COOK - Music Theory and 'Good Comparison' - A Viennese Perspective
COOK - Music Theory and 'Good Comparison' - A Viennese Perspective
COOK - Music Theory and 'Good Comparison' - A Viennese Perspective
Nicholas Cook
Journal of Music Theory, Vol. 33, No. 1. (Spring, 1989), pp. 117-141.
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MUSIC THEORY AND
'GOOD COMPARISON':
A VIENNESE PERSPECTIVE
Nicholas Cook
Figure 2
Figure 3
Symphony being in the tiny notes of Schenker's graph is all very well, but
it misses one of the main points of the analysis, which is to show how
highly salient features of the music arise as purely surface elaborations
(something, incidentally, that seems to parallel Nottebohm's remark, based
on his studies of the sketches, that Beethoven's creative faculty "often rose
to its greatest heights only at the last moment"60). Schenker's 'Eroica' anal-
ysis does not reduplicate the salient features of the listener's experience; it
interprets them in terms of the metaphor of large-scale contrapuntal struc-
ture. In fact it precisely fulfils the criteria that Schoenberg himself set out
for a "good comparison", in which "we bring closer what is too distant,
thereby enlarging details, and remove to some distance what is too close,
thereby gaining perspective".
Stephen Davies remarks that, in general, analyses "are best to be seen
as illustrations of the theory [that informs them], rather than as evidence
for it"!' This seems to me to go to the heart of the supposed dichotomy
between universalism and particularism. Davies is suggesting that the main
purpose of general principles-theories-is to articulate the analyst's
insights into individual works. This is rather like historical writing, in
which general principles are on the whole invoked as a starting point for
the consideration of the individual instance, and not the other way roundPz
That is to say, the historian's general principles are to be understood not as
universal laws, but as systems of presentation. And when, exceptionally,
such principles are elevated into laws, so that proving their validity
becomes the historian's primary concern, the result is the now discredited
kind of historiography represented by Spengler's or Toynbee's writings.
Schoenberg of course lumped Spengler and Schenker together in his caus-
tic essay "Those who complain about the decline",63 and it is certainly pos-
sible to view Schenker's analyses as being designed to prove the validity of
his theory of musical structure (a theory which, in Schenker's view, ren-
dered all other theories obsolete). In their article, Brown and Dempster
talk a good deal about the ways in which Schenkerian theory can or cannot
be proved to be correct. My complaint is not that this is illegitimate, nor
that it is unfair to Schenker, but simply that it is not the most profitable way
for us to approach what Schenker had to say.
To regard a Schenkerian analysis-or indeed any other type of analysis-
as a demonstration that a given piece is unified is less illuminating than
regarding it as a demonstration of how the piece is unified, or for that mat-
ter of how it is not unified but rather characterized by irreducible structural
contrastsP4 And when we use the word "demonstration" in this sense we
mean something quite different from a mathematical demonstration, which
demands to be accepted (or rejected) on the grounds of its strictly logical
coherence. One cannot reasonably reject a mathematical proof just because
one does not like it. But the same does not apply to a Schenkerian analysis,
or to any other analysis that can be "heard" in musical terms. Of course we
are influenced by the arguments an analyst puts forward, by the corrobora-
tion provided through surface detail, register and so forth. But this is not
enough in itself. Davies writes that
The analyst who sees in the score relationships which cannot be heard by
anyone will not convince us that he has exposed the source of a work's unity.
But the analyst whose analysis allows us to hear relationships of which pre-
viously we were unaware may well convince usPS
However this does not go far enough, either. We do not accept an analytical
interpretation just because we can "hear" it. (After all, it is easy to "hear"
the most preposterous structural relationships if one wants to.) We accept
an analytical interpretation because we find it persuasive; that is, because it
satisfies the particular demands that led us to the analysis in the first place-
demands such as, in Benjamin's words, "the need to memorize a work, the
desire to relate it to other works, or the simple impulse to understand it
better'?
