# Schenker Analysis & Species Counterpoint



## Minona (Mar 25, 2013)

Hello... I've been looking at some Schenkerian analyses.

What I'm confused about is, why do these analyses reduce compositions beyond the 4-part counterpoints that formed the technique of the old masters? I mean, we know for certain that old masters learned (and taught) composition via species counterpoint and, if anything, regarded figured bass as the maximum practical minimization possible. Albrechsberger (Beethhoven's teacher) wrote the second most celebrated treatise and declared figured bass:

_"Thorough-bass is the fundamental basis of all
music, and must be profoundly studied by all those
who desire to dedicate themselves to this beautiful
art. Without this science, we can admire the ex-
cellence of a composition by the physical impression
it may cause, but we can never worthily appreciate
its intrinsic merit. With innate talent we may
produce some not imperfect compositions, but we
cannot satisfactorily account for the matter created,
nor vouch for blameless immaculacy in regard to
grammatical technicality. Thorough-bass teaches
us to reduce to its simple, original, natural, and
derived chords, every composition,-for whatever
instrument it may be written, and however florid
the melody, accompaniment, or embellishments :
it grants us a view of the unveiled innermost sanc-
tuary,-shews the whole wonderful construction of
a work of art in a skeleton shape, stripped of all
ornamental garb : by a mere figured bass, enables
the initiated to follow correctly a composition of
many parts, throughout all its turns and modu-
lations : it is our sure guide and director,-orders
and binds ideas,-straightens paths,-chains and
unites that which without its aid would be separate
and erring. Therefore let us all become intimate
with this elemental science, as our great ancestors
were, and it will fare well with us!"​_
Let me put it another way: Reductions of pieces to their background counterpoints still sound like music, albeit simplified to a minimum of note against note (or some other species). Why go further? What use is a reduction to the point that it no longer sounds much like music? Were the old masters not capable of understanding their own technique thoroughly enough with counterpoint alone? If it is not enough, why did they teach it to their pupils? Surely if WE want to understand the technique, only counterpoint is necessary!

Any thoughts?

Thanks


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## Ramako (Apr 28, 2012)

Schenker's techniques reveal long-range aspects of tonal compositions: counterpoint does not. Most writing I've come across on Schenkerian analysis makes this plain, and I have by no means studied it properly, so I'm not sure how to explain it since what you have read probably does so better. _Structural Hearing_ by Felix Salzer is a fairly good introduction on the topic though if you have not already come across it.

Counterpoint only deals from note to note, whereas Schenkerian analysis acknowledges, and tries to express the effects of, the fact that a note has impact on more than just the notes on either side (and above and below) it. When a tonic or a dominant bass is prolonged, all the music within that prolongation, to a certain extent (related to how close to the foreground or the background it is), takes on the characteristic of that bass note and merely elaborates on it. Same for melody notes. Thus the entire middle (5 in the bass, 2 in the melody) of a tonal composition is to some extent 'dominanty'.

The remarkable thing about Schenkerian analysis is that it works, and works extremely well. Even more remarkable is, imo, the way he managed to express it.


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

I've never exactly found Schenkerian analysis to be particularly helpful all the time, but having a knowledge of it does indeed let me understand tonal plans of the whole piece _if_ it is tonal. My interest in music analysis is how I originally came across this form of tonal analysis, but I found it quite restricting as it was very hard to use it with a lot of 20th and 21st century music, one of my foremost interests in music history. I would like to look into Schenkerian analysis more though, last time I read about it I noticed that there were many flaws that restricted it mainly to the standard repertoire of the 17th to 19th centuries, and then again often being quite unsuitable to the harmonically more adventurous music of the latter half of the romantic era.


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## Ramako (Apr 28, 2012)

ComposerOfAvantGarde said:


> I've never exactly found Schenkerian analysis to be particularly helpful all the time, but having a knowledge of it does indeed let me understand tonal plans of the whole piece _if_ it is tonal. My interest in music analysis is how I originally came across this form of tonal analysis, but I found it quite restricting as it was very hard to use it with a lot of 20th and 21st century music, one of my foremost interests in music history. I would like to look into Schenkerian analysis more though, last time I read about it I noticed that there were many flaws that restricted it mainly to the standard repertoire of the 17th to 19th centuries, and then again often being quite unsuitable to the harmonically more adventurous music of the latter half of the romantic era.


