Analysis of Tonal Music: A Schenkerian Approach – Allen Cadwallader, David Gagné and Frank Samarotto

Thoughts: Analysis of Tonal Music is a textbook; I read it for a course in Schenkerian Analysis at McGill University. It did its job in helping me understand the ideas and practice of Schenkerian Analysis. I’m not sure I’d recommend the book to anyone else, though: when it works, Schenkerian Analysis can provide elegant explanations of pieces of music, but it’s only really useful in explaining a very narrow slice of the world’s musical practices. It also seems like an easy path toward confirmation bias - if you analyze a piece expecting there to be an Urlinie, you’re likely to find one.

(The notes below are not a summary of the book, but rather raw notes - whatever I thought, at the time, might be worth remembering.)

Cadwallader, Allen, David Gagné and Frank Samarotto. 2020. Analysis of Tonal Music: A Schenkerian Approach (Fourth Edition). Oxford.

Part I: Basic Principles

Chapter 2: Melody and Counterpoint

• 16: Scale degree 2 can be usefully thought of as a descending leading tone at times.
• 17: Fleissender Gesang: melodic fluency (lit. flowing song): the “balance and poise” a mostly stepwise melody (with judicious leaps) can achieve
• 17 “In total melodies, falling motion is typically associated with a release of tension and with closure, while rising motion conveys a sense of growing intensity, as if in opposition to gravity.” -cf. entropy: system is shifted out of equilibrium by an early rising line/leap, and this free energy is dissipated over the course of the movement.
  • compare to the article about tonal music being dissipative
  • on p24, the authors even use the word “dissipate”: a line that moves downward by step after leaping upwards “begins to dissipate some of the tension created by the initial leap”
• 19: “such connections can also occur over broader spans of music, on various levels of structure.” This raises questions about the value of this theory - are such connections possible to hear? is a theory that works with such connections useful even if they can’t be heard/perceived, or if they can’t be easily perceived?
• 20: just as chords can be prolonged, tones can also be prolonged
• 23: “the sense of motion or ‘flow’ that most persons associate with tonal music is produced in part by imperfect consonances leading to and from stable points defined by the perfect consonances” - there is no citation to support this assertion. could it be empirically tested?
• 24-25: the example of the Handel chord progression just being the result of two lines in counterpoint to each other: cf. schemata
• 27: authors assert that melodic substitution “does not alter the continuity of underlying, melodically fluent stepwise progression.” another assertion without citation.
• 33: different definition of diminution (in contrast to the fugal technique): melodic embellishment (since the embellishments tend to have shorter note values)
• 34: key term: structural melody - the underlying, melodically fluent framework that underlies a passage of music (which includes all sorts of embellishments/diminutions)
• 38: Schenker regarded the leading tone as an acceptable substitute for ˆ2 - when illustrated with Greensleeves, this makes sense to me, but I’m not sure how I feel about it as a general principle. Why should ˆ2 and ˆ7 specifically have a special relationship? is substitution a central part of Schenker’s theory, or is this an ad-hoc, one-off exception?

Chapter 3: Bass Lines and Harmonic Structure

• 41: the authors state that in large-scale harmonic motions, Stufen tend to cluster near the end of progressions, with the earlier parts of the progression tending to be expanded upon and thus more spaced-apart
• 42: Schenker distinguished between chords and harmonies. Harmonies are functional classes (this book specifies Tonic, Intermediate and Dominant as the three classes), while many different chords fit into each harmonic class. Chords can also embellish a harmony.
• 43: contrapuntal chords: embellishing chords that arise from neighbouring and passing motions.
• 45-46: The authors argue that the I-V-I motion is fundamental to tonal music because the fifth is the first non-octave note to appear in the overtone series. It’s true that that relationship is there, but this sounds like a just-so story.
• 49-50: chromaticized intermediates: harmonies built not on ^4 but on ^#4 (includes V6/V harmonies and +6 harmonies)
• 53: apparent tonic: a literal I chord used to expand an intermediate harmony
  • j: can apparent tonics also embelish dominant harmonies?
• 56: “The upper fifth of the tonic triad is the most ‘natural’ dividing point of the major and minor scales, because of the inherently close relationship of the tonic and the dominant” j: I don’t understand - is this in a scalar sense, or in a temporal sense?

