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    The Masterwork in Music: Volume III, 1930
    The Masterwork in Music: Volume III, 1930
    The Masterwork in Music: Volume III, 1930
    Ebook289 pages3 hours

    The Masterwork in Music: Volume III, 1930

    By Heinrich Schenker

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    About this ebook

    The three volumes of The Masterwork in Music present complete English translations of major works by Austrian music theorist Heinrich Schenker, one of the twentieth century's leading figures in the field. First published in German between 1925 and 1930, these essays represent Schenker's greatest writings in analysis prior to the 1935 definitive formulation of his theory of music in Der freie Satz (Free Composition). This new publication of the long-awaited English translation, which first appeared in the distinguished Cambridge University Press edition, provides a valuable resource for scholars. Editorial annotations and elucidations by Dr. William Drabkin and his translators offer additional insights.
    This volume comprises the eminent Austrian theorist's main writings from the mid-1920s to 1930. In addition to essays on music theory in cultural context, the book is dominated by one of Schenker's most celebrated studies of a single work: the analysis of Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony, which discusses all four movements in painstaking detail. Volume One includes analyses of keyboard works by Bach, Scarlatti, Chopin, Beethoven, and Handel and solo violin music by Bach, along with studies of other works. Volume Two contains a major essay on Mozart's Symphony No. 40 in G minor and shorter studies of works by Bach, Haydn, and Reger.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDover Publications
    Release dateOct 13, 2014
    ISBN9780486799377
    The Masterwork in Music: Volume III, 1930

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      Book preview

      The Masterwork in Music - Heinrich Schenker

      1930

      1

      RAMEAU OR BEETHOVEN? CREEPING PARALYSIS¹ OR SPIRITUAL POTENCY IN MUSIC?

      RAMEAU ODER BEETHOVEN? ERSTARRUNG ODER GEISTIGES LEBEN IN DER MUSIK? { 11-24}

      TRANSLATED BY

      IAN BENT

      ‘You may state publicly that my principles, and those of my late father, are antithetical to Rameau’s.’

      C.P. E. Bach, in a letter to Kirnberger quoted in

      Kirnberger’s Art of Strict Counterpoint, II, 3, P. 188.²

      The histories of music all draw attention to Rameau’s Treatise on Harmony of 1722,³ extolling it as a major contribution to the field of music theory. They proclaim the new doctrine of fundamental bass and the inversions of a chord, of chordal construction in thirds and harmonic relations among those chords, as contained, virtually full-grown, in its pages.

      What no music historian — or theorist, for that matter — has yet realized however is that even while J. S. Bach and Handel were still living, and before Mozart and Beethoven were even born, with this doctrine the seeds of death had already been sown in [music] theory, and indirectly also in music composition!

      triad as the most natural arrangement of the vertical axis, the slavishly mechanical exploitation of this law threatened the very survival of the horizontal: while such a triadic technique of composition was not detrimental so long as the horizontal remained moderate in scale and involved only diminution of utmost simplicity (even today it is still viable under like circumstances), on the other hand the overemphasis of the vertical hampers both the composer, when creating horizontal structures on a larger scale, and the listener, in grasping connections over greater distances. Because of this, in any attempt to expand the horizontal axis, the extra thrust of the vertical was bound to feel overpowering; and however often composers sought to overcome this effect by using as the subject {12} of contrapuntal writing songs, sacred or secular in spirit, that at least were familiar to the ordinary people, there was still no way of eliminating that fundamental error.⁴

      Next came monody, and this, while adhering to the contrapuntal framework of composition, actually put the horizontal axis at an advantage over the vertical. Recognizing the horizontal’s role in composing out the fundamental chord, monody elevated that axis to sole carrier of an enhanced content, as also of the latter’s cohesiveness [Zusammenhang].⁵ This state of affairs monody could achieve only by assigning the bass its own composing-out of the fundamental chord (to be sure, one that corresponded to its special nature), i.e. arpeggiation through the upper fifth. This arpeggiation would then be filled out to greater or lesser extent with passing notes, as if the bass were just another species of the horizontal: a second treble beneath the real treble, so to

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