Indeed! It's restrictions are hardly accidental given Schenker's beliefs about music (Brahms the last composer of any worth etc.).

Nevertheless, the problem theory has to deal with is its incredible usefulness and validity for a few types of music and utter uselessness at any others. There was an attempt I believe to abstract Schenkerian analysis to all forms of music in the 20th century, I forget who by, but, as I understand it, it wasn't fully successful (I will have to look into it at some stage). Hopefully we will see a more general form of the theory at some stage.


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## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

Ramako said:


> Schenkerian analysis acknowledges, and tries to express the effects of, the fact that a note has impact on more than just the notes on either side (and above and below) it.


I think the value of Schenkerian analysis lies in its tools and methods rather than its premises or conclusions. The notion that a note has an impact on other notes is quite useful, and if that's all Schenker had said then all would be well. The problem lies in his notion of the fundamental structure. Given a sufficient reduction of its surface elements, so the theory goes, a piece can always be shown to be an elaboration of the fundamental line.

This is what scientists sometimes call verificationism: when one engages in Schenkerian analysis and starts reducing music to its essential structural elements, stripping away the surface details layer by layer, one _already has a preconceived idea of what the end result should be_--namely, the fundamental line. As a result, the fundamental line inevitably serves as a guide for the reduction process: if you're not sure whether a note is merely a surface detail or is structurally important, you make the decision based on the note's relationship to the fundamental line. The analysis consequently becomes a kind of circular argument. One is not "discovering" the fundamental structure; one is creating it.

In his defense, Schenker was writing at a time when underlying unity was so privileged in German romantic music as to be taken for granted (Beethoven's motivic writing, Berlioz's _idée fixe_, Liszt's "thematic transformation," etc.). Schenker, in turn, helped paved the way for Schoenberg's concepts of _Grundgestalt_, developing variation, etc. But with some historical distance, most musicologists have come to see Schenkerian analysis as a very subjective exercise designed to show that every piece of (good) music exhibits precisely the qualities that German romantics prized.

So you're right that it works, but that's because it's a tautological method. It designed so that it _can't_ not work. According to the theory, it doesn't matter whether you're analyzing a 2-minute Bach prelude or the finale of a Beethoven symphony: you will always get the fundamental line. It seems to me that if an analytical method gives you the same answer each time, it hasn't really told you anything.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

ComposerOfAvantGarde said:


> I've never exactly found Schenkerian analysis to be particularly helpful all the time, but having a knowledge of it does indeed let me understand tonal plans of the whole piece _if_ it is tonal.


Shenker's method had an agenda, and as per that agenda -- as others have already said -- the system works well to give GLOBAL overviews of the main relationships within a piece.

The Agenda (or bias) _was meant to insist / prove that tonal music was "the true way,"_ and another part of the intent was it was hoped it would prove _the superiority of German music_ -- hey, it was the late 1920's, 30's 

As to the built-in aesthetic / theoretical bias, Eschbeg's post (just above) explains that bias very well.

So for tonal music, global view, it can be handy. Elliott Carter said he had looked into it, and that other than the fact it showed a piece had, for example, dropped an octave over the running of its entire course, he thought there was little to be gained from it.


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## Minona (Mar 25, 2013)

Thanks for your thoughts! I'd be interested to know your thoughts on this opposing view by Roger Scruton (University of St. Andrews; University of Oxford):

"Objections to Schenker’s idea are now familiar. Not only does it reduce all classical works, or at least all classical masterpieces, to a single basic gesture. It also implies formidable powers of concentration on the listener’s part, to hold in suspension the sparse points at which the Ursatz can be glimpsed beneath the surface of a complex melodic and harmonic process. Moreover, it leaves entirely mysterious what the benefit might be, either in composing or in listening to a piece, the understanding of which involves recuperating these elementary musical sequences that have no significance when heard on their own. 

The mistake, it seems to me, comes from thinking that these perceived relations define a hidden or more basic structure, from which the rest of the musical surface is derived. The perceived relations should rather be seen as we see the relation between spires on a Gothic castle. The pattern made by the spires emerges from the supporting structures, but does not generate them.

