Schenkerian Analysis - Legacy and Responses

Legacy and Responses

In the academic generations after Schenker, other music theorists have both added to and disseminated Schenker's ideas. In the second generation (Schenker himself being the first), the fierce philosophical opposition between Oswald Jonas and Felix Salzer set the stage for a conservative–liberal split among Schenkerians that persists to this day. Jonas, a traditional disciple who was more strict about the theory than Schenker himself, promoted the viewpoint that the analysis belonged only in the realm of triadic tonal music. This camp is generally responsible for the codification and clarification of the theory's principles, epitomized as the "New York" model by theorists such as Carl Schachter and recently Allen Cadwallader and David Gagne. Salzer, on the other hand, was the first Schenkerian to attempt to use elements of the theory to explain music that is not strictly tonal, an approach that has since engendered structural and linear analysis of early music as well as post-tonal music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Milton Babbitt admired Schenker's work and his own work may be seen as part response, revision, and alternative to Schenker's. For example, he suggests that the properties described as natural phenomena by Schenker be considered axioms and he also formulated a system to compose twelve-tone music that was "equally intricate and fruitful." Allen Forte also responded to Schenker by providing an alternative system applicable to the analysis of nontonal nontwelve tone music. (ibid, p. 162–163)

Hampered by limited availability in and after the war years, by the 1960s Schenkerian analysis had begun to attract renewed interest, and by the 1980s it had become one of the main analytical methods used by many North American music theorists. While Schenker's theories have been increasingly challenged since the mid-century for their rigidity and organicist ideology, the wider analytical tradition that they inspired has remained central to the study of tonal music in North America.

Fred Maus (2004, p. 162) compares Schenker's "creation of an elaborate tonal theory in response to post-tonal music" with "sexologists' back-formation of the concept of heterosexuality as a complement to their new concept of homosexuality." Finding similarities, "to some extent" including the "conceptualization of the normative or unmarked category" following "awareness of an alternative." Schenker considered nontonal or atonal music unnatural.

For more on issues pertaining to the dissemination of Schenkerian thought in the U.S., see several essays by David Carson Berry, including:

• "The Role of Adele T. Katz in the Early Expansion of the New York 'Schenker School'". Current Musicology 74: 103–51. 2002.
• Berry, David Carson (2003). "Hans Weisse and the Dawn of American Schenkerism". Journal of Musicology 20 (1): 104–56. doi:10.1525/jm.2003.20.1.104.
• "Victor Vaughn Lytle and the Early Proselytism of Schenkerian Ideas in the U.S". Journal of Schenkerian Studies 1: 92–117. 2005.
• "Schenkerian Theory in the United States: A Review of Its Establishment and a Survey of Current Research Topics". Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie 2 (2–3): 101–37. 2005. http://www.gmth.de/zeitschrift/artikel/206.aspx.
• Eybl, Martin; Fink-Mennel, Evelyn, eds. (2006). "Hans Weisse (1892–1940)". Schenker-Traditionen: Eine Wiener Schule der Musiktheorie und ihre internationale Verbreitung . Vienna: Böhlau Verlag. pp. 91–103. ISBN 978-3-205-77494-5.