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The Politics of the Urlinie in Schenker's Der Tonwille and Der freie Satz

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Suzannah Clark
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Type
Review Article
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Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 132 , Issue 1 , 2007 , pp. 141 - 164
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2007

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References

1 Joseph Lubben, who translated the essay ‘Haydn: Austrian National Anthem’, also provides the Latin translations in a footnote (Der Tonwille, 10, p. 136, note 3) to Schenker's statement cited above: ‘justness is the fundamental principle of (imperial) rule’ and ‘justness is the fundamental principle of art’. Lubben clarifies that the ‘rule’ is an ‘imperial’ one, which is a crucial detail in Schenker's political persuasion. A word of explanation is needed here on how references to the translation of Der Tonwille will be made in this article. Schenker's Der Tonwille consisted of ten issues, with issues 8–9 published as a double issue. The translation edited by Drabkin is divided into two volumes, containing issues 1–5, dating from 1921–3, and 6–10, from 1923–4, respectively. The subtitle of Drabkin's second volume, given above, is slightly different from that of the first, reflecting Schenker's renegotiation with his press, Universal Edition, to issue Der Tonwille quarterly from issue 7 onwards. References in this article will be to the issue number, followed by the page number(s) in the translation. William Drabkin and Ian Bent wrote a ‘General Preface’ to each volume, and references to these will be indicated by ‘General Preface I’ or ‘General Preface II’.Google Scholar

2 For a detailed discussion of the elements that constituted the ‘synthesis’ of Haydn's Austrian anthem, see Lubben, Joseph, ‘Schenker the Progressive: Analytic Practice in Der Tonwille’, Music Theory Spectrum, 15 (1993), 59–75 (pp. 70–4).Google Scholar

3 Bent and Drabkin provide a fascinating account in ‘General Preface I’, p. viii, of Schenker's intended content for each issue and the interventions of his editor, which disrupted the coherence of Schenker's plans.Google Scholar

4 For an excellent example of such a study (which examines how Schenker's ideology influenced the shape of the Ursatz) see Richard Littlefield and David Neumeyer, ‘Rewriting Schenker: Narrative – History – Ideology’, Music Theory Spectrum, 14 (1992), 38–65.Google Scholar

5 Lubben, ‘Schenker the Progressive’, 63.Google Scholar

6 See esp. ibid., 60–1. Indeed, Schenker undoubtedly concentrated in Der freie Satz on harmonic-contrapuntal features over motivic-thematic ones on grounds that reflect his political agenda: ‘If a theorist like Riemann cannot follow the aristocratic urge of genius to bind great unities, to present far-reaching compilations of chords from a single point of view, then, whether he wants to or not, … he must, in good democratic fashion, break up the whole, the large form, splinter the connections, and hear innumerable harmonies where only passing motions rule’ (Der Tonwille, 2, p. 92).Google Scholar

7 Lubben, ‘Schenker the Progressive’, 75.Google Scholar

8 See Pastille, William, ‘The Development of the Ursatz in Schenker's Published Works’, Trends in Schenkerian Research, ed. Allan Cadwallader (New York, 1990), 29–36.Google Scholar

9 Schenker had explained the significance of the size of print in the essay on Haydn's Sonata in E♭ major, Hob. XVI:52, in Der Tonwille, 3, p. 100. This is also the essay and issue in which Schenker first used the hat (⁁) symbol above numbers to denote scale degrees.Google Scholar

10 The principle is introduced and explained in detail in Brown, Explaining Tonality, 41–56, but its impact on Schenkerian theory is explored throughout his book. The relevant passage from Schenker's Harmonielehre is cited on p. 41.Google Scholar

11 Schenker, Free Composition, ed. and trans. Ernst Oster (New York, 1979), §3, p. 11.Google Scholar

12 This fact may have prompted Drabkin's policy of leaving the word ‘Urlinie’ in German. Its traditional translation is ‘fundamental line’; Schenker certainly thought there was something ‘fundamental’ about the lines in these graphs (after all, he used the prefix ‘Ur-‘), but the association of the English term with what it signifies in Der freie Satz may have made its use here appear more like an interpretation than a translation of the term.Google Scholar

13 Mention of the background and final realization of Mendelssohn's piece are made in Schenker, Der Tonwille, 10, pp. 150–1, and of Schumann's piece on pp. 156–7.Google Scholar

14 Compare Schenker, Der Tonwille, 8–9, p. 117, and Free Composition, ed. and trans. Oster, 12–13.Google Scholar

15 In Der freie -line' and ‘fifth progression’ are terms that denote separate things: although a-line naturally consists of a fifth progression, the latter term is reserved for lower-level progressions. This distinction is irrelevant in Der Tonwille, as there are multiple Urlinien in a piece there; however, as in Der freie Satz, fifth progressions do not need to start on .Google Scholar

16 Compare the graphs of Mozart's sonata K. 545 in Schenker, Der Tonwille, 4, p. 157, and in Free Composition, ed. and trans. Oster, Fig. 47.1. Schenker's comment about the Little Prelude is in Der Tonwille, 5, p. 180.Google Scholar

