The essays contained in this volume provide a focus on the work of the music theorist Heinrich Schenker - a figure of legendary status who has had an incalculable influence on developments in music theory and analysis in this century. His theories, not always fully understood, have aroused some controversy. The broad spectrum of essays presented here will help clarify Schenker's ideas and their application and will also serve as a useful introduction to his work for music theorists. The essays, written by fourteen leading theorists, originate in papers delivered at the Schenker Symposium held at The Mannes College of Music, New York in 1985.

This is the first comprehensive study of this century's most influential music theorist, Heinrich Schenker.

Carl Schachter is the world's leading practitioner of Schenkerian theory and analysis. His articles and books have been broadly influential, and are seen by many as models of musical insight and lucid prose. Yet, perhaps his greatest impact has been felt in the classroom. At the Mannes College of Music, the Juilliard School of Music, Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and at special pedagogical events around the world, he has taught generations of musical performers, composers, historians, and theorists over the course of his long career. In Fall 2012, Schachter taught a doctoral seminar at the CUNY Graduate Center in which he talked about the music and the musical issues that have concerned him most deeply; the course was in essence a summation of his extensive and renowned teaching. In The Art of Tonal Analysis, winner of the Society for Music Theory's 2017 Citation of Special Merit, music theorist Joseph Straus presents edited transcripts of those lectures. Accompanied by abundant music examples, including analytical examples transcribed from the classroom blackboard, Straus's own visualizations of material that Schachter presented aurally at the piano, and Schachter's own extended Schenkerian graphs and sketches, this book offers a vivid account of Schachter's masterful pedagogy and his deep insight into the central works of the tonal canon. In making the lectures of one of the world's most extraordinary musicians and musical thinkers available to a wide audience, The Art of Tonal Analysis is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of music.

The first detailed study of Schenker's pathbreaking 1906 treatise, showing how it reflected 2500 years of thinking about harmony and presented a vigorous reaction to Austro-Germanic music theory ca. 1900.

SchenkerGUIDE is an accessible overview of Heinrich Schenker's complex but fascinating approach to the analysis of tonal music. The book has emerged out of the widely used website, www.SchenkerGUIDE.com, which has been offering straightforward explanations of Schenkerian analysis to undergraduate students since 2001. Divided into four parts, SchenkerGUIDE offers a step-by-step method to tackling this often difficult system of analysis. Part I is an introduction to Schenkerian analysis, outlining the concepts that are involved in analysis Part II outlines a unique and detailed working method to help students to get started on the process of analysis Part III puts some of these ideas into practice by exploring the basics of a Schenkerian approach to form, register, motives and dramatic structure Part IV provides a series of exercises from the simple to the more sophisticated, along with hints and tips for their completion.

The first two volumes of Heinrich Schenker's masterwork Neue musikalische Theorien und Phantasien, Harmonielehren (1906), and Kontrapunkt (1910 and 1922), laid the foundations for the harmonic aspect of his theory. The specific voice-leading component was a later development, progressing with brilliance over the last 15 years of his life. It is in Free Composition (Freie Satz, 1935) that the idea of voice-leading receives its most detailed and precise formulation. Pendragon Press is honored to make this distinguished reprint available once again, with a new preface by Carl Schacter.

Publisher description

Today we think of Heinrich Schenker, who lived in Vienna from 1884 until his death in 1935, as the most influential music theorist of the twentieth century. But he saw his theoretical writings as part of a comprehensive project for the reform of musical composition, performance, criticism, and education-and beyond that, as addressing fundamental cultural, social, and political problems of the deeply troubled age in which he lived. This book aims to explain Schenker's project through reading his key works within a series of period contexts. These include music criticism, the field in which Schenker first made his name; Viennese modernism, particularly the debate over architectural ornamentation; German cultural conservatism, which is the source of many of Schenker's most deeply entrenched values; and Schenker's own position as a Galician Jew who came to Vienna just as fully racialized anti-semitism was developing there. As well as presenting an unfamiliar perspective on the cultural and political ferment of fin-de-siècle Vienna, this book reveals how deeply Schenker's theory is permeated by the social and political. It also raises issues concerning the meaning and value of music theory, and the extent to which today's music-theoretical agenda unwittingly reflects the values and concerns of a very different world.

This book approaches Schenkerian analysis in a practical and accessible manner fit for the classroom, guiding readers through a step-by-step process. It is suitable for advanced undergraduates and graduate students of musicology, music theory, composition, and performance, and it is replete with a wide variety of musical examples.

Introduces the fundamental principles of Schenkerian analysis within the context of the music itself.