PAL Topic Guides

Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935) is recognized today as the most important music theorist of the twentieth century. Schenker wrote a number of major theoretical works in which he provided insight into literally hundreds of pieces of music. Since Schenker's theories are closely tied to the interpretation and performance of music, his ideas are receiving ever-widening attention from performers as well as scholars. Clearly organized, meticulously researched, and carefully annotated, the Index makes it possible to ascertain quickly if Schenker wrote about a certain piece and where the analysis may be found. Also, each entry includes precise measure number references as well as a short description of each subsequent discussion of that analysis. Thus, for the first time, musicians will be able to locate Schenker's analyses quickly and efficiently. Scholars and performers will find this reference work an invaluable aid in their research, writing, and teaching.

Advanced Schenkerian Analysis: Perspectives on Phrase Rhythm, Motive, and Form is a textbook for students with some background in Schenkerian theory. It begins with an overview of Schenker's theories, then progresses systematically from the phrase and their various combinations to longer and more complex works. Unlike other texts on this subject, Advanced Schenkerian Analysis combines the study of multi-level pitch organization with that of phrase rhythm (the interaction of phrase and hypermeter), motivic repetition at different structural levels, and form. It also contains analytic graphs of several extended movements, separate works, and songs. A separate Instructor's Manual provides additional advice and solutions (graphs) of all recommended assignments.

The book begins with a thorough coverage of a number of elementary matters. This may be regarded either as a review or as a reorientation in preparation for the systematic presentation that follows.Beginning in Part Two ideas that are more specifically Schenkerian are developed and applied to the analysis of short compositions. Since the book is also intended to cover all of the basic standard form it has seemed logical to use this feature in organizing the material. Thus, Part Two ends with longer forms and Part Three covers the main large forms (sonata, rondo, and so on). The various types of Schenkerian prolongations are introduced gradually and discussed and illustrated thoroughly in the text.Each chapter ends with a set of exercises keyed to the topics that have been presented, and the student is given precise instructions for completing the exercises as well as occasional hints about pitfalls and special problems that they contain.

To the growing list of Pendragon Press publications devoted to the work of Heinrich Schenker, we wish to announce the addition of this much-needed bibliography. The author, a student of Allen Forte, has created a work useful to a wide range of researchers music theorists, musicologists, music librarians and teachers. The Guide 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. 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.

Heinrich Schenker's theoretical and analytical works claim to resubstantiate the unique artistic presence of the canonic work, and thus reject those musical disciplines such as psychoacoustics and systematic musicology which derive from the natural sciences. In this respect his writing reflects the counter-positivism endemic to the German academic discourse of the first decades of the twentieth century. The rhetoric of this stance, however, conceals a sophisticated programme wherein Schenker situates his project in relation to these sciences, arguing his reading of the musical text as a synthesis of a descriptive psychology and an explanatory historiography (which itself embeds both paleographic and philological assumptions). This book rereads Schenker's project as an attempt to reconstruct music theory as a discipline against the background of the empirical musical sciences of the later nineteenth century.

Schenker's Interpretive Practice is the first comprehensive study of this century's most influential music theorist, Heinrich Schenker. Since the 1960s, American theorists and musicologists have focused almost exclusively on analytical methods distilled from Schenker's writings. Breaking from that tradition, Robert Snarrenberg returns to Schenker's texts and to the humanist roots of his approach, situating Schenker's work in the broader context of his desire to portray the richness and particularity of musical experience. Snarrenberg concentrates on four aims that Schenker hoped to achieve: to present a theoretical account of musical effects encountered in European music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to represent the mindset shared among composers of that music, to convey the expressive interaction of musical effects in individual artwork, and to promote continued creative and re-creative participation in the musical tradition. Author recipient of the 1998 Young Scholar Award from the Society of Music Theory.

The second volume of studies based on the work of Heinrich Schenker, now recognised as the twenty-first century's most influential figure in the areas of music theory and analysis. The first section of the book contains three archival studies that derive from the contents of Schenker's Nachlass, recently made available to scholars. Schenker's unpublished papers also supplement several of the analytical studies in the second, larger section of the book. Eleven essays fall into four groups: studies in the Classic and Romantic repertory, studies in twentieth-century music, rhythmic studies and studies in the theory of Schenker's fundamental analytical constructs, the Urline and the Ursatz.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A defense of Schenkerian analysis of tonality in music.A wide range of music -- from Bach to Mozart and Brahms -- is marked by its use of some form of what is generally called "tonality": the tendency of music to focus melodically on some stable pitch or tonic and for its harmony to use functional triads. Yet few terms in music theory are more enigmatic than that seemingly simple word "tonality." Matthew Brown's Explaining Tonality: Schenkerian Theory and Beyond considers a number of disparate ways in which functional tonality has been understood. In particular, it focuses on the comprehensive theory developed by Heinrich Schenker in his monumental three-part treatise Neue musikalische Theorien und Phantasien [1906-1935]. Schenker systematically investigated the ways in which lines and chords behave both locally within individual tonal phrases and globally across entire compositions. Explaining Tonality shows why Schenker was able to elucidate tonal relationships so successfully and the many advantages that his explanations have over those of his rivals. In addition, it proposes some ways in which Schenker's approach can be extended to tonal features in works from before Bach [such as Monteverdi] and after Brahms [such as Debussy, Stravinsky, and much popular music of today]. Along the way, the book explores six methodological criteria that help in building, testing, and evaluatinga plausible theory of tonality or, indeed, any other musical phenomenon: accuracy, scope, fruitfulness, consistency, simplicity, and coherence. It reveals how understanding the tonality of a piece can shed light on other aspects of musical composition. And, in conclusion, it describes some ways in which Schenkerian theory might fruitfully develop in the future. Matthew Brown is Professor of Music Theory at the Eastman School of Music, Universityof Rochester, and author of Debussy's "Ibéria" [Oxford University Press].