Customer Reviews

Topical Guide to Schenkerian Literature: An Annotated Bibliography With Indices (Harmonologia)

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This is the largest Schenkerian reference work ever published. At nearly 600 pages, it contains 3600 entries (2200 principal, 1400 secondary) representing the work of 1475 authors. It is organized according to a wide variety of topics. Fifteen broad groupings encompass seventy topical headings, many of which are divided and subdivided again, resulting in a total of 271 headings under which entries are collected. Composer and author indices further facilitate finding sources.

"The advantage of this organizational system is twofold. First, it obviously facilitates finding sources appropriate to the investigation at hand. Second, because of the topical hierarchies employed, whereby one can first find a broader heading and then gradually narrow the focus to a unit of perhaps very few entries (or do the reverse: expand from a specific to a more general focus), this bibliography is conducive to what I hold to be an indispensable component of the research process: browsing. As an analogy, consider the serendipitous discoveries many scholars have made due to their libraries' topical classification schemes. That is, while searching the stacks for a particular book, one often finds another book-previously unknown, but with a similar call number and thus only a few inches away-that is perhaps more useful than the book originally sought. I have attempted to replicate that beneficial experience, as much as possible, by organizing this bibliography not chronologically nor alphabetically, but principally by nested topical headings . . ." (p. 1).

More detailed information is available online at the author's website (search via Google, etc.); it includes Web and PDF brochures. There are also comments about the book contributed by the noted Schenkerian scholars John Rothgeb and Hedi Siegel.

Berry's exhaustive bibliography is a great resource for students and scholars focusing on Schenkerian theory. The work is pragmatically organized in a fairly easy to find manner. My only complaint is that it was not published sooner, so I could have utilized it while writing my master's thesis.