Moot Thoughts & Musings

I. Schenker’s disparaging opinion of early music.

Schenker’s opinion of early music, found in his book on harmony first published in 1906, is primarily based on his consideration of the modes. He names 6 modes: Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, and Aeolian, based on the finals C through A. Ionian and Aeolian are basically our modern major and minor, so they’re alright in his book. However, the other four modes, based on the finals D, E, F, and G, are faulty systems. In a primitive, pseudo-Pythagorean sketching of the overtone series, he finds these four modes outside what is naturally good and appropriate in music and music based on these modes is merely a bad experiment on the way to tonality.
He gives four reasons for why these modes persisted for so long. First, he asserted that they were created and supported by the church, which held the rule to which all in the Middle Ages subscribed. Secondly, as I have just mentioned, composers were in a “fog of experimentation” and had not emerged to find tonality yet. Third, the artists had bound themselves to these prescribed systems of tones and composed likewise. And fourth, there were certain features in their music that foreshadowed tonal practices, which fits in with his “age of experimentation” thesis.
From my lofty vantage point in history, it is simple to cry out against all that reeks of mistaken notions and false presumptions in Schenker’s polemic. For example, his basic concept of the nature, development, and use of mode in the Middle Ages is entirely wrong, and despite the explosion in recent decades of research in early music, this basic knowledge was available to him at the time. Another faulty premise is the imposition of distinctly 19th century conceptions of artist, piece of composition, and act of composing onto the music of Middle Ages. For this, I think I can forgive him in as much as I am tantalized by the coinciding of these presuppositions with his contemporary historical thought. With the Jakob Burkhardts out there throwing a cloak of darkness over the Middle Ages and shinging a flashlight on the Renaissance, Reason, and Enlightenment, it is no wonder Schenker is of the mind that he is.
Given Schenker’s distinctly negative opinion of early music, one is led to question why his techniques were applied to early music anyway?

II. Why his analysis got used anyway.

This leads me to my second point. Not only has Schenkerian analysis been applied to the context of early music, but it has been done so by his near and dear. In his 1952 two volume work Structural Hearing, Felix Salzer, pioneering the application of Schenkerian analysis to early music, devotes significant portions of his attention to early music including everything from chant to organum to isorhythmic motets by Machaut to 16th century mass movements and motets by Obrecht, Isaac, Josquin, and others, carefully mapping out the counterpoint, significant cadential moments, and the coherence and prolongation of the tonic and dominant relations. The example on your handout (MOTET 527, p. 328) shows an example of an anonymous 14th century motet with Salzer’s Schenkerian graph below. It is clearly apparent that he sees distinct tonic-dominant relationships.
We will see why it is necessary that Salzer see these kinds of relationships. His next encounter with early music comes in 1967 in his essay “Tonality in Medieval Polyphony” in the first volume of Music Forum. His purpose in analyzing early music is to show the development of tonality. Stating that there was no conception of harmonic thinking in medieval music, which is no surprise to us, Salzer asserts the thesis that it is a contrapuntal tonality that is present. Emerging in the fourteenth century, he states, is an unconscious gravitation to harmonic progressions of I-V-I, though they were still functioning in a contrapuntal context. He says, “The birth of the harmonic concept and the resulting harmonic progressions, all based on I-V-I, however, in no way diminished the role of counterpoint. The new developments rather gave the contrapuntal voice leading a different orientation and a new perspective. They also influenced the contrapuntal voice leading as such in a radical fashion.” (98) Defining tonality as chord prolongation, Salzer is advocating that early music was tending towards tonality, placing himself in line with Schenker’s assertions that the Middle Ages was a “fog of experimentation” in which success to emerge from this fog was defined as music that tended toward tonality. Many graphs by Felix Salzer, and some by Carl Schachter, support this agenda of Schenkerianism in mid-20th century American early music analysis.

III. Implications for us today.

These leads us to ask what are some implications for us today? Few would remain in line with the “emerging tonality” thesis of a few decades ago. What is the effect of Salzer’s work on early music analysis now? Cristle Judd in her book Reading Renaissance Music Theory traces analyses from the 1960’s and 70’s of a Josquin motet Magnus es tu domine/Tu pauperum refugium by Salzer/Schachter, Wallace Berry, and Charles Joseph, all neo-Schenkerian to some degree or other, and places them in line with the “emerging tonality” thesis.
Because of this agenda, she states, Tu pauperum refugium received a place in the second edition of Charles Burkhart’s Anthology for Musical Analysis, a text used by most undergraduates today in their first steps in analyzing tonal music. Since the placement of this motet in the anthology, though, early music analysis has become more contextualized, and Tu pauperum refugium, once a guardian of Josquin’s genius, is now of questionable attribution. Judd closes her discussion with a provocative point. She states, “Relatively few motets ascribed to Josquin have been the subject of such extended analytical discussion, and no other single piece has garnered such attention from the theoretical community…All these ‘analyses’ of Tu pauperum refugium appropriated and incorporated the motet in the service of broader narratives, a potent reminder…that agency belongs not to the piece described but to the author describing.”
We have come a long way from Schenker’s tirade against the modes, so what does this have to do with Schenker? Probably not all that much. We can use his tools for analysis in many different ways and for many different purposes and effects, but the reality is that we have created Schenker in our own image. There are many helpful techniques we can harvest from Schenker for early music analysis, such as taking a global look at a piece or identifying motivic patterns, but the picture we are creating is not one that comes from Schenker’s head but from our own head. Any use of Schenker in early music analysis will be for our own ends and cannot align with the fancy that we are able analyze a work accurately representing Schenker’s mind and aesthetic.