We have come to know a lot about Heinrich Schenker. Gone are the days when mention of his name required birth and death dates in parentheses; today, use of his analytical method brings no special notice. And information on his life and times has burgeoned, to say the least. Nicholas Cook’s virtuosic deep dive into Schenker’s cultural milieu, The Schenker Project, is only the latest window into his world and it is a panoramic one at that.Footnote ¹ A myriad of other details can be filled in by the excellent resource Schenker Documents Online.Footnote ² The identification of the man with the theory would seem to be complete.

Perhaps not quite. Despite the title, this important new addition to this literature, Robert Morgan’s Becoming Heinrich Schenker, is a kind of biography of the theory, or rather Schenker’s Odyssean voyage toward it. The book is a triptych, with the lengthy central panel constituting an extended and detailed examination of Schenker’s development. It is flanked by an introduction to the man and his theory and by a final section of critical reconsideration of both the theory and its ideology. I shall describe and comment on each of these sections in turn.

The name of Schenker invites contention, and Morgan strives admirably to maintain a tone of even-handedness (and he largely succeeds, I think). Thus Morgan does not shy away from giving Schenker his due, but is frequently quick to add qualification. The following is typical:

Morgan returns to this particular qualification frequently (about which more later). Indeed, Morgan’s introductory account seems suffused with a kind of tension. Thus he begins quoting Schenker in 1894, finding a ‘prescient’ foreshadowing of his life’s work: ‘… to find a way of hearing and representing music like a landscape, simultaneously and as a whole’ (p. 3). Yet he ends the chapter on a morose note, that Schenker’s theory offers

Tension is not necessarily a bad thing, and perhaps unavoidable when discussing Schenker’s work. More positively, Morgan finds a productive tension between Schenker’s idealism and his modernism, and he develops this valuable new perspective throughout his tour of Schenker’s work. Tension relaxes in the lucid overview of Schenker’s final theory that Morgan provides in his second chapter, and I concur with Morgan that even experts will want to give it attention, both to prepare what follows but also to examine some of the assumptions integral to the theory (and even to consider whether they are assumptions).

Preliminaries out of the way, Part II begins the odyssey. And it begins early, with Schenker’s 1895 essay ‘The Spirit of Musical Technique’,Footnote ³ a text that has attracted an inordinate amount of attention (in my view, at least) – Morgan spends six pages just revisiting prior literature on it. From ‘Spirit’ Morgan highlights premises that for him set Schenker on his path: that nature is organic and causally determined but music cannot be, and that music therefore cannot be organic and can based only on its own internal content (p. 58). Eventually Morgan argues that, from his position in 1895, Schenker undertook ‘… a fundamental change of [his] view of musical content, shifting his conception of form from a thematic one to a contrapuntal one’ (p. 36). Clearly, for Morgan, the ‘Spirit’ essay is the necessary linchpin, the essential initial impulse sending Schenker on his quest to recover organicism in music.

For Morgan, Schenker takes his first critical step with Harmony,Footnote ⁴ but it is not what you might think: the nature–artifice dichotomy is transformed by Schenker’s new assertion that, ‘… tones are biological … [with] an independent life of their own; and harmony is “spiritual”’ (p. 60). Now, on the one hand, I am immensely pleased to see one of our most eminent music theorists fully embrace Schenker’s idealism – I agree that it is an essential pathway into Schenker’s mindset. On the other hand, I would not want to underplay some of the nuts-and-bolts techniques Schenker develops in this, his first real theory treatise. Morgan does reproduce an important abstract diagram inexplicably omitted from the Borgese translation (Morgan’s Example 4.3, p. 69, Harmonielehre, p. 204Footnote ⁵ ) that lays out quite clearly the relation between strict counterpoint and free composition, arguably the central axiom of Schenker’s theory. (Could not Schenker’s odyssey have begun here?) Perhaps this alignment does ‘come close to giving a spiritual dimension to counterpoint’ (p. 68) but I would note that Schenker follows that diagram with a detailed examination of a combined species example, thus giving his imaginative notion concrete specificity. And the emphasis on harmony as a spiritual force is illuminating, but again one could also pin it down a bit more tangibly: Schenker suggests that the Stufe might have originated in the traditional practice of the pedal point, an analogy that renders the concept of Stufe quite transparentFootnote ⁶ (and that suggests an origin in Sechter’s extension of the fundamental). These small points aside, Morgan persuasively portrays Harmony as a significant advance on the ‘Spirit’ essay, one that maintains a connection with nature while reaffirming music’s autonomous construction.

The two volumes of Counterpoint Footnote ⁷ are considered next, and for Schenker, counterpoint has both strict laws and a ‘non-material dimension’ (p. 78). Through the vehicle of melodic fluency, the affinity between strict and free composition is both concretized and spiritualized, the latter especially in the more abstract Counterpoint II. At this point, Morgan sees ‘the conceptual framework for theory [as] largely in place, but not the theory itself’ (p. 97).

For that, analysis was needed. Morgan groups the analytical monographs together (including the article on ornamentation in C.P.E. Bach). Particularly fine here is the attention paid to the concept of synthesis, beautifully illustrated by Schenker’s reading of the phrase construction in the slow movement of the Ninth. And we do see the theory starting to emerge: from the explanatory edition of the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue Morgan highlights the reading of the fugue subject, from which Schenker extracts a descending fifth composing out the D minor triad – for me, at least, this is essentially a Zug in all but name (p. 107–8). Are we witnessing Schenker becoming Schenker?

