described verbally, an analytic approach which centers on the recognition of each detail in relation to the totality or total organism of a work needs a different way of demonstration. This became even mandatory after Schenker had discovered that in the background of a complex tonal event lies a simpler or basic progression, and that the complex progression is an elaborated transformation (prolongation) of the basic one. Since this transformation can be explained and understood in stages (Schichten)—not unsimilar to the understanding of a complex idea, thought or human action—the concept of the three structural levels took shape. The simultaneity and interrelatedness of these three levels can undoubtedly best be demonstrated by a graphic type of musical notation. Thus the graphing technique began to materialize in the first issue of Der Tonwille (1921), and by the time Five Graphic Music Analyses appeared, the technique had grown and developed to a high degree of perfection.
The meaning of these graphs lies in their ability to delineate and explain the function of each progression or each motion of the detail (foreground) in relation to the overall musical structure (middleground and background). The graphs make use of noteheads and many symbols of notation as they appear in the score itself. They show a type of notation in which different note values, slurs, beams, connecting lines, brackets and various additional symbols and terms are used to indicate tone and chord function, goals as well as details of motion, relation of certain tones to others, and, above all, the direction and interaction of the various voices, in short: the voice leading and tonal coherence of an entire work.
It is here that the eye comes to the aid of the ear by showing, for instance, a goal of motion in the background or middleground, and simultaneously the quasi roundabout way the composer may take to reach this goal. Thus the eye helps the ear to integrate the analysis of tonal events on the various levels of structure.
Concerning a written commentary to accompany graphic analysis, all Schenker publications preceding the present one show an often detailed text in addition to the graphs. It seems to me that whenever there is a didactic purpose connected with a presentation of graphs, whenever the work under discussion is complex or not very well known, or when comparisons between possible analytic versions are to be made, written comments and explanations, in all such cases, are called for. However, after Schenker had developed the graphic language to the level of this publication, it seemed entirely logical to him that graphs could be offered without or with a minimum of accompanying text or commentary. And since they were meant for readers with some previous knowledge of the approach, they are in fact self-sufficient and self-explaining. Thus Schenker's words in the opening paragraph of his Foreword stemmed from the recognition that he was beginning to speak to an increasing number of musicians who had followed the gradual shaping of his ideas. He knew that they would now be able to follow and discern his analytical insights even without verbal comments.
Since Heinrich Schenker's Five Graphic Music Analyses stems from the time when I was one of his students, a few personal recollections and comments may be of interest. Before studying with Schenker I had been, for several years, a student of the late Hans Weisse, one of Schenker's outstanding pupils. In 1931, Weisse decided to leave his native Vienna to take up a teaching position at the David Mannes Music School in New York (now The Mannes College of Music). He suggested that I and three of his other students (Manfred H. Will-fort, Trude Krai, and Greta Kraus), continue our work under Schenker. Our reaction, needless to say, was enthusiastic, and it was our good fortune that Schenker agreed to have us constitute an informal seminar which would meet in his apartment once a week for a lengthy session. I thus studied with Heinrich Schenker from the fall of 1931 until shortly before his death on January 22, 1935. For three seasons I was a member of the seminar; after he gave it up I continued as a private student for the remaining months preceding his death.
Some time before the seminar began its work Schenker gave me the following list of compositions which we were to analyze. At this time he planned to publish analytic studies of these works in the form of graphs. The analyses of the first five works listed make up the contents of this publication. The study of these five works and the most careful graphing of the results formed the core of the first winter's work (1931 to 1932). Each of us was assigned a different composition; the work on the voice-leading graphs went through many stages until they represented Schenker's point of view. The fact that we were "involved" in a future publication of Heinrich Schenker demanded the highest exactitude in our preparatory work. We gradually came to understand that the results of analytic work must be corroborated by the actual music and well founded in the voice leading. Every one of us became, to say the least, deeply impressed by this need for responsibility toward the work, lest graphs and analytic explanations become arbitrary excursions into a half-understood theoretical approach.
I am in no position to state when Schenker himself had completed analytic work on these five compositions. It was my impression that it was done before our sessions began, perhaps simultaneously with his work on the "Eroica," since the graphing technique is very similar. He led us step by step into all facets of voice leading and of musical synthesis. This kind of analysis can only be taught by one who has clarified for himself the analytical problems of a particular work. I shall never forget the highly persuasive and artistic manner in which he explained particular sections or passages, playing them on the piano, sometimes in "slow motion," so as to make their voice leading clear. Thus it appeared that the explanations and analytic readings grew, so to speak, out of the most inspired and lucid playing.
This publication stems from the last period of Schenker's life, following the appearance, in 1930, of the exhaustive analysis of Beethoven's Third Symphony. In my opinion, the five graphs show the profound insights of Schenker in his most mature and convincing manner. The lucidity of the graphing technique is unsurpassed by that of any of his other publications.
Schenker, in a letter to me, explicitly stated his intention to issue other publications in similar form containing analyses of some of the works on the seminar's list. Why a second or third series was never completed I cannot state with certainty. I have always believed—and some passages in his letters seem to corroborate this belief—that he was under so great an inner pressure to complete his main work, Der freie Satz, that there was simply not enough time to publish a further series of analyses. However I recall, and some of the graphs in my possession show, that work on a second series was well under way at the time of his death. They stem from our work in the seminar during the two following seasons (1932 to 1934); they are in various stages of completion. The publication of some of these is planned in the future.
New York October, 1968
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Five Graphic Music Analyses by Heinrich Schenker. Copyright © 1969 Dover Publications, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of Dover Publications, Inc..
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Table of Contents
Contents
J. S. BACH Chorale: "Ich bin's, ich sollte büssen," St. Matthew Passion,J. S. BACH Prelude No. 1 in C Major, Well-Tempered Clavier, Vol. 1,
J. HAYDN Sonata in E-Flat Major v. H. xvi, No. 49,
F. CHOPIN Etude in F Major, Op. 10, No. 8,
F. CHOPIN Etude in C Minor, Op. 10, No. 12,