"Choosing our words with great care'', writes Kerman, "we might say
theory deals with those aspects of music that might be thought analogous to
vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and rhetoric in the field of language"P7 The-
orists like Keiler or Lerdahl and Jackendoff think of music theory more or
less on the model of linguistics. But the rationale for analytical practice
which I have outlined would imply an analogy not so much with linguistics
but with literary criticism, the thrust of which (as Judith and A.L. Becker
put it) is "to understand, not to explain"P8 Other ethnomusicologists, such
as Kenneth Gourlaypg have also endorsed literary criticism as a research
model, while Anthony Newcomb has recently applied techniques explicitly
derived from literary criticism to the study of Schumann's music.70 And in
the field of musical historiography, Leo Treitler expresses a similar concep-
tion of the musicologist's work when he writes that "verifiability as the mea-
sure of lawfulness yields ground to intelligibility, coherence, potential
explanatory power"?l Writers like Newcomb and Treitler-and one might
cite Kerman and Gary Tomlinson as well - aim primarily at the reconstruc-
tion of musical meaning through a full consideration of the context in
which the music arose, and they tend to deplore the way in which theorists
ignore the historical context of the music they analyze. Treitler, for
instance, complains that "prevailing modes of structural analysis are anti-
historical, in two respects: they decontextualize their objects in their ration-
alistic treatment of them; and they are taught and practiced without notice
taken of their own historicality or, in general, of the role that particular
models play in the organization of under~tanding"?~
Nobody can claim that this charge is wholly unwarranted; after all, music
is never heard outside some interpretative context, whether that in which it
originated or another, and to this extent its meaning is obviously determined
contextually. But the issue is not as simple as it might seem. Dahlhaus writes
that "it is quite defensible in methodological terms for us to isolate an object
so long as we do not question the reality of the connections from which it has
been extracted"73 Of course the composition suffers a loss of meaning in this
process. But the loss of meaning may not be so great as to override the
methodological gains, particularly when one is dealing with a culture as
institutionalized and reified as that of Western art m u ~ i c . 7Indeed
~ I would
argue that such a methodology is indispensable not only from the theorist's
point of view-after all, it defines what he does-but also from the historical
musicologist's. For, as Dahlhaus and Treitler have made abundantly clear,
historical facts do not just exist; they are created through historical interpre-
tation. And this applies with particular force to the musical work, which is
not something given but rather (as Dahlhaus puts it) "dissolves into a source,
an authentic text, a composer's intention and a historian's notion as to the
musical significance of the acoustical substrate sketched out by the text or
realized according to the guidelines laid down within In other words,
the musicologist constitutes the musical work through his own interpretation
of it, through conceiving of it as an aesthetic object. And to do this involves
taking up some kind of theoretical position vis-i-vis the work, whether the
theory involved is explicit or merely implied, because it is only by virtue of
some kind of theory that a piece of music can be conceived as a discrete
entity. In this way any study of the music of the past-to the extent that it
maintains the concept of the work at all, rather than breaking up into recep-
tion history-is by definition theoretical as well as historical. To say this is
not to claim primacy for theory over history, as Schenker did when he out-
lined the way in which the history of music would have to be rewritten in the
light of his the0ries.7~(One shudders to think what such a history would have
looked like; maybe Schoenberg's remarks about Spengler were not so far off
the mark.) It is merely to endorse Treitler's own statement that "as investig-
ative procedures, neither analytical nor historical methods can be absolutely
prior to the other. They inform one another in a continuous circle".77
The central proposition I have put forward in this article is that music the-
ory acquires validity not, like scientific knowledge, from being verifiable,
but from serving some useful purpose - in enabling the analyst to arrive at an
interpretation, communicate an insight, or resolve a problem. And I have
cited music history in order to exemplify the kind of way that theory can be
useful and even indispensable within the broader context of musical studies.
But of course there are many other examples that could have been cited too.
Theoretical thinking about music is important just to the extent that it leads
to better musicology, ethnomusicology, composition, or performance. The-
ory, in short, can best be justified by practice.
1. Carl Dahlhaus, Analysis and Value Judgment (New York: Pendragon Press, 1983 [An-
alyse und Werturteil, Mainz, 1970, trans. S. Levarie]), p. 54.
2. See for instance Bell Yung, "Choreographic and kinesthetic elements in performance
on the Chinese seven-string zither", Ethnomusicology 28 (1984): 505-17, and John
Baily, "Musical structure and human movement", in Peter Howell, Ian Cross and
Robert West (4s.). Musical Structure and Cognition (London: Academic Press,
1985). pp. 237-58.
3. David Lewin, "Music theory, phenomenology, and modes of perception", Music Per-
ception 3 (1986), especially pp. 374-91.
4. Alan Smith, "Feasibility of tracking musical form as a cognitive listening objective",
Journal of Research in Music Education 21 (1973): 200-13.
5. Sylvan Kalib, "Thirteen essays from the three yearbooks Das Meistenverk in der
Musik by Heinrich Schenker: an annotated translation" (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern
University, 1973). ii, p. 293.
6. Ruth Solie, "The living work: organicism and musical analysis'', 19th Century Music
4 (1980): 151.
7. Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), p. xii.
8. Irttne Delitge, "Grouping conditions in listening to music: an approach to Lerdahl
and Jackendoffs grouping preference rules", Music Perception 4 (1987): 325-59.