Of course, we recognize long-term tonal relations, relations of dependence between episodes, ways in which one part spells out and realizes what has been foretold in another. These aspects of music are important: they are the foundation of our deepest musical experiences and an endless source of curiosity and delight. But they concern structures and relations that are created in the surface, not hidden in the depths. 

The musical order is not generated from these long-term relations, as Schenker would have us believe, but points toward them, in the way that architectural patterns point toward the form in which they culminate. We come to understand the larger structure as a result of understanding the small-scale movement from which it derives. "


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## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

Minona said:


> Thanks for your thoughts! I'd be interested to know your thoughts on this opposing view by Roger Scruton


It doesn't sound all that opposing to me. Scruton is saying what we've said too: Schenker's "fundamental structure" is basically imaginary and can be dispensed with.


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## BurningDesire (Jul 15, 2012)

In studying Schenkerian analysis, I found it to be among the most boring and uninteresting music analysis I've had to do. Really it just seems a useless waste of time.


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## Ramako (Apr 28, 2012)

Eschbeg said:


> So you're right that it works, but that's because it's a tautological method.


Obviously - except that that (fairly clearly) is not what I meant by 'works'. The fundamental line could be found in anything. The method 'works' because there is a link between the Schenkerian graphs and the musical experience, and it seems to me that an analytical method which does not engage with the realm of musical experience is not worth the time of day. The value of Schenker is in the middleground, and in the interaction between the various structural levels. Its potential falsification lies in the realm of individual experience, and I am forced to acknowledge I feel it does work. Obviously many others have as well, otherwise it would not have caught on - and remember that it did not catch on in Germany in the 1930s, where there was a strong ideological incentive, but in North America in the latter half of the 20th century, in spite of a heavily problematic conceptual basis (much of which was abandoned).


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## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

Ramako said:


> The method 'works' because there is a link between the Schenkerian graphs and the musical experience,


Fair enough, though I would add the caveat that the method comports with individual experience to the extent that music is experienced primarily through pitch structure, which is probably fine for most listeners but can be pretty limiting for others. That is the other major criticism with Schenkerian analysis: it wasn't designed to account for things like rhythm, tone color, expressive markings, and to a lesser extent form.


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## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

Also:



Ramako said:


> it did not catch on in Germany in the 1930s, where there was a strong ideological incentive, but in North America in the latter half of the 20th century, in spite of a heavily problematic conceptual basis (much of which was abandoned).


There was actually a very strong ideological _dis_incentive to promote the theories of Schenker in 1930s Germany, owing slightly to Schenker's race but mostly to the prevailing (though not universally adhered to) policy that art should work in the service of the state. Any theory that considers aesthetic value a function of structure and form is not going to thrive in an environment where (as Goebbels put it) "art must be conditioned by the needs of the people." Meanwhile, it is true that Schenkerian theory did thrive in the U.S., but this was initiated by students of Schenker who emigrated from Germany and Austria: Felix Salzer (as you mentioned above), Oswald Jonas, and Hans Weisse. And by the time it caught on to American academics in the 1950s, there was a strong ideological incentive in the west to view aesthetic value as a function of structure and form--an incentive formed in explicit reaction against the continuing disincentive to do so in the countries on the other side of the Iron Curtain.


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## Minona (Mar 25, 2013)

Eschbeg said:


> It doesn't sound all that opposing to me. Scruton is saying what we've said too: Schenker's "fundamental structure" is basically imaginary and can be dispensed with.


Er... I meant opposing Schenker. Thanks


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Minona said:


> Er... I meant opposing Schenker. Thanks


Originally Posted by Eschbeg: 
It doesn't sound all that opposing to me. Scruton is saying what we've said too: Schenker's "fundamental structure" is basically imaginary and can be dispensed with.

Uh, I don't know how much more opposed you could get than what Scruton said, unless "wholly dismissive" is not considered a complete opposition :

No one writes short or long thesis-like essays when something trendy has bitten the dust. The Schenkerian Analysis trend died a natural death, a theoretical premise based as much on social and cultural intents and agenda as music had more than seen its day, had a hayride in the mid to late 20th century in the U.S. as part of the anti socialist / communist cold war, never had as much to do with music or the needs of musicians as much as it was touted to have, really.

As far as I know, there were not more than a very few mourners at the funeral.


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