17 The same scenario crops up yet again in the first movement of Beethoven's Sonata in F major, op. 49 no. 2 (see bars 9–17). Der Tonwille, 4, pp. 158–9.Google Scholar

18 Schenker described this movement as ‘altogether one of the most individual and intense pieces in the entire musical literature’ (Der Tonwille, 2, p. 61). He was referring not only to its unusual form (it contains a ‘sort of trio in A major with the character of a musette’ for its middle section) but also to these bursts of Urlinien that strive for the complete fifth-progression, matching the breathlessness of the music; fittingly, Schenker speaks of the partial Urlinien as inhalations.Google Scholar

19 See my ‘Schubert, Theory and Analysis’, Music Analysis, 21 (2002), 209–43. The bibliography on this is huge; two important examples are Harald Krebs, ‘The Background Level in Some Tonally Deviating Works of Franz Schubert’, In Theory Only, 8 (1985), 5–18, and David Beach, ‘Schubert's Experiments with Sonata Form: Formal-Tonal Design versus Underlying Structure’, Music Theory Spectrum, 15 (1993), 1–18. Although not Schenkerian in perspective, the phenomenon is akin to Edward T. Cone's notion of the ‘promissory note’ in ‘Schubert's Promissory Note: An Exercise in Musical Hermeneutics’, 19th-Century Music, 5 (1981–2), 233–41.Google Scholar

20 It is probably the look of the Ursatz in the Bach essay rather than the conception of it that led William Pastille to identify the Bach essay as the first appearance of the Ursatz.Google Scholar

21 See Lubben's footnotes in Schenker, Der Tonwille, 4, p. 146, note 2, and ibid., 10, p. 156, note 1. The translation of Der Tonwille was divided between Bent, Drabkin, Joseph Dubiel, Timothy Jackson, Lubben and Robert Snarrenberg. One of the great assets of their translations is that they also added commentaries to some of Schenker's points in the footnotes. Brief though these necessarily are, their insights, cross-references to Schenker's other work and references to Schenker's unpublished papers are invaluable and are testimony to the depth of research that accompanied the (already difficult) task of translation.Google Scholar

22 I am not including in this discussion the use of in -lines, as obviously the seventh degree of the scale is present in such cases.Google Scholar

23 Schenker hints at the same interpretation in an earlier essay (on Haydn's Sonata in E♭ major, Hob. XVI:52, Der Tonwille, 3, p. 103) and says there that a detailed explanation of this phenomenon is forthcoming in Der freie Satz. See also the comment by Robert Snarrenberg (the translator of this essay), ibid., note 13, for emendations in Schenker's own copy of Der Tonwille: in bars 35–9, Schenker apparently erased a parenthesis around , but shifted the and clarified in the margin that it was an elaboration of .Google Scholar

24 See, for example, the first and third movements of Haydn's Sonata in E♭ major, Hob. XVI: 52, in Der Tonwille, 3, pp. 100, 109.Google Scholar

25 Schenker's career was dominated by his espousal of the idea that musical genius is a gift from nature, a gift in the rudimentary form of the fifth and major triad, from which the artist develops tonality. For an explanation of the process, see my ‘Schenker's Mysterious Five’, 19th-Century Music, 23 (1999–2000), 84–102.Google Scholar

26 In Der freie Satz, composing-out takes place precisely through transformations of an upper-level dissonance into lower-level consonant tonicizations. These occur through the transformation of the quality of a pitch, not by changing the pitch itself.Google Scholar

27 Schenker distinctly prefers to see incomplete structures as ending in the tonic; see Der freie Satz, §§244–5. However, the Bach Little Prelude resurfaces as Fig. 152.6 in §307, a section on undivided form, and not as a model for incomplete structures.Google Scholar

28 Brown provides an excellent definition of Schenker's concept of prototype in Explaining Tonality, 72–6.Google Scholar

29 Schenker, Der Tonwille, 4, p. 156, and Free Composition, ed. and trans. Oster, Fig. 47.1.Google Scholar

30 See, however, John Snyder, ‘Schenker and the First Movement of Mozart's Sonata, K.545: An Uninterrupted Sonata-Form Movement?‘, Theory and Practice, 16 (1991), 51–78, who attempts to make it deep middleground.Google Scholar

31 A good model, which however would have to be applied writ large instead of on the phrase level, is Robert P. Morgan, ‘Symmetrical Form and Common-Practice Tonality’, Music Theory Spectrum, 20 (1998), 1–47 (p. 29).Google Scholar

32 Brown acknowledges Schenker's unfavourable view of Debussy on p. 171, citing a passage from Der Tonwille's sister project, Das Meisterwerk in der Musik, 3 vols., trans. Ian Bent et al., ed. William Drabkin (Cambridge, 1994–7).Google Scholar

33 This feature was the subject of an earlier joint study by Matthew Brown, Douglas J. Dempster and Dave Headlam, ‘The #IV(♭V) Hypothesis: Testing the Limits of Schenker's Theory of Tonality’, Music Theory Spectrum, 19 (1997), 155–83.Google Scholar