9. Burton Rosner, '2 Generative Theory of Tonal Music by Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jack-
endoff' (review), Music Perception 2 (1984): 289-90. See also Eric Clarke, "Theory,
analysis and the psychology of music: a critical evaluation of Lerdahl, F. and Jack-
endoff, R., A Generative Theory of Tonal Music:' Psychology of Music 14 (1988):
15-16.
10. Burton Rosner and Leonard B. Meyer, "The perceptual roles of melodic process, con-
tour, and form", Music Perception 4 (1986): 37.
11. Nicholas Cook, "The perception of large-scale tonal closure'', Music Perception 5
(1987): 197-205. In these tests, listeners heard pieces of music in two versions, one of
which was tonally closed while the other was not; they were required to say which ver-
sion was more coherent, created a stronger sense of completion, etc.
12. See Eugene Narmour, Beyond Schenkerism: the Need for Alternatives in Music Anal-
ysis (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1977) and Alan Keiler, "On some proper-
ties of Schenker's pitch derivations", Music Perception 1 (1983): 200-28.
13. See in particular Narmour's "Some major theoretical problems concerning the con-
cept of hierarchy in the analysis of tonal music", Music Perception 1 (1983): 129-199.
Lerdahl and Jackendoffs theory is also reductive in this sense, because their prolon-
gational reduction-whose background-to-foreground formation corresponds to
Schenker-is complemented by time-span reduction, which works the other way
round.
14. For a full bibliographical citation see note 3 of Brown and Dempster's article.
15. See Boretz' "Nelson Goodman's Languages of A n from a musical point of view'', in
Benjamin Boretz and Edward T. Cone (eds.), Perspectives on Contemporary Music
Theory (New York: Norton, 1972), p. 35. (Orig. publ. in Journal of Philosophy 67
[I9701: 540-52 .)
16. Milton Babbitt, "Past and present concepts of the nature and limits of music", in
Boretz and Cone, op. cit., p. 9.
17. I do not mean to say that Boretz doesn't care about perceptual viability: "I believe
there's a real world out there, because not all of my fantasies work" ("Two replies",
Perspectives of New Music 1512 [1977]: 242). But the decision as to whether an ana-
lytical interpretation "works" is a purely intuitive one; the theory itself is not con-
cerned with perception at all.
18. Milton Babbitt, "Twelve-tone invariants as compositional determinants", in Paul
Henry Lang (ed.), Problems of Modem Music (New York: Norton, 1962). p. 120.
(Orig. publ. in Musical Quarrerly 46 [1960]: 246-59.)
19. A summary of such experiments will be found, with references, in Jana K. Millar,
"The Aural Perception of pitch-class set relations: a computer-assisted investigation"
(Ph.D. diss., North Texas State University, 1984). Millar's list should be supple-
mented by Paul Pedersen, "The perception of octave equivalence in twelve-tone
rows'', Psychology of Music 312 (1975): 3-8, and Carol L. Kmmhansl, Gregory J. San-
dell and Desmond C. Sergeant, "The perception of tone hierarchies and mirror forms
in twelve-tone serial music", Music Perception 5 (1987): 31-78.
20. See Babbitt's famous statement about scientific language and scientific method,
quoted at the beginning of Part I of Brown and Dempster's article.
21. Mary Louise Serafine, Music as Cognition: the Development of Thought in Sound
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). p. 60. A parallel argument to the one
I have put forward, leading to a similar conclusion, would be to contrast the Eucli-
dean representation of time in the score with the multiplicity of temporal perceptions
revealed through the phenomenological analysis of music; David Lewin discusses
this in "Music theory, phenomenology, and modes of perception". See also Boretz'
"What lingers on (, when the song is ended)", Perspectives of New Music 1611 (1977),
especially pp. 107-8.
22. On the score as a model see Henry Martin, "Modes of explanation in analytical dis-
course", Perspectives of New Music 1512 (1977): 174-191. On models and metaphors
see Christopher Lewis, "Mirrors and metaphors: reflections on Schoenberg and
nineteenth-century tonality", 19th Century Music 11 (1987): 26-42.
23. This argument is presented in more detail in my book Music. Imagination, and Cul-
ture (forthcoming from Oxford University Press).
24. Benjamin Boretz, "Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art': p. 34.
25. Dika Newlin, Schoenberg Remembered: Diaries and Recollections (1938-76) (New
York: Pendragon Press, 1980), p. 164.
26. Translated in Kalib, op. cit., ii, pp. 52-83.
27. Free Composition (New York: Longman, 1979 [Der Freie Satz. Vienna, 1935, trans.
E. Oster]), p. xxiii.
28. John Rahn, "Logic, set theory, music