Schenker's Argument and the Claims of Music Theory (Cambridge Studies in Music Theory and Analysis, Series Number 9)

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. Heinrich Schenker's theoretical and analytical method occupies a central (and often troubling) position in modern Anglo-American musical studies. His writings claim to resubstantiate the unique artistic presence of the canonic work, and reject those disciplines, such as psychoacoustics and systematic musicology, which derive from the natural sciences. This book rereads Schenker's project as an attempt to reconstruct music theory as a discipline against the background of the new empirical musical sciences of the later nineteenth century, such as the psychological and historical investigations of music. This series is designed for those absorbed by the theoretical and intellectual issues of music, whether as historians of ideas, as practical analysts, or as theoreticians. Schenker moves most decisively in the preface to Harmony (1906) to differentiate his work from that of his contemporaries. Leslie David Blasius. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 136-145) And Indexes.

this Book Provides A Reassessment Of The Work Of Heinrich Schenker.