Customer Reviews

Analysis of Tonal Music: A Schenkerian Approach

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This text is intended for graduate students in music (and perhaps for advanced undergraduates as well). It replaces Allen Forte and Steven Gilbert's Schenker text of ca. 1979 as an authoritative introduction to the themes and tools of Schenker's way of looking at the music of the Western Classical tradition. Long considered a "secret code" impenetrable to outsiders, Schenkerian analysis has at last been accepted as defining the mainstream of music theory in this country, thanks to the widespread availability since the '80s of English translations of his most important books, _Harmonielehre_, _Kontrapunkte_, the _Five Graphic Analyses_, and Schenker's late summary of his techniques and theories, _Der Freie Satz_. Cadwallader and Gagne succeed where Forte and Gilbert failed to find a clear, uncluttered style of presentation and a tone that is suited to the level of preparation one is likely to find among the target student population. A good test of this boo! k's success is that it is _almost_ usable by students with little or no prior specialized background; it succeeds to a remarkable degree in making Schenkerian theory a tool for musicians at large, rather than for specialists. A glossary of specialized terms would have been useful, as well as more extensive treatment of certain topics such as mixture about which Schenker had quite idiosyncratic ideas, but all in all this is a teacher-friendly, student-friendly contribution to the study of music theory which should be known to everyone in the discipline.

I agree whole hearted with Perry's review, but give this book 5 Stars as it really is the best introduction to this subject. The book is clear and well laid out but it could benefit with more details on larger forms and completed analyses. That being said you should be able to tackle Schenker's books and analyse, and get into Salzer's Structrual Hearing and Forte's work after completing this book.

I honest felt I had a better understanding of music form and structure after using this book, and this of course is the point of Schenkarian Analysis, it's not just a thoery, it is supposed to be useful in understanding musical form and structure; which is easily forgotten with other books on the subject.

This is a widely used text and the authors certainly are recognized authorities in the field. The overall content is broad and appropriate, however, the text is very disorganized and poorly written. There is no sense of coherent progression of concepts and the authors frequently include extraneous information which is distracting. The approach attempts to break down the various aspects of Schenkerian Analysis by separately discussing bass lines, melodic structures, formal design, etc. but it is very unclear as to the relationships of the various aspects and is inconsistent in it's own use of the analytical language. The sequencing of the text makes it difficult to glean a holistic understanding of the method. In a graduate course I took recently, the professor spent large portions of class just answering questions about places we were confused by the text. A lot of students just took lecture notes and stopped reading the text all together.