A Topical Guide to Schenkerian Literature: An Annotated Bibliography with Indices (review)

Schenker studies are very much alive and well. The publication of Der freie Satz, the most important treatise since Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's Versuch, in English translation in 1979 had been hoped at the time to provide a kind of closure by making Schenkerian theory a household item in North America and England; it seems, by contrast, to have laid the course for a steady stream of analysis and enquiry. And now that Schenker's Nachlass is available for consultation, at the New York Public Library (Oster Collection) and at the University of California at Riverside (Oswald Jonas collection), the stream has become a torrent, fuelled as much by historical musicologists as card-carrying theorists.

Back in the late 1970s, Pendragon Press inaugurated their studies in music theory with an index to analyses in the published works of Schenker. Now, a quarter-century later, they have brought out an elaborate—one could say gargantuan—bibliography of writings about Schenker: David Carson Berry's A Topical Guide to Schenkerian Literature dwarfs all previous bibliographies, including David Beach's long-serving decennial series for the Journal of Music Theory and numerous other lists of selected readings in the field. Berry has catalogued over 2,000 books, master's and doctoral dissertations, book chapters, and journal articles by subject matter, together with reviews, responses, and related studies. Also included are reprints and translations, and some editions of music.

The organization of the bibliography is complex, and it is best to read the prefatory explanation before searching for entries. There are fourteen principal categories, or 'divisions', of writing, and these are organized hierarchically—how appropriate!—into sub-categories, and smaller units, by the basic outlining system of roman and arabic numbers alternating with letters. The simplest of divisions is XIII, for essays by diverse authors brought together in a single publication. It consists simply of two subdivisions:

XIII.

Anthologies (Essay Collections) [9]

Special Journal Issues [9 + 3]

where the numbers in square brackets give the number of principal and related items in each. The system reveals itself to be at its most complex in the area of melodic and harmonic events, which are fine-tuned to the seven roman-number harmonies, thus:

IV.

...

e. Regarding Chord Types/Harmonic events

...

iii. Chords upon Various Scale Degrees

Users wishing to find out what had been said about mediant harmonies in a Schenkerian context will be referred to IV.e.iii./♯III. (From this, one can see that Berry does not lack a sense of humour; he also has a sense of the artistic, in his use of size-coded wingdings to divide the main list of entries.) There is an elaborate 'see also' and cross-referencing system, ensuring that the reader will pick up writings that cover more than one field and those that are only partly concerned with Schenkerian approaches. All of this works extremely well; all that is lacking is a headline name for each of the major divisions.

There are three appendices: an index to partial translations of essays in Der Tonwille, a series of small booklets that Schenker brought out between 1921 and 1924; a list of composers whose works are analysed in some depth in one of the main entries; and, of course, a list of authors and the location of their writings within the bibliography. The first of these indexes is no longer of great importance, as the whole of Der Tonwille has recently appeared in a reliable, well-annotated English translation. The second will be of great value for scholars undertaking research into minor composers, for whom there may be only a handful of entries; but those who want to see what has been said in Schenkerian terms about, say, a particular Beethoven sonata or symphony...