The Masterwork in Music: Volume III, 1930

Heinrich Schenker, William Drabkin, Ian Bent, Alfred Clayton, Derrick Puffett

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780486799377
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Classical Music

The three volumes of The Masterwork in Music present complete English translations of major works by Austrian music theorist Heinrich Schenker, one of the twentieth century's leading figures in the field. First published in German between 1925 and 1930, these essays represent Schenker's greatest writings in analysis prior to the 1935 definitive formulation of his theory of music in Der freie Satz (Free Composition). This new publication of the long-awaited English translation, which first appeared in the distinguished Cambridge University Press edition, provides a valuable resource for scholars. Editorial annotations and elucidations by Dr. William Drabkin and his translators offer additional insights.
This volume comprises the eminent Austrian theorist's main writings from the mid-1920s to 1930. In addition to essays on music theory in cultural context, the book is dominated by one of Schenker's most celebrated studies of a single work: the analysis of Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony, which discusses all four movements in painstaking detail. Volume One includes analyses of keyboard works by Bach, Scarlatti, Chopin, Beethoven, and Handel and solo violin music by Bach, along with studies of other works. Volume Two contains a major essay on Mozart's Symphony No. 40 in G minor and shorter studies of works by Bach, Haydn, and Reger.

1

RAMEAU OR BEETHOVEN? CREEPING PARALYSIS¹ OR SPIRITUAL POTENCY IN MUSIC?

RAMEAU ODER BEETHOVEN? ERSTARRUNG ODER GEISTIGES LEBEN IN DER MUSIK? { 11-24}

TRANSLATED BY

IAN BENT

‘You may state publicly that my principles, and those of my late father, are antithetical to Rameau’s.’

C.P. E. Bach, in a letter to Kirnberger quoted in

Kirnberger’s Art of Strict Counterpoint, II, 3, P. 188.²

The histories of music all draw attention to Rameau’s Treatise on Harmony of 1722,³ extolling it as a major contribution to the field of music theory. They proclaim the new doctrine of fundamental bass and the inversions of a chord, of chordal construction in thirds and harmonic relations among those chords, as contained, virtually full-grown, in its pages.

What no music historian — or theorist, for that matter — has yet realized however is that even while J. S. Bach and Handel were still living, and before Mozart and Beethoven were even born, with this doctrine the seeds of death had already been sown in [music] theory, and indirectly also in music composition!

From the moment counterpoint entered into music — a blessing bestowed upon the people of the Western world in preference to those of all ages — a tension between the horizontal and vertical axes has pervaded the history of musical composition. Progress though it certainly was when, after their first contrapuntal endeavours in organum, discant and fauxbourdon, composers advanced to the

triad as the most natural arrangement of the vertical axis, the slavishly mechanical exploitation of this law threatened the very survival of the horizontal: while such a triadic technique of composition was not detrimental so long as the horizontal remained moderate in scale and involved only diminution of utmost simplicity (even today it is still viable under like circumstances), on the other hand the overemphasis of the vertical hampers both the composer, when creating horizontal structures on a larger scale, and the listener, in grasping connections over greater distances. Because of this, in any attempt to expand the horizontal axis, the extra thrust of the vertical was bound to feel overpowering; and however often composers sought to overcome this effect by using as the subject {12} of contrapuntal writing songs, sacred or secular in spirit, that at least were familiar to the ordinary people, there was still no way of eliminating that fundamental error.⁴

Next came monody, and this, while adhering to the contrapuntal framework of composition, actually put the horizontal axis at an advantage over the vertical. Recognizing the horizontal’s role in composing out the fundamental chord, monody elevated that axis to sole carrier of an enhanced content, as also of the latter’s cohesiveness [Zusammenhang].⁵ This state of affairs monody could achieve only by assigning the bass its own composing-out of the fundamental chord (to be sure, one that corresponded to its special nature), i.e. arpeggiation through the upper fifth. This arpeggiation would then be filled out to greater or lesser extent with passing notes, as if the bass were just another species of the horizontal: a second treble beneath the real treble, so to speak.

