Who is Heinrich Schenker and why should you care?

Everyone’s favorite music theorist is back in the news. If you are curious about the controversy surrounding him and don’t have a music theory background, I wrote a Twitter thread for you:

However, maybe you don’t feel like wading through a long Twitter stream of consciousness, and would rather read a coherent blog post instead. Read on!

Disclaimers: I am not a Schenker specialist. I did write about him in grad school, but many people know his work better than I do. If they show up in the comments to correct me, I defer in advance. Another thing: I’m biased. I think Schenker was a pretty terrible human being, and that his influence on the American music academy has been malign. If you want a more evenhanded or pro-Schenker explainer, look elsewhere.

Okay! So. To understand this whole drama, first you have to know a little music theory. Western European music of the 18th and 19th centuries revolves around a particular chord progression called a cadence. Here are some cadences in the key of C major:

The first chord in each pair (the ones labeled G7) sounds tense and unresolved. The second chord in each pair (the ones labeled C) sounds relaxed and resolved. The word “cadence” is from the Latin word for falling. The idea is that you are falling from the unstable perch of G7 to land on the firm ground of C. Western European musical tradition uses lots of other chord combinations, but the cadence is the foundation of the house.

Schenker’s big idea about the canonical masterpieces was this: not only are cadences very important in this music, but at the deepest level, they are the only things happening in the music. All the complexity of a Beethoven or Brahms symphony is just surface decoration for big, slow cadences. The joke about Schenker is that he wanted to reduce all of music down to “Three Blind Mice.” There’s an element of truth to that. “Three” is a relaxed/resolved sound, “Blind” is a tense/unresolved sound, and then “Mice” is relaxed/resolved again. “Blind” to “Mice” is the cadence.

Many music theorists here in the US find Schenker’s theory to have profound explanatory power when you apply it to the Germanic masterworks. Even his biggest critics think so! The most prominent critic is Philip Ewell, whose paper about music theory’s white racial frame set this whole controversy in motion. Ewell has taught and published papers on Schenkerian analysis, and thinks that it’s a valuable analytic tool within its intended context. So what’s the problem?

For one thing, Schenkerian analysis doesn’t work so well outside of the Germanic canonical masterpieces. It doesn’t have much to say about medieval or Renaissance music, and it isn’t very useful for atonal music either (though people continue to try.) Also, the further you get from Western European music, the less useful Schenker’s theory becomes. Remember that Schenker believed that cadences are the structural foundation of music. However, not all music uses cadences this way, or uses them at all. Jazz, blues and rock use cadences some of the time, but not always, and rap and dance music hardly ever use them.

For Schenker, the fact that his theory doesn’t apply well outside of the Germanic masterworks wasn’t a problem. If you couldn’t analyze a style of music in his terms, then he thought it proved that it wasn’t really “music” at all. Schenker wasn’t just trying to explain the music of a particular time and place. He was trying to explain all music. Any music that he couldn’t explain, he didn’t consider to be worth explaining.

Hmm, you might be thinking. If Schenker only considered German and German-sounding music to be valid, doesn’t that seem… kind of racist? You are correct in thinking so. Schenker was outspokenly hateful toward non-German peoples and their music. For example, he compared the music of Turkey and Japan to “the babbling of infants,” sometimes charming, but devoid of meaning. He also didn’t think much of non-German Europeans and their music. Furthermore, he insisted that his political/racial beliefs were inseparable from his music theory. He saw the dominance hierarchy of notes and chords in music as mirroring the natural dominance hierarchy of the world’s peoples.

Now comes the twist: Schenker was Jewish. He died before the Nazis came to power, but he was sympathetic with the broad strokes of German nationalism and superiority. He might have changed his mind if he had lived longer, but we’ll never know. Timothy Jackson, the Schenker scholar who mounted the ill-considered attack on Phil Ewell, says that Schenker couldn’t really have been that racist, because he was a member of an oppressed minority. Jackson went on to accuse Ewell and other Schenker critics of anti-Semitism. This unprovoked personal attack ignores the fact that there were plenty of racist Jews in Schenker’s era, and there continue to be many today. But it also misses the point of Ewell’s critique. Schenker’s bad influence is bigger than his repulsive personal beliefs.

Remember that Schenker didn’t just think he was trying to explain Beethoven. He believed that he had created a grand unified theory of all music. The American music theory academy picked up Schenker and ran with him because they loved the idea that you could explain the entire world’s music using an objective, math-like system. At last, music theory could be a real science, not just a bunch of feelings and opinions! Music theorists handled Schenker’s racist ranting by politely ignoring it. They left it out of textbooks, and didn’t talk about it in class. You can spend a lifetime doing Schenkerian analysis without ever hearing anything about the man’s politics. But this is not what Schenker had in mind! He had an ideological goal with his analyses, and that ideology is still present, whether or not Schenkerians want to admit it.

