What kind of artifact is a musical work and how should it be studied? To what extent does the tonal music of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe obey discoverable laws? What larger social significance should be ascribed to the dissolution of tonal harmony in music of the early twentieth century? Of all the musicians and scholars who pondered such questions in fin-de-siècle Vienna, none placed greater significance on their answers than the music theorist Heinrich Schenker (1868–1935). That Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms had been superseded by the likes of Strauss, Debussy, and Schoenberg signaled, for Schenker, nothing less than a cultural and spiritual catastrophe, and he made it his life's work to codify the purportedly eternal laws of tonal music. Schenker may not have been able to change the course of Western music, but he did try to demonstrate exactly how, in his view, modern composers had gone astray.

As dogmatic as Schenker's outlook sounds to present-day ears, his analytical methods currently enjoy a remarkable popularity among Anglo-American music theorists. After World War II, scholars and composers attempted to develop a more scientific study of music; included in this approach was a radically revamped version of “Schenkerian theory” expunged of its creator's nationalist, monarchial, and anti-democratic views. While many of Schenker's supporters continue to hold that his often-shocking political inclinations have nothing to do with his insights into musical structure, Nicholas Cook's recent study sets out to weave these seemingly disparate strands of meaning into a seamless socioaesthetic texture. Like other theorists committed to “historically informed Schenker studies” (4), Cook explores how aesthetic, cultural, social, and philosophical debates native to fin-de-siècle Vienna helped to shape Schenker's distinctive music-theoretical “project.” This project consisted of a wholesale rethinking of the organization of tonal music and, at least from Schenker's perspective, a concomitant closing of the case for German musical superiority.

Previous scholarly forays into Schenker's commentaries on culture and society have tended to shy away from the discomforting image they present of a near-fanatical German nationalist of Jewish origins. Cook, however, refuses to brush these matters aside in his effort to understand how Schenker's ethnic and cultural identity influenced his music theory. In particular, Cook traces Schenker's obsession with the “internal” essence of German music to his status as a territorial and ethnic outsider. Indeed, Schenker's self-appointed mission as the one true defender of German musical tradition could perhaps have only been conceived by someone from the periphery.

Born in a small town in Galicia, he made his way to Vienna at the age of 16 to study law at the university. After finishing his degree in 1890, Schenker devoted himself fully to music, pursuing composition, performance, and journalism. Despite his early successes, Schenker became increasingly pessimistic about the state of European music, a feeling he voiced in the unpublished essay “On the Decline of the Art of Composition” (1905–1906). Cook speculates that the climate of increasing anti-Semitism in Vienna, epitomized by the 1897 appointment of Karl Lueger as the city's mayor, contributed to Schenker's growing preoccupation with theoretical definitions of Germanness in music. In short, Cook proposes that Schenker's theoretical project was an “act of reappropriation” (88) that aimed to wrest ownership of the German musical legacy from Richard Wagner and his anti-Semitic followers, though in a fashion that led into yet another cul-de-sac of Germanic chauvinism.

In prose accessible to readers interested in fin-de-siècle Vienna at large, Cook elaborates the tenets of Schenker's project by situating his writings in relation to other prominent discourses of the time, an approach that fosters greater appreciation of the centrality of music in Viennese cultural debates. To capture the complexity, and at times the contradictory nature of Schenker's claims, Cook teases apart the theorist's debts to a wide range of conceptual sources, including the lingering Idealism of Austro-German thought, the relatively new discipline of psychology, the “reluctant modernism” and ethical concerns of figures such as Adolf Loos, the conservatism and right-wing polemics of the interwar period, and Jewish mysticism. Cook thereby assembles yet another rich cultural study of this already well-researched time period but with the added benefit of illustrating the degree to which a field as seemingly abstract as music theory can be a site of political contestation, or, as Cook puts it, a “site for the construction of music as socially meaningful” (317). In sum, The Schenker Project offers a riveting account of how music comes to be “imbued with worldly meaning” (318)—a process that was not without its dark side in the early decades of the twentieth century.