Enter Rameau. In that he reduced all musical phenomena to fundamental basses and the progressions proper to them, Rameau detached what not even the layman can avoid seeing in front of his nose, namely the superimposition of notes, from the flux of horizontal voice-leading in which every superimposition has its origin. This represented a turning away not only from his forerunners and contemporaries, who clung to voice-leading even within figured-bass theory, but from the very essence of music itself.

Admittedly, Rameau knew too little of — may even have been wholly ignorant of — the expanses encompassed by the horizontal in the creations of J. S. Bach and Handel. Even so, enough of the monodic repertory must surely have been available to him to make him aware of the richer fluidity that the horizontal axis had by then attained, liberated as it was from the earlier triadic technique of the vertical; all the more so, since Rameau followed in the footsteps of monody [as a composer] himself.

Rameau, however, was oblivious to the fact that ‘voice’, which was in the beginning the embodiment of song, not to say the very concept of all music, in Nature and in art presents a succession, not a superimposition, of notes. As motion before all else, ‘voice’ exists only in the realm of time, not in the realm of the vertical. It is the temporal-horizontal axis of musical motion, therefore, however one may otherwise explain its laws, that alone generates musical content and guarantees the latter’s organic cohesiveness.

{13} Rameau was oblivious also to the not infrequent occurrence, in even the least advanced works of his day, of chord formations which, while appearing as

,

or such like when viewed vertically, nevertheless resisted reversion to primary forms and reduction to root-successions without violence being done to the inherent logic of the horizontal axis, i.e. against musical cohesiveness.

What is more, even granting the significance of fundamental basses on his terms, Rameau really ought to have asked himself the question: Why is it that if generation of content (i.e. diminutions and their cohesion) is solely a matter of the vertical axis and its cadences — why, if this is so, do not these selfsame cadences left to their own devices give rise to a perpetuum mobile, so to speak, thereby turning the content into a perpetuum mobile too?⁶ What is it that offers resistance to such a perpetuum mobile? Where does the impetus come from ever to bring a composition to a close? If not from the vertical and its cadences, then does it not perhaps come from form? But where does the latter come from? The vertical and its cadences? Or is it not much more likely that it comes from the horizontal, and from the impetus at work there, the impetus of the law of the passing note? Instead of giving primacy to the horizontal, as the composing-out of the fundamental chord that yields content, and subordinating to it as a mere counterpoint the vertical, with its first arpeggiation of the fundamental chord and the derivatives of that, Rameau right at the outset shunned the horizontal in favour of the vertical, which offered his more lacklustre French musical taste the enticing possibility of a cosier schematization. So it became Rameau’s sorry task in life to lure the musical ear away from voice-leading, instead of being the first to identify the latter and its laws.

His contemporaries pricked up their ears: something new — something new and French, what is more! Especially in Germany, where all things French held people in thrall, Rameau’s notions were adopted with alacrity. And this notwithstanding that Johann Sebastian and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach — one a master of the older, strict style, the other a master of the newer, so-called ‘galant’ style — had both disapproved of this doctrine (see the head of this article for a passage from a letter, quoted by Kirnberger).

In his biography of Bach (II, P.604), Spitta writes: ‘To what in particular his (J. S. Bach’s) dissenting opinion related we cannot with certainty tell; but we may reasonably assume it concerned the claims that Kirnberger himself disputed’.⁷ So a century and a half later a Spitta, whose great merits far be it from me to question, still cannot put his finger on the reasons for J. S. Bach’s rejection of Rameau. If only he had given the space necessary to his discussion of these reasons it would have been of inestimable value, for it concerned nothing less than an {14} assault by Rameau on the very essence of the art [of music], and a counter-attack against this assault by two men of genius, hence a confrontation between mediocrity [Mittelmass] and genius within music in general, here specifically between French mediocrity and German genius.⁸ (Schweitzer makes no mention of this issue in his biography of Bach; I have reason to doubt whether the logistics of condensing so much material is all that lies behind this.⁹) One has only to see the out-and-out Rameauification of the B minor Fugue from Book I [of the Well-tempered Clavier] by J. S. Bach, and the A minor Prelude from Book II, in Kirnberger’s The True Principles for Harmonic Practice (see pp.55ff and 107ff), to be persuaded of the impracticality of Rameau’s principles.¹⁰ J. S. Bach would never have thought up even four bars of the fugue or prelude concerned if he had had at the forefront of his mind — conscious or unconscious, it makes no difference — the principles of Rameau, stemming from the vertical axis, rather than the laws governing the horizontal axis. But what were those principles fit for, if they were of no service to the creative artist?

