Schenker Notes

Caveat — Schenkerian analysis cannot be learned in a week or a month. This page simply serves as a starting point.

Historical Perspective — Heinrich Schenker's ideas are rooted in counterpoint. He returned to the materials which master composers had studied.
• 18th Century — Counterpoint (Read the last paragraph about Johann Joseph Fux's Gradus Ad Parnassum.)
• 19th Century — Roman numeral analysis took hold.
• 20th Century — Schenkerian analysis

Hierarchy — Trills and mordents are wonderful embellishments of a melodic line, but performers understand that the line gives direction to the phrase. Another example of melodic hierarchy: the first and last notes of a glissando are most prominent. Schenker understood music hierarchically. Some melodic notes and chords are structural while others are decorative. However, both are important to the form and artistic merit of the music.

Graphs — "A picture is worth a thousand words." Schenker created graphs using music notation to express analysis clearly and succintly. Prose—like these very words!—is often more cumbersome. "Talking about music is like dancing about architecture!" (The authorship of these quotes is uncertain.)

I believe the fundamental melodic structure of this "Over the Rainbow" segment is a major scale which descends from tonic to tonic—the open noteheads above. (Sing or play it.) Schenker believed that the fundamental melodic structure of every piece started with a note of the tonic triad (1, 3 or 5) and descended to tonic.

On the highest harmonic level, a sonata form movement simply moves from tonic to dominant and back. Lower in structural significance are the key changes in the development. Finally, music passages often hint at still other keys with just two chords—a secondary dominant and its resolution. These so-called tonicizations do not detract from the prevailing key, but are nonetheless crucial to the beauty of the composition.

Sonata Form
\|\|:	Exposition		:\|\|:	Development	Recapitulation		:\|\|
	Theme 1	Theme 2		Transformations	Theme 1	Theme 2
	Tonic	Dominant		Other Key(s)	Tonic	Tonic

Schenker’s descent is challenged
in Michael Buchler’s analysis of
“Take Me Out to the Ball Game”
from the Society of Music Theory
video journal, SMT-V.

Interpretation — No single analysis is best. There is more than one good answer. In the same way that many performance interpretations may be excellent, many good analyses of a piece of music are possible.