When I did my masters at NYU not so very long ago, the entire graduate theory core was based on Schenker. Every music major had to learn his ideas, regardless of specialty, including music tech students like me. I reacted very negatively to the idea that everything can be reduced down to cadences. Even if you just limit yourself to the study of Western “art” music, that isn’t really true, and if you’re talking about, say, the blues, it’s hilariously untrue. My fury motivated me to do some research, and I was horrified (but not surprised) by what I found. Thanks to the efforts of Phil Ewell and others, the word is getting out, but Schenker’s universalizing/totalizing influence on American music theory continues to be pervasive.

Schenker’s defenders argue that they have disconnected his valuable analytical insights from his loathsome personal beliefs. These defenders are wrong. The important question is not whether Schenker’s racism affects the way he analyzed Beethoven. The important question is why so many music theorists believe that a theory designed to explain Beethoven can also explain every other kind of music in the world. Even at NYU, which is as woke an institution as exists in this world, the “music theory” sequence was exclusively concerned with the harmonic practices of the canonical Western Europeans. These classes were not called “European classical harmony theory”, they were just called “music theory.” That naming shows the real harm of Schenker’s beliefs. Few people who teach Eurocentric music theory are personally racist. But this kind of teaching devalues nonwhite musics, and in so doing, unwittingly perpetuates white supremacy.

The white racial frame of academic music theory is not entirely Schenker’s fault. He may have been a more outspoken white supremacist than other music scholars of his era, but most people agreed with him. The music theory field continues to use analytical methods and assumptions that were formulated by white supremacists. If we want to mitigate their lingering influence, merely choosing not to discuss their ideology is not adequate. Schenker is a useful person to focus on because he is so prominent and influential. Once you start critically examining him, though, you find out that he is only one thread in a very ugly sweater. We have a lot more unraveling left to do.

I’m hardly an expert on the Germanic masterworks. But on the music that I am an expert in, Schenker’s approach can be worse than useless. Remember the string of cadences? In some contexts, like funk and blues, the roles of the two chords can be exactly reversed. The G7 chord can feel like home base, safe and resolved, and the C chord can feel like a departure from home base.

In groove-based musics, chord function is much more about when the chords happen than whatever notes they happen to contain. And dissonance and consonance work very differently in blues-based music than they do in 19th century German music. You would never guess that to be true from a typical college-level music theory course.

Not all music has cadences. Not all music has chord progressions. Not all music even has chords, or piano-key pitches for that matter. And I’m not talking about avant-garde or “non-Western” music here. I’m talking about the popular mainstream, about rap and dance music. Schenker would say, well, no problem there, those things aren’t music. Ben Shapiro’s music theorist father who went to music school would agree. But we can and should do better.

Schenker’s main analytical technique is the “reduction,” where you strip off the music’s surface detail to reveal the deeper structures beneath. This is a reasonable idea on its face. However, in order to show harmonic relationships across long stretches of musical time, Schenker asks you to ignore musical time itself. For the Germanic masterworks, maybe the relationships between the chords are more important than the specific time when those chords occur. I’m skeptical of this, but what do I know. However, in the musics that I’m interested in, the specific timing of musical events matters a lot. In groove-based music, it’s the most important thing. Timing variations that you can measure in milliseconds can be the structural underpinnings of a groove.

What does Schenkerian analysis have to say about “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” by the Temptations, which is twelve minutes long without any chord changes at all, and which revolves entirely around the nuances of its groove?

That’s a rhetorical question. Schenker would have thought this song was beneath his consideration. The problem is that very few subsequent academic music theorists have felt the Temptations to be worthy of consideration either. There’s a large extent to which “music theory” is really just “Western European harmony theory.” This bias extends far beyond the traditional classical world. Academic jazz theorists are overwhelmingly obsessed with functional tonal harmony too. Jazz theorists have to at least acknowledge swing and groove as existing, but they are still marginal topics. Outside of jazz specialists, groove barely exists as a music theory subject at all.

Finally, let’s touch on the freedom of speech aspect of this whole drama. It’s the silliest aspect. Timothy Jackson is arguing that the leftist mob ganging up on him represents a growing threat to academic discourse. Jackson is apparently blind to the irony that he’s complaining about being canceled in the New York Times, on Fox News, in numerous conservative blogs and podcasts, and so on. It seems like his freedom of speech is doing fine.

But Timothy Jackson’s freedom of speech is beside the point. The real point is this: you can study music theory for a long time at many universities without encountering any music by Black people, women, or people outside of Western Europe and the US. I had a grad school advisor who got an entire PhD in music composition from a prestigious university, and she had never heard of the blues scale. There’s a widely used tonal theory textbook called The Complete Musician. It’s written by a Schenkerian and in the edition that I used in grad school, all of the music in it is by white men (except for one example by John Coltrane, a recent addition.) The book is called the “Complete” musician. Can you imagine a book with that title that only talked about the blues, or about groove?