Shall I face a charge of political chauvinism if, in epitomizing Rameau’s theory, I start by portraying it as a typical piece of French ‘Enlightenment’? It stands alongside those many other examples of French ‘Enlightenment’ that issue from French mediocrity and first flow back into French mediocrity before inevitably polluting the mediocrity of other nations as well — is any place free from mediocrity? These examples are so emblematic of France’s limited capabilities that they account unaided for her aggressiveness and craving for conquest. Come to think of it, does not Rameau’s idea of inversion, which is surely the main prop of his theory, repeat itself by analogy, for example, in the ‘enlightenment’ of the so-called Great Revolution?¹¹ Lower shall become upper, and upper lower! shrieked France’s lower classes, fancying that human rights had first been discovered in France, and rejoicing that they were now the upper classes, without more ado. Just think how the lower classes, together with those shallow-minded dispensers of enlightenment the Encyclopedistes, imagined the course of human affairs, as simplemindedly as the cheapest of slogans, and always strictly in terms of that eternally French mediocrity! As if any guillotine could ever behead the spirit, especially the spirit of a genius! Whatever is born upper-class remains upper-class, conversely the lower classes remain forever in their place; and no matter how much murder and robbery man may commit against man in the attempt to overthrow this Nature-ordained hierarchy, it is all in vain. Genius is ordained by Nature — anyone who challenges it will have Nature to reckon with; yet it is ordained also by man, for without its leadership humanity would forfeit its very life.

Before the advent of Rameau, theory and practice had always been one and the same thing; both owed allegiance solely to voice-leading. This is not to say that {15} its laws could yet have been articulated in words, but rather only as a first glimmering of their application. Even the theory of thoroughbass had much in common with voice-leading; so strictly did it cling to this association, what is more, that it never once admitted the concept of inversion — for sound methodological reasons, it felt obliged not to admit it, could not bring itself to do so.

After Rameau, on the other hand, theory and practice go utterly their own separate ways! Mysteriously delivered from the womb of music, which luxuriates in its own abundance — root, stem, branch and fruit, all its own — there appear in Germany over the course of two centuries musical geniuses who, oblivious of the false theorems that beset them on every side, derive, from fundamental laws of music that are as yet completely unrecognized but are inbred within them, a stream of constantly new, ever bolder applications [of those laws] in linear progressions, diminutions and forms, so bringing music to a degree of unfolding never before dreamed of. All of a sudden, an art came of age, an art which, while dispensing with all guidance by way of the eye and the intellect, while creating solely out of its own inner resources, and while nevertheless constructing with the sensually vital motion of its innate horizontal linear progressions, patterns that correspond with the motions of the human soul, should have ranked among all the arts as the most independent and sublime.

Through the unbroken succession of those German musical geniuses, Nature was already expressing her will for a clamorous profusion [Wachstum] of musical content. However, Nature, which revels in a play of opposite forces — who can say to what purpose? — yet does not concern herself in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• A Brief Publishing History
• Contents
• General preface
• A note on the translation
• German words, phrases, technical terms and abbreviations used in the music examples
• Bibliographical abbreviations
• 1 Rameau or Beethoven? creeping paralysis or spiritual potency in music?
• 2 Beethoven’s Third Symphony: its true content described for the first time
• 3 Miscellanea: thoughts on art and its relationships to the general scheme of things
• Foreground Graphs for chapter 2
• Index