Heinrich Schenker's theoretical and analytical works claim to resubstantiate the unique artistic presence of the canonic work, and thus reject those musical disciplines such as psychoacoustics and systematic musicology which derive from the natural sciences. In this respect his writing reflects the counter-positivism endemic to the German academic discourse of the first decades of the twentieth century. The rhetoric of this stance, however, conceals a sophisticated programme wherein Schenker situates his project in relation to these sciences, arguing his reading of the musical text as a synthesis of a descriptive psychology and an explanatory historiography (which itself embeds both paleographic and philological assumptions). This book rereads Schenker's project as an attempt to reconstruct music theory as a discipline against the background of the empirical musical sciences of the later nineteenth century.

To the growing list of Pendragon Press publications devoted to the work of Heinrich Schenker, we wish to announce the addition of this much-needed bibliography. The author, a student of Allen Forte, has created a work useful to a wide range of researchers music theorists, musicologists, music librarians and teachers. The Guide is the largest Schenkerian reference work ever published. At nearly 600 pages, it contains 3600 entries (2200 principal, 1400 secondary) representing the work of 1475 authors. Fifteen broad groupings encompass seventy topical headings, many of which are divided and subdivided again, resulting in a total of 271 headings under which entries are collected.

What does it mean to think of Western Art music - and the Austro-German contribution to that repertory - as a tradition? How are men and masculinities implicated in the shaping of that tradition? And how is the writing of the history (or histories) of that tradition shaped by men and masculinities? This book seeks to answer these and other questions by drawing both on a wide range of German-language writings on music, sound and listening from the so-called long nineteenth century (circa 1800-1918), and a range of critical-theoretical texts from the post-war continental philosophical and psychoanalytic traditions, including Lacan, Zizek, Serres, Derrida and Kittler. The book is focussed in particular on bringing the object of historical writing itself into scrutiny by engaging in what Zizek has called a 'historicity' or a way of writing about the past that not merely acknowledges the ahistorical kernel of historical writing, but brings that kernel into the light of day, takes account of it and puts it into play. The book is thus committed to a kind of historical writing that is open-ended - though not ideologically naïve - and that does not fix or stabilize the nature of the relationship between so-called 'primary' and 'secondary' texts. The book consists of an introduction, which places the study of classical music and the Austro-German tradition within broader debates about the value of that tradition, and four extensive case studies: an analysis of the cultural-historical category of listening around 1800; a close reading of A. B. Marx's Beethoven monograph of 1859; a consideration of Heinrich Schenker's attitudes to the mob and the vernacular more broadly and an examination, through Franz Kafka, of the figure of Mahler's body.

This book examines the origin, content, and development of the musical thought of Heinrich Schenker and Arnold Schoenberg. One of the premises is that Schenker’s and Schoenberg’s inner musical lives are inseparable from their inner spiritual lives. Curiously, Schenker and Schoenberg start out in much the same musical-spiritual place, yet musically they split while spiritually they grow closer. The reception of Schenker’s and Schoenberg’s work has sidestepped this paradox of commonality and conflict, instead choosing to universalize and amplify their conflict. Bringing to light a trove of unpublished material, Arndt argues that Schenker’s and Schoenberg’s conflict is a reflection of tensions within their musical and spiritual ideas. They share a particular conception of the tone as an ideal sound realized in the spiritual eye of the genius. The tensions inherent in this largely psychological and material notion of the tone and this largely metaphysical notion of the genius shape both their musical divergence on the logical (technical) level in theory and composition, including their advocacy of the Ursatz versus twelvetone composition, and their spiritual convergence, including their embrace of Judaism. These findings shed new light on the musical and philosophical worlds of Schenker and Schoenberg and on the profound artistic and spiritual questions with which they grapple.

