O modo de dizer da teoria musical: uma reflexão sobre a terminologia de Schenker

Coloca-se em discussão a tradução para a língua portuguesa de alguns termos da teoria musical de Heinrich Schenker. Detendo-se, principalmente, sobre os termos Urlinie e Ursatz, procura-se realizar um debate a respeito do significado de tais conceitos, significado que aparece como a manifestação estritamente musical do princípio da unidade da obra de arte. Tal princípio assume um papel emblemático na teoria se Schenker por meio do concito de coerência orgânica e, portanto, do conceito de organismo. A argumentação se concentra sobre os múltiplos significados da palavra Satz, destacando seus usos no vocabulário musical e, principalmente, nos escritos de Schenker, mais especificamente, como elemento formador do termo Ursatz. A discussão oportuniza uma reflexão a respeito de termos propostos por Schenker e de suas implicações e alcances quando vertidos para outras línguas, épocas e lugares.

The Art of Modulating, Preludizing, and Fantasizing: Schenker’s Thoughts about Keys and Key Change Reconsidered

Although Heinrich Schenker certainly changed his mind about many topics, he never waivered in his belief that 1) current ways to explain modulation were fundamentally flawed; and 2) that modulation is best learned by improvising preludes and fantasies. To explain these points, Part I reconsiders Schenker’s critique of Max Reger’s Beiträge zur Modulationslehre (1903) and Salomon Jadassohn’s Die Kunst zu Modulieren und zu Präludieren (1890) and describes three types of modulation endorsed by Schenker in his Harmonielehre (1906): 1) [diatonic] reinterpretation; 2) chromaticism; and 3) enharmonicism. Part II then shows how Schenker not only dispensed with the traditional concepts of relative, close, and distant keys, but he eventually proposed that modulations arise at the foreground for contrapuntal, even motivic reasons. Finally, Part III uses Schenker’s claims about modulating and preludizing to analyze Beethoven’s “Two Preludes” in C major, Op. 39, both of which modulate “through all twelve major keys.”

Razões e meios para o envolvimento com a proposta de Heinrich Schenker

A expansão da percepção de obras musicais que emerge do contato de músicos com a proposta schenkeriana é valorizada neste artigo. Para tanto, as autoras compartilham com o leitor suas experiências docentes junto ao ensino dessa prática analítica, em interlocução com processos harmônicos, contrapontísticos e texturais.

Rules Are Made to Be Broken, or the Menuetto of Beethoven’s Op. 2, No. 1

A striking gesture appears at the climax of the first phrase of the Menuetto from Ludwig van Beethoven’s Sonata for Piano in F minor, Op. 2, No. 1. This motivic gesture, which may be understood as derived from manipulation of standard voice-leading procedures, has intriguing ramifications that deeply affect the structure and narrative of the entire movement. These features are explored with the aid of Schenkerian analytic procedures, and the analysis is then compared to an interpretation of this same movement by Heinrich Schenker.

THE DEFECTS OF A REIGNING THEORY

Contemporary theoretical musicology, and especially its anglophone section, has been heavily influenced by the ideas and analytical methods of Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935) who was an Austrian. Schenkerian-inspired theory, once imported in the United States from Austria, spread widely on American soil, where it was “enriched” conceptually, and was then re-exported to Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and other English speaking countries. The old American school of harmony that stemmed from the best German, French, and Russian traditions, found itself pushed to the wall by the ever growing Schenkerian school of thought which was erecting a cult of his creator. A “new order” in harmony and analysis was gradually established that regarded tonality as a business between tonic and dominant alone, the rest of the chords being of peripheral importance. This mentality shut the door to diversity and freedom in functional thinking, and opened the door to highly biased harmonic and formal analyses which erased harmonic cadences, presented tonality in black and white, breached syntactical units to create a new way of hearing music (the so-called "distance hearing" or "structural hearing”), and inevitably ended up with the same fundamental structure in melody and harmony, named “Ursatz”. This essay discusses major defects of Schenkerian theory and their negative impact on traditional harmony and analysis.

Hypermetrical Irregularities in Expanded Phrases

This chapter deals with hypermetrical irregularities in phrases expanded by means of parenthesis, repetition, and appendix. All these means of phrase expansion were recognized by eighteenth-century authors. The discussion of parenthesis reveals an uncharacteristically careless treatment of this concept by Heinrich Christoph Koch. It outlines its further development by Hugo Riemann and Heinrich Schenker and deconstructs the concept of parenthesis developed by William Rothstein (1989), thus restoring it to eighteenth-century perspective. The discussion of repetition engages with Rothstein’s discussion of this technique of phrase expansion and its effect upon hypermeter. The discussion of appendix compares Koch’s account of this concept to Rothstein’s concept of “suffix.”

Thinking In and About Music

Milton Babbitt (1916–2011) was, at once, one of the century’s foremost composers and a founder of American music theory. These two aspects of his creative life—“thinking in” and “thinking about” music, as he would put it—nourished each other. Theory and analysis inspired fresh compositional ideas, and compositional concerns focused theoretical and analytical inquiry. Accordingly, this book undertakes an excavation of the sources of his theorizing as a guide to analysis of his music. Babbitt’s idiosyncratic synthesis of ideas from Heinrich Schenker, analytic philosophy, and cognitive science—at least as much as more obviously relevant, and more frequently cited, predecessors such as Arnold Schoenberg—provide insight into his aesthetics and compositional technique. Examination of Babbitt’s newly available sketch materials sheds additional light on his procedures. But a close look at his music reveals a host of concerns unaccounted for in his theories, some of which seem to directly contradict theoretical expectations. New analytical models are needed to complement those suggested by Babbitt’s theories. Departing from the serial logic of Babbitt’s writings, his compositional procedures, and most previous work on the subject—and in an attempt to discuss Babbitt’s music as it is actually heard rather than just deciphered—the book brings to bear theories of gesture and embodiment, rhetoric, text setting, and temporality. The result is a richly multifaceted look at one of the twentieth century’s most fascinating musical minds.

Parallelism between Linguistics and Music – Noam Chomsky and Heinrich Schenker

The paper aims to compare musical language with verbal language, creating a new perspective on music and natural language. The three categories of linguistics, phonology, syntax and semantics are analyzed. Bernstein highlights the analogies between the linguistic categories and music, researching the same three components of linguistics in music. The possibility of applying the transformational grammar procedures to the musical text is studied. In the second part of the paper, the authors investigate the method of analysis based on harmony and counterpoint, differentiating several structural levels conceived by the theoretical musician H. Schenker. Schenkerian analyzes are a relatively recent appearance in the field of musical analysis, which proposes as an innovation in the field of musical analysis the structural vision of musical discourse.