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Schenker versus Schoenberg versus Schenker: The Difficulties of a Reconciliation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Abstract
Music theory has increasingly been attempting to find points of conjunction between the analytical methods of Heinrich Schenker and those of Arnold Schoenberg. However, the move toward a reconciliation has encountered obstacles because of the uneven development of the two schools and differences in the philosophical background of their procedures. The present article focuses on these differences through an examination of three standard examples: the first movements of Beethoven's sonatas op. 2 no. 1, op. 10 no. 1 and op. 57. The comparison of Schenker's analyses in Der Tonwille and Der freie Satz with those of Schoenberg, Webern, Rufer and Ratz shows that the disagreement principally concerns musical form and the functions of its components. The differences can finally be traced back to two opposite paradigms: music as nature and music as language.
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References
My thanks to Laurie Schwartz for her help in bringing the English version of this article to its present form, and to William Drabkin for kindly providing translations of three passages from Schenker's Der Tonwille.Google Scholar
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39 See Webern, , Über musikalische Formen, ed. Boynton. These grace notes in turn refer to the grace notes c“ – e♭” of bar 9; if one sees the model of the liquidation as a fusion of the augmentation of the initial rhythm of motive b with motive d, then the grace notes could be understood, by analogy with that of bar 5 of the first movement of op. 2 no. 1, as a ‘recuperation’ of motive a, which was lost in the thematic fragmentation.Google Scholar
40 See Ratz, , Einführung, 148–9.Google Scholar
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44 See Examples 12 and 14 in Schmalfeldt, ‘Towards a Reconciliation’, 266–7, 272–3.Google Scholar
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47 See Schoenberg, , Fundamentals, 208. Schenker drew a graph of the development (Free Composition, ed. and trans. Oster, ii, Figure 154/7) which brings to light the eccentricity of this section; in his exegesis (i, 137), however, he insists that the ‘diminutions’, derived from the main section of the sonata form, should not be understood as an elaboration which leads to something new, but as a reconfirmation of the articulation of the Urlinie.Google Scholar
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49 Ibid., i, 131. Schenker explains here that he had been thinking about the subject for a long time. To me, at least, it seems that the first traces of the project may be found in his analysis of the variations of the sonata op. 109, where he defers more thorough investigation to ‘the sketch of a new morphology’. See Schenker, Heinrich, Erläuterungsausgaben der letzten fünf Sonaten Beethovens, Op. 109 (Vienna, 1913), 41.Google Scholar
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56 See Schenker, Heinrich, ‘Beethoven: Sonate Opus 57‘, Der Tonwille, iv/1, 3–33 and attached Urlinietafel, particularly the graph of the development (p. 9).Google Scholar
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61 See the formal outline of the first movement of op. 57 in Ratz, Einführung, 159.Google Scholar
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64 The same motive reappears, transposed and in inversion (E–F), as the main voice in the dramatic opening of the concluding section (bar 239). At the end of the preceding diminuendo it is heard in its original form, so that here the inversional movement is exhibited in close-up: E–F counterbalanced at the fifth, D♭–C.Google Scholar
65 See Federhofer, Hellmut, Beiträge zur musikalischen Gestaltanalyse (Graz, Innsbruck and Vienna, 1950), and Felix Salzer, Structural Hearing: Tonal Coherence in Music (New York, 1952). From the point of view of the history of twentieth-century music theory, the treatment of the formal question in these two texts can be seen as the parallel in the Schenkerian school of the attempt to transfer the principles of functional morphology from tonality to dodecaphony, which was undertaken in the same period by Leibowitz (‘Traité de la composition avec douze sons’, 1950) and Rufer (Composition with Twelve Tones, 1952); this last issue is the subject of my essay ‘Zwölftontechnik und Formenlehre: Zu den Abhandlungen von René Leibowitz und Josef Rufer’, Autorschaft als historische Konstruktion: Arnold Schoenberg – Vorgänger, Zeitgenossen, Nachfolger und Interpreten, ed. Andreas Meyer and Ulrich Scheideler (Stuttgart and Weimar, 2001), 287–321.Google Scholar
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67 ‘Dehnung eines im Klanglichen geborgenen Tonraumes’ (Federhofer, Beiträge zur musikalischen Gestaltanalyse, 38).Google Scholar
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