Essays from the Third International Schenker Symposium.(Book review)

Essays from the Third International Schenker Symposium. Edited by Allen Cadwallader, assisted by Jan Miyaka. (Studien und Materialien zur Musikwissenschaft, Bd. 42.) Hildesheim: Olms, 2006. [xix, 305 p. ISBN-10: 3487132001; ISBN-13: 9783487132006. [euro]48.00.] Index.

Conferences devoted to a specific analytical system are rare, especially when compared to conferences examining a composer's works or a genre of music. Heinrich Schenker's analytical approaches, however, continue to hold sway over the American music theory community, and are steadily becoming a force to be reckoned with in German-speaking lands as flags continue to be planted on the map in the basement of the Mannes College of Music (see William Rothstein, "The Americanization of Heinrich Schenker," In Theory Only 9, no. 1 [September 1986]: 5-17). Conferences devoted to other methods of analysis, e.g., set theory, transformational voice-leading, or neo-Riemannian theory are not typically given with such regularity, although some do occur. This alone gives powerful testimony to the explanatory power, artistic usefulness, analytical rigor, and sound technique of Schenker's theories and analytical methods. Although the conference on which this book is based was billed as the "Third International Schenker Symposium," there have been at least eight symposia devoted specifically to Schenker: four at Mannes (1985, 1992, 1999, and 2002, the last being the "Schenker Institute"), and one each at Notre Dame (1984), the University of Hartford (1986), Utrecht University (2001), Vienna (2003), and Berlin, Sauen und Mannheim (2004). In addition, special workshops and courses continue to be offered on a regular basis and the discipline of music theory continues to be renewed, refreshed, and enriched by this ongoing critical engagement with the multifaceted thought of Heinrich Schenker.

As the most recent in a series of essay collections devoted specifically to Schenker's theories, Allen Cadwallader's collection will join those of David Beach (Aspects of Schenkerian Theory [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983]), Maury Yeston (Readings in Schenker Analysis and other Approaches [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977]), Carl Schachter and Hedi Siegel (Schenker Studies I and II, [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990 and 1999]), Joseph Straus (Unfoldings: Essays in Schenkerian Theory and Analysis [New York: Oxford University Press, 1998]), as well as the collection that Cadwallader edited in 1990 (Trends in Schenkerian Research [New York: Schirmer, 1990]), and another co-edited by David Gagne and L. Poundie Burstein (Structure and Meaning in Tonal Music: A Festschrift for Carl Schachter [Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2006]). Of these, the volumes edited by Schachter and Siegel were direct results of the Schenker symposia in 1985 and 1992, appearing five and seven years after the conferences respectively.

This volume contains revisions of several papers that were presented at the Third International Schenker Symposium held at the Mannes College of Music in March of 1999. Of the thirty-four papers presented over the three days of the symposium, twelve are contained in this volume. Of those twelve, three have been previously published and, of the twenty-two papers not presented in this collection, fifteen have been published elsewhere. Thus twenty-seven of the thirty-four papers from the conference are available in some form. That the papers appeared in print some eight years after the conference is surprising, but does not compromise the timeliness of the volume as the analytical issues discussed in the papers are every bit as relevant now as when they were first presented.

The editorial organization of these essays follows precisely the order of their presentation at the symposium. No attempt is made, however, to group them according to their emphasis as was done in the previous volumes. Presumably this grouping is implied by the inclusion of the symposium program, reproduced to orient the reader to the original context of the papers. One omission here is the heading "Harmonic Issues" separating the contributions of James Baker and Eytan Agmon (p. xvi). Also perplexing is the absence of any comment made as to the criteria used to include certain contributions while excluding others. These factors notwithstanding, the essays collected here contain thoughtful explications of theoretical topics and thorough considerations of a number of analytical issues.

Although some have criticized Schenker for not being open either to the music of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries or to music prior to the high baroque, it is the contention of this author that since Schenker conceived of his ideas as "the first genuine theory of tonal music," and since he employed it to show organic coherence in musical masterworks, we should limit our formal use of his method to this same repertoire where its results are most convincing. Analytical problems abound in the application of Schenker's method to repertoire for which it is not suited, e.g., pieces in which tonality is either absent or not clearly evidenced, or music that blurs the distinction between consonance and dissonance.

The first three essays in the collection deal in three different ways with the auxiliary cadence, one of Schenker's most unique and most challenging analytical concepts. Poundie Burstein, in "Schenker's Concept of the Auxiliary Cadence," presents a thorough explanation of the topic as it is described in Schenker's writings, showing how the technique is used by composers to create senses either of forward momentum or of ambiguity. Further, he considers the auxiliary cadence from both a tonal and a metric position in an effort to clarify what he perceives as misunderstandings of Schenker's (sometimes too brief) comments. Finally, he shows how the technique can be used as an aid to harmonic fluidity and considers several types of auxiliary cadences: deceptive beginnings; auxiliary dividers (which combine the auxiliary cadence with a back-relating dominant); auxiliary cadences within a larger progression; and the VII-V progression. He concludes the article with an analysis of Schumann's Warum? from the Fantasiestucke op. 12.