Chapter 4: Linear Techniques

• 81: Linear progressions: lines that move between notes of a triad - can span a 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th or 8ve.
• 84: The authors identify an imitation in example 4.5, with G-F-E in the LH answered with an embellished C-Bb-A in the RH a measure later. Maybe the fact that it’s the same species of trichord lends credence to this interpretation, but if we’re going to be boiling many things down to 3-progressions and 5-progressions, doesn’t that mean that finding examples of imitation is not particularly remarkable?
• 87: a dissonant span - a bit like a linear progression, but traverses a dissonant interval within a harmony (e.g. a m7 or a d5 within a V7 chord)

Chapter 5: Tonal Structures

• 114: superposition - where a note that belongs to an inner voice in the imaginary basso continuo is placed above the main melodic upper-voice note.
• 117: authors state that one of Schenker’s most profound realizations was that the same contrapuntal and harmonic processes processes that occur on one level of a musical composition can be occurring on smaller or larger scales at the same time.
• 117: so this is counterintuitive to me: “higher-level structures” are processes that are happening on larger scales, while “lower-level structures” are processes that are happening near the musical surface. I guess I have to imagine myself walking among the roots of a tree that has been plucked from the ground…
• 117: Ursatz parallelisms - patterns that replicate in miniature the larger ursatz going on in a composition. - cf. that essay about recursive structure in medieval/renaissance architecture
• 125: authors state that in an ursatz spanning from ^5 down to ^1, either ^4 or ^3 will necessarily be either dissonant or supported by a dissonant tone.

Chapter 6: Techniques of Melodic Prolongation

• 130: an initial ascent, by definition, leads to the first tone of the Urlinie
• 135: authors state that unfolding necessarily involves a change in direction
  • j: in order to delineate what the high and low notes of the implied dyad are
• 146: octave coupling: implies an alternation of registers, with one register dominant and one playing a supportive role
  • 147: the main/primary register is referred to as the obligatory register
• 148: reaching over: related to superposition (in which an inner voice is momentarily played above the piece’s primary voice), in that an inner voice is transferred to a higher position

Chapter 7: Some Basic Elaborations of Fundamental Structure

• 189: an “apparent” tonic - a tonic chord, but one that is elaborating a non-tonic harmony (rather than expressing a tonic harmony and being elaborated upon by the chords around it)

Part II: Analytical Applications

• 208: The authors draw a distinction between a piece’s form and a piece’s structure. A piece can have multiple formal sections while having a one-part structure (i.e. the urlinie is uninterrupted). A two-part structure (one in which the urlinie is interrupted) can have two or more formal sections.
• 209: Preludes, introductions, songs, simple binary forms are examples of genres/forms which display a one-part structure while being divided into a variety of formal sections.

Chapter 8: One-Part Forms

• 213: In a passage with linear progressions involving parallel intervals, the authors note that one linear progression usually “leads”, expressing one of the piece’s harmonies, while the other “follows”, not expressing that harmony.
• 214: Bach’s famous C major prelude exists in two forms, one with an added i6/4 chord that was inserted by Christian Schwenke because he thought it must have been accidentally omitted, the harmonic progression before the dominant pedal being so complicated.
• 221: nesting: where one motive is contained within a larger statement of the same motive, sharing at least one note.
• 222: auxiliary cadence: used in schenkerian analysis to identify a progression that contains a V-I motion but doesn’t start with a I chord.
• 229: in strophic forms, an entire urlinie is often expressed in a single stanza, and this undivided structure is then repeated/reiterated in subsequent stanzas
• 232: boundary play, “in which melodic activity occurs within the span of a single, prolonged tone”
  • j: what distinguishes boundary play from simple prolongation?

Chapter 9: Binary Forms

• 253: obligatory register: Schenker believed that even when the tones of an urlinie are projected up or down by octaves, the urlinie tends to return to its initial (i.e. obligatory) register in order to complete its descent.

Chapter 10: Ternary Forms and Rondo

• 273: Schenker often thought of pieces with sections whose harmonies are related by third or fourth as contrapuntal progressions, as they often involve high-level common-tone and neighbour motions.

Chapter 11: Sonata Principle

• 324: authors state that “the first part of a Classical sonata exposition establishes the primary tone and initial tonic of the structure… [while] the second part always involves the composing-out of a subordinate key.”