Remember that Phil Ewell is an expert on Schenker. He has taught Schenkerian analysis for years. He published an article in Timothy Jackson’s very own Journal of Schenkerian Studies a few years back. Meanwhile, Schenkerians are allowed to be ignorant of the world’s music outside their area of specialty. Whether or not Schenker gets canceled, I really don’t care. I’m much more concerned about all those artists and traditions who are preemptively canceled by their exclusion from the curriculum, and who mainstream theorists consider to be beneath their notice.

As for Jackson and his putative cancellation, he made his bed. No one forced him to accuse Phil Ewell of being an anti-Semite, or to make ignorant and atavistic generalizations about black people and their musicality. Jackson calls his treatment “cancellation,” I call it “appropriate social consequences for being belligerent on a public forum without a lot of provocation.”

If you want to dive deeper into the issues, this Adam Neely video is a great place to start. It includes an interviews with Phil Ewell himself. (I helped with this video in a small way.)

Also, not all music theorists are Schenkerians. There are plenty of music theorists doing great work, especially the more progressive ones who come from “new musicology” or ethnomusicology backgrounds. Their approach is not to try to find universal rule systems that explain everything. Instead, they look at musical practice in a particular style or genre, and see what patterns or rules they can derive. Sometimes they might try to use an existing theoretical structure to do their explaining, and sometimes they invent new structures. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to keep track of this kind of work, because it’s published in academic journals that are heavy on jargon. The good news is that many progressive music theorists are on Twitter, and will happily answer your questions, including me.

Update: read some conservative takes from Wenatchee the Hatchet and The Music Salon.

Further update: the prominent Schenkerian Allen Cadwallader is sending abusive emails to Megan Lavengood for her blog posts on the controversy.

4 thoughts on “Who is Heinrich Schenker and why should you care?

  1. Fascinating discussion. Thanks for the clarity. Pretty dire stuff… like “inequality is the principle of all creation” — but eugenics and empirical racism was prominent in much academic study of 100-125 years ago. Change is needed!

  2. Hi Ethan

    I have had some experience with the Schenker method, and its failings are just as you described It is of limited usefulness, or none outside the narrow field Schenker inhabits The claims to universalism are abhorrent (Look at Hegel if you want to see where German Idealism leads, its fascism) The racism, and the moral cowardice that allows academics to approve or worship Schenker without engaging with his views and the malevolent influence he has had are disgraceful Music ought to be better than this Music is better than Schenker The Temptations have more music in their toenails than Schenker could ever comprehend Glad he’s dead, his influence lives on, but only among the morally-shallow

    You nailed it here :
    Whether or not Schenker gets canceled, I really don’t care. I’m much more concerned about all those artists and traditions who are preemptively canceled by their exclusion from the curriculum, and who mainstream theorists consider to be beneath their notice.

    Thanks N

  3. Sorry I won’t be able to help with the “balance”. My views on Schenkerism are probably the most extreme that you will find anywhere.

    I think it’s a cult that needs to be shut down at least at public universities. And not because of anything Schenker said or did, although I do think he was a racist nutjob. Really, Schenker, himself, is modern Schenkerism’s first victim, because his fanciful notions have come to be treated as incontrovertible facts in some parts of music academia, even to an extent which Schenker was very explicit about not wanting to encourage.

    The most basic problem with modern Schenkerism is that it is claimed to be analysis (a term Schenker said should not be applied to his theory), but the criteria that are used to partition the supposed components, in many cases, ar simply not analytic criteria. To complete a Schenker graph the “analyst” would seem to need to either apply a superhuman/supernatural form of intuition that only Schenkerians have, or he would have to communicate with unseen entities such as the souls of the dead, or at least read their minds. Even in non-“analytic” writing, I can show you ample examples of Schenkerians casually telling you what was in the minds of long deceased persons, without any supportive documentary evidence. If you think this way of looking Schenkerism sounds disingenuous, that’s an impression it makes sense to me that people could easily form. On the other hand, the facts will support my statement if you look at them forensically, rather than by giving Schenkerians the benefit of a doubt in terms of possibly having legitimate sources unstated in order to suppor their claims.

    It’s my position that a form of music “analysis” that ultimately depends upon supernatural forms of perception shouldn’t be taught at public universities in the United States.

    And there are other serious problems, not even considering the racism, specifically (which is a problem).

    The graphs have a lot of potential to help performers make decisions about what to emphasize. But modern Schenkerians have repeatedly denied to me that that’s what they’re actually for, despite Schenker’s own statement to this effect translated in 2020, after Schenkerians had just been making sh** up at US univerisities for 30 years in terms of what it’s FOR. So what’s it FOR? Considering that the list of people making Schenker graphs is much, much longer than the list of people actually using Schenker graphs for anything, it seems like the real utilities of Schenkerian theory are less musical than political.

    I was pretty sure from the first day of my first Schenker class (which I passed) that I’d stumbled onto an intergenerational con game in which the marks were continuing the same con, possibly unwittingly.

    But what’s wrong with the theory, itself?

    Tip of the Iceberg: the Ursatz

    I have plenty of other bad things to say about the Ursatz, but this is the easiest point to make.
    It’s in video form, because that’s probably the easiest way for people to understand it:

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