cook n. the schenker project

[...]... Stadt- und Landesbibliothek, Vienna The Schenker Project Introduction: Schenker s Contexts If Schenker s theory was the solution, what was the problem? In terms of the English-speaking academic environment within which Schenker s ideas became naturalised in the period after the Second World War, the answer is obvious: how to account for the coherence of Western ‘art’ music of the eighteenth and nineteenth... during precisely the period when Schenker lived there (chapter 4) The book is motivated by the belief that basic aspects of Schenkerian theory—aspects which survived the journey across the Atlantic—arose out of these circumstances, and that without an understanding of this, one cannot really claim ownership of the agenda to which one works through the very act of doing Schenkerian analysis The book is also... Schenker s theory is not just a theory of music but a theory of society—or to put it another way, not just a theory but a project How are we to explain the comprehensiveness of Schenker s thinking together of the musical and the social? There are several answers, some of which I have already mentioned One is the Viennese tradition of associating music and society Another is Schenker s personal situation... decades—then we clearly need to draw the problem to which Schenker s theory is the solution in much broader terms That is the overall aim of this book, in which I set Schenker s work into a variety of contemporary contexts ranging from the artistic (music criticism, architectural modernism) to the broadly political (the tradition of German cultural conservatism, Schenker s position as a Jewish 3 4 The Schenker. .. imagery The central categories of artistic construction can be translated into social ones It is in fitting together under their own law, as becoming, negating, confirming themselves and the whole without looking outward, that his movements come to resemble the world whose forces move them What he calls thematic work is the mutual abrasion of the antitheses, the individual interests The motive... demonstrated the extent to which Schenkerian theory, as promulgated on both sides of the Atlantic in the late twentieth century, was the product of American postwar academia In so doing, he opened up the possibility of what might be termed historically informed Schenker studies, by analogy with the historically informed performance movement at its zenith in the 1980s: the attempt to resituate Schenker s theory... about the epithet the most important music as to ‘whether I shall ultimately be able to make up my mind to sacrifice my freedom’ (letter of 2 December 1909 [CA 106–7], transcribed and translated by Bent, Schenker Correspondence Project website) 28 OC 2 26 The Schenker Project theorist of the present day’, and interpreted Furtwängler’s final comment as a dig at Richard Strauss The third way of telling the. .. motivated by the idea that Schenker s theory is not, or not simply, a theory in the way that music theorists today commonly understand that word, but an integral element in a much broader programme for artistic, social, and political change, and it is to convey this that I speak of the Schenker project (a term I have borrowed from James Hepokoski’s [1991] interpretation of the ‘Dahlhaus project ) The idea... says, ‘there are undeniable over- Introduction: Schenker s Contexts 7 lappings in the theories of Riemann and Schenker (1982: 37) Indeed, Riemann’s early (1880) claim that the first stipulation and cardinal characteristic of a musical art work is first and foremost the unity of the key’,2 which predates the development of his own theory, could serve equally well as a statement of Schenker s basic theoretical... of work carried out since then Yet I feel there is still unfinished business At one level, Korsyn’s demonstration of the affinities between Schenker and Kant, or Pastille’s demonstration of the affinities between Schenker and Goethe, add crucially to our understanding of what Schenker wrote: if you don’t pick up these resonances, then you won’t understand the terms within which Schenker framed his thought . Wiener Stadt- und Landesbibliothek, Vienna Abbreviations xi The Schenker Project Introduction: Schenker s Contexts If Schenker s theory was the solution, what was the problem? In terms of the English-speaking. D-moll. Vienna: Universal Edition, 1910] BNS Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, trans. and ed. John Rothgeb. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. [Beethovens neunte Sinfonie. Vienna: Universal Edition, 1912] C1. feel there is still unfinished business. At one level, Korsyn’s dem- onstration of the affinities between Schenker and Kant, or Pastille’s demonstration of the affinities between Schenker and Goethe,