Of course, the path is not so direct. Morgan lavishes considerable space on the analysis of the March from Beethoven’s op. 101, from its explanatory edition, and this complex multi-levelled reading merits the attention it receives (pp. 112–15).Footnote ⁸ Nor does Morgan shy away from noting its problematic features; among these he points out that at bar 23 an arrival at D minor is contradicted by an apparently deeper-level E♭ (see Morgan’s Ex. 6.6, p. 113). But, for me, this raises a difficult question: Do we see such instances as contradictory only because we are inculcated in Schenker’s theory in its final form? Or is there something about the levelled presentation itself that entails the need for a logical relationship among those levels – and thus implying the later theory as an inevitable consequence? Morgan does not articulate this question (and I do not blame him – I am not sure how I would answer it myself). The working out of the ‘mediation between ideal and concrete’ (p. 116) that Morgan rightly finds in the analytical monographs is certainly crucial to Schenker’s development, but the mechanism of that working out is not completely transparent, even in Morgan’s lucid treatment.

The next chapter groups together the essays of Der Tonwille and Das Meisterwerk in der Musik and Morgan strikes an effective balance between the theoretical pronouncements that run through these volumes and their ever more comprehensive application to actual pieces.Footnote ⁹ The Tonwille analyses have become much more familiar in recent years but Morgan here makes the original observation that it is in the parsing of development sections that Schenker could really prove the clarity of an overall prolongational reading (see the discussion of K310, I, pp. 143–4.) Regarding whole movements, though, Morgan admits that ‘the Urlinie is still conceived as a collection of individual segments’ (p. 142). But consider the analysis to which this statement is applied, of Mendelssohn’s Song without Words, op. 67, no. 6 (reproduced in Ex. 7.12, p. 142). Schenker’s brackets around the careted numerals correspond clearly to the straightforward phrase structure; the segmented voice leading responds sensitively to surface structure – this is a feature, not a bug. Indeed, the bracketing of $\vskip -1.4pt \raster="rg1"$ shows interruption in all but name, suggesting that this important concept was derived empirically from analytical observation, from the music itself.Footnote ¹⁰ Of course, by the time of Meisterwerk III, containing a monumental analysis of the Eroica symphony, interruption was in full use as an analytical tool. (It could hardly have been otherwise given the reading of the first movement as an Urlinie from $\vskip -1.4pt \raster="rg2"$ .) Morgan’s explication of the Scherzo analysis is richly detailed and rewards careful reading (pp. 149–53). One wonders why there are not many more such guides to Schenker’s intricate analytical work.

Of course we know where the odyssey ends, and it is where Schenker foresaw it would, with Free Composition.Footnote ¹¹ This summa of Schenker’s theory has come to be a locus of ambivalence, and Morgan has his fair share. However, he does not deny Schenker his achievement, finding in this treatise 17 related points that align his ideology with a rigorous theory, effectively solving the conundrums of the ‘Spirit’ essay. This returns Morgan to one of his main themes, that the theory

This brings to close the survey of Schenker’s development, and this central portion stands on its own as a valuable resource.Footnote ¹² Now Morgan turns to critical assessment – and Schenkerian theory could use more critics as thoughtful as Morgan. Turning first to ideology, Morgan avoids the usual easy targets and instead goes deeper to retrieve a ‘philosophical matrix’ of terms – nature, spirit, will, genius and unconscious – that are essential to Schenker’s work (p. 200). They undergird ‘Schenker’s belief that human beings possess an imaginative power capable of uniting music’s variable appearances into a complex whole’ (p. 203).

More technical matters come to the fore in the next chapter, and Morgan immediately returns to an ongoing theme: Schenker’s ‘exclusive orientation toward pitch’ (p. 204). Strictly speaking, Morgan is correct: Schenker’s theory does not treat rhythm and other parameters as rigorously as it organizes pitch structure. (What theory does?) However, many scholars feel that there is a close affiliation between pitch and rhythm in Schenker’s theory (as there is in species counterpoint), enough to consider rhythm and meter as part of the framework.Footnote ¹³ Morgan also assesses the theory’s ability to coordinate with formal articulation (uneasily, in his view), the status of the Ursatz (also fraught) and, finally, extensions of the theory, which includes any transgression of Schenker’s fixed eternal laws of music. Morgan construes Schenker’s theory as narrowly as Schenker did, so that virtually all practitioners of voice-leading analysis would fall into the category of extenders. (But wasn’t Schenker’s theory always in a state of flux, even in his latest work?) Other extensions include going beyond Schenker’s sanctioned repertoire (again, a very substantial literature), and, not surprisingly for Morgan, the application to post-tonal music. This task does not admit of easily solutions, as Morgan acknowledges, but he argues well that one should keep all possibilities open.

Morgan’s concluding chapter is no mere peroration, but a wide-ranging meditation on Schenker’s place in Western music theory and in scientific thought. As everywhere in this book, the judgments are mixed but always fair. Morgan is harshly critical of Schenker’s insistence on the eternal validity of his approach, based on his ‘increasing reliance on the “law-like” principles of strict counterpoint, which served as the underpinning for his entire mature theory’ (p. 224). One can hardly argue that the rules of strict species are eternal; but still, it worth pointing out the contrapuntal relationships that became normative in the fifteenth century are essentially the same as those practiced for some five centuries after (and still taught today). This critique notwithstanding, Morgan closes with an elegant portrait of the theory as allowing an ideal hearing, and its author as embodying puzzling contradictions. Here as throughout I found much to encourage thoughtful consideration. Becoming Heinrich Schenker unfurls valuable new perspectives on the theory and the man.