Customer Reviews

Schenker's Interpretive Practice (Cambridge Studies in Music Theory and Analysis)

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This book won its author a prestigious award from the premier scholarly organization for music theory in the United States, and the award was fully deserved. The book offers a very enlightening approach to Schenker's work, one that includes both considerable technical detail and a great deal of fascinating intellectual and musical background. Any student of Schenker will find valuable insights in the book to supplement the analytical training that is the more usual focus of work with Schenkerian theory.

An extremely bad misrepresentation of Schenker and his work. In the first place the author uses only his own translations in the text, and very many of them are mistranslations of a more or less serious nature. For example, he mistranslates the verb "besteht [in]" (consists in) as "gets its start in"; this mistranslation has fateful consequences for his reading (misreading) of Schenker's interpretive practice. (There are literally scores of translation mistakes, some of them involving the most elementary German.) The author's attempts to portray Schenker's thought process in analyzing music are ludicrous, the work of a person who entirely lacks the requisite training for such an endeavor, and has no conception of who Schenker was and how he thought about music.