The Schenker Project Culture, Race, and Music Theory in Fin-de-siècle Vienna

by Cook, Nicholas

• ISBN13: 9780199744299
• ISBN10: 0199744297
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-05-24
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Today we think of Heinrich Schenker, who lived in Vienna from 1884 until his death in 1935, as the most influential music theorist of the twentieth century. But he saw his theoretical writings as part of a comprehensive project for the reform of musical composition, performance, criticism, and education-and beyond that, as addressing fundamental cultural, social, and political problems of the deeply troubled age in which he lived. This book aims to explain Schenker's project through reading his key works within a series of period contexts. These include music criticism, the field in which Schenker first made his name; Viennese modernism, particularly the debate over architectural ornamentation; German cultural conservatism, which is the source of many of Schenker's most deeply entrenched values; and Schenker's own position as a Galician Jew who came to Vienna just as fully racialized anti-semitism was developing there. As well as presenting an unfamiliar perspective on the cultural and political ferment of fin-de-siecle Vienna, this book reveals how deeply Schenker's theory is permeated by the social and political. It also raises issues concerning the meaning and value of music theory, and the extent to which today's music-theoretical agenda unwittingly reflects the values and concerns of a very different world.

Author Biography

NICHOLAS COOK is 1684 Professor of Music at Cambridge University. He previously directed the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM) at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of articles and books on a wide variety of musicological and theoretical subjects. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2001.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction: Schenker's contexts

Foundations of the Schenker project

Schenker and the philosophers

Formalists against formalism

Rehabilitating musical logic

The reluctant modernist

Curlicues and catastrophe

Ornamentation and critique in fin-de-siècle Vienna

Modernists against modernism

Alienated classics

The conservative tradition

Schenker's politics

The logic of nostalgia

The anachronistic city

The politics of assimilation

Schenker's project and Jewish tradition

The logic of alterity

Schenker and others

Beyond assimilation

Schenker's Rosenhaus

The posthumous Schenker

Conclusion: music theory as social practice

List of references

Appendix: 'The spirit of musical technique', Translated by William Pastille

Index

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