Dass Heinrich Schenker zu einem der meistdiskutierten Musiktheoretiker des 20. Jahrhunderts wurde, hat im Wesentlichen zwei Gründe: Erstens ermöglicht seine Theorie ebenso vielschichtige wie konsistente Beschreibungen der Stimmführung, Harmonik und Syntax tonaler Werke. Und zweitens fand Schenkers ?Schichtenlehre? in den USA, wohin die meisten Schüler Schenkers nach 1933 emigriert waren, ideale Bedingungen vor - Bedingungen, die sie rasch zur führenden Theorie tonaler Musik aufsteigen ließen. In Österreich, Deutschland und der Schweiz nahm die Schenker-Rezeption vorerst einen anderen Weg: Bis zur Jahrtausendwende blieb Schenkers Theorie Sache weniger Spezialisten. Seither aber stößt sie auch im deutschsprachigen Raum auf wachsendes Interesse. Der vorliegende deutsch-englische Sammelband trägt zur Schenker-Forschung beider Sprachräume und Wissenschaftskulturen bei. Er untersucht theoriegeschichtliche Fragen, beleuchtet unerforschte Aspekte der Schenker-Theorie und erschließt zahlreiche ihrer wissenschaftstheoretischen, rezeptionshistorischen und musikästhetischen Implikationen. Häufig geht er dabei über Schenker hinaus - durch neue Vorstellungen von Rhythmik und Metrik, Bezüge zur Systemtheorie Niklas Luhmanns oder pluralistische Theoriekonzepte. Der separate Notenband enthält analytische Graphiken ebenso wie originale Notentexte. Online abrufbare Hörbeispiele verdeutlichen, wie sich unterschiedliche analytische Interpretationen auf musikalische Aufführungen auswirken können. Glossar und Register schließlich erleichtern vertiefte Lektüren entlang gezielter Fragestellungen. Ein grundlegendes Studienbuch, das Musiktheoretiker:innen wie Interpret:innen zahlreiche Möglichkeiten aufzeigt, sich von Schenkers Denken anregen zu lassen.

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.

Milton Babbitt (1916-2011) was, at once, one of the century's foremost composers and a founder of American music theory. These two aspects of his creative life--"thinking in" and "thinking about" music, as he would put it--nourished each other. Theory and analysis inspired fresh compositional ideas, and compositional concerns focused theoretical and analytical inquiry. Accordingly, this book undertakes an excavation of the sources of his theorizing as a guide to analysis of his music. In Thinking In and About Music, author Zachary Bernstein shows how Babbitt's idiosyncratic synthesis of ideas from Heinrich Schenker, analytic philosophy, and cognitive science--at least as much as more obviously relevant predecessors such as Arnold Schoenberg--provide insight into his aesthetics and compositional technique. At the same time, a close look at his music reveals a host of concerns unaccounted for in his theories, some of which seem to directly contradict theoretical expectations. Bernstein argues, therefore, that new analytical models are needed to complement those suggested by Babbitt's theories. Departing from the serial logic of most previous work on the subject--and in an attempt to discuss Babbitt's music as it is actually heard rather than just deciphered--the book brings to bear theories of gesture and embodiment, rhetoric, text setting, and temporality. The result is a richly multi-faceted look at one of the twentieth century's most fascinating musical minds.

Music and Transcendence explores the ways in which music relates to transcendence by bringing together the disciplines of musicology, philosophy and theology, thereby uncovering congruencies between them that have often been obscured. Music has the capacity to take one outside of oneself and place one in relation to that which is ’other’. This ’other’ can be conceived in an ’absolute’ sense, insofar as music can be thought to place the self in relation to a divine ’other’ beyond the human frame of existence. However, the ’other’ can equally well be conceived in an ’immanent’ (or secular) sense, as music is a human activity that relates to other cultural practices. Music here places the self in relation to other people and to the world more generally, shaping how the world is understood, without any reference to a God or gods. The book examines how music has not only played a significant role in many philosophical and theological accounts of the nature of existence and the self, but also provides a valuable resource for the creation of meaning on a day-to-day basis.

The first book to be devoted to the music of Stravinsky's last compositional period.

The Fourth International Schenkerian Symposium took place at Mannes College of Music during March of 2006, a year that marked the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Harmonielehre and, in a very real sense, the beginning of the Schenkerian enterprise. The essays in this volume are organized into three categories--analytical, theoretical, and historical. Among the analytical essays is Carl Schachter's brilliant discussion of large-scale connections in the opening scenes of Don Giovanni. The theoretical section includes a comparison of two perspectives on sonata form by Allen Cadwallader and Warren Darcy. In the historical section, Robert Wason details the publication history of Harmonielehre and the checkered career of its translation into English. Like the previous volume published by Olms Verlag, this collection gives testimony to the ongoing exploration of Schenker's ideas by American and European scholars.