Customer Reviews

Five Graphic Music Analyses (Dover Books on Music)

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While the technique Heinrich Schenker used for analyzing tonal music is no longer as controversial as it once was, it is still a much more complex, and much more rewarding, way of looking at musical works than simple harmonic methods. It is much simpler to stick roman numerals to notate chords in their various inversions and think that the piece has yielded its mysteries. Not so. The great composers were also geniuses at their voice leading methods that not only provided delight on the surface, but also to the medium and long range structure of their works.

But what practical purpose does this type of analysis yield? It certainly can and should inform they way we play the pieces. For example, in the foreward he discusses how the Bach Chorale he analyzes unifies the piece despite a surface pause at the fermata. His analysis of the first prelude of Bach's "Well Tempered Clavier Book I" is full of wonderful insights that can enhance anyone's performance of the piece.

Felix Salzer, a student of Schenker, provides a short and interesting introduction as well as a glossary of the terms used (not the symbols). A word of warning, while this notation looks like musical notation gone mad, it is adapted from musical notation but does not mean the same thing as the notation you use to play a piece. You will also find much of this opaque without a solid grounding in counterpoint and harmony. The voice leading matters most here, but you do need to have some idea of functional harmony as well.

You can spend a great deal of time with these analyses even though they are only a page or a few pages long. The notation communicates a great deal in a small space and that is its power and beauty. However, it yields its bounty only after serious study. Once you get a handle on how it works, it is wonderfully informative.

It is not necessary to agree with everything Schenker says about a given piece. I have seen skilled analysts take different views and approaches. However, I have also seen people who originally took a different approach, after consideration, come back to Schenker's view.

Schenker's Five Graphic Music Analyses (Funf Urlinie-Tafel), is one of the most important sources of Heinrich Schenker's theories. Edited by Felix Salzer - one of Schenker's pupils - in 1932, this book is a very important aprroach to musical analysis, and a mandatory way to Schenkerian studies.