Becoming Heinrich Schenker: Music Theory and Ideology by Robert P. Morgan (review)

‘Music and Music’s laws lay hid in night; God said, Let Schenker be! and all was light.’ No one at all familiar with the writings and opinions of Heinrich Schenker—the eightieth anniversary of whose death (13 January) as well as the posthumous publication of his final theoretical text, Der freie Satz, falls in 2015—would be much surprised were such a self-penned reworking of Alexander Pope’s epitaph for Isaac Newton to be found among his unpublished papers. The thought is prompted by Robert P. Morgan’s comparison, towards the end of this book, of the scientist and the music theorist, though Morgan is quick to point out that ‘Schenker’s musical universe did not, like Newton’s physical one, achieve instantaneous equilibrium, nor did it then maintain a perpetual steady state’ (p. 224).

The comparison arises within a discussion of the ‘scientific orientation’ of Schenker’s work, part of the concluding chapter of the volume. This, together with a ‘critical assessment’ of Schenker’s ‘final theory’ and a similar assessment of his ideology, makes up Part III (‘Reconsideration’: pp. 183–229). The book begins with an Introduction and an ‘overview of Schenker’s mature theory’ (Part I: ‘Theory’, pp. 3–37 at p. 14) and proceeds (Part II: ‘Development’, pp. 41–180) to a chapter-by-chapter exposition of the publications through which his development as a music theorist can be charted: the 1895 essay ‘Der Geist der musikalischen Technik’; Harmonielehre (published in 1906 without the definite article that Morgan’s chapter heading erroneously supplies); the two chronologically separated volumes of Kontrapunkt; the ‘monographs’, from the early study (1903) of C. P. E. Bach through to the Erläuterungsausgabe of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in A, Op. 101 (1921); then Der Tonwille and Das Meisterwerk in der Musik, and finally back to Der freie Satz. Extensive quotation from Schenker’s writings is conspicuous in these and the chapters of the flanking parts (the German-language original texts are collected together on pp. 230–63), and several graphs are reproduced, in whole or in part, along with other music examples.

One celebrated disequilibrium in the Schenkerian universe, to pursue Morgan’s Newtonian analogy, is introduced in the 1895 ‘Geist’ essay. It is now over thirty years ago that William Pastille brought this text to general notice and thereby exposed Schenker’s renunciation, at that point in his career, of the possibility of ‘scientific’ (Morgan’s term) organicism in music: the very attribute or quality that so prominently characterizes his later work and mature theory. The organicism demonstrated by some music is not ‘scientific’ but ‘artificial’; music, as a human rather than a natural creation, has devised means to feign organicism. Pastille, Alan Keiler, and Kevin Korsyn are among those scholars who have entered the fray in the attempt to account for the apparent volte-face in Schenker’s thinking between ‘Geist’ and Harmonielehre; and Morgan subjects their efforts, which appeared in 1984, 1989, and 1993 respectively, to a brief critique (pp. 46–54) as a prelude to his own assertion that, far from falling on one side or the other of an oppositional idealist/empiricist account of organicism in music, the argument promoted in ‘Geist’ draws from and maintains elements of both traditions.

This is crucial, for it allows Morgan to maintain that ‘Schenker’s development did not contain a serious “discontinuity”, but on the contrary “Geist’s” idealism and empiricism both remained prominent throughout his theoretical career. Even more important, the article’s ambivalence toward scientific organicism actually formed a crucial moment in his overall development’ (p. 57). Similarly, in the concluding pages of the book, Morgan stresses that Schenker’s solution to the problem that the laws of music are in the last analysis not like those of the Newtonian universe was achieved by ‘complementing his theory’s empiricism with an idealistic superstructure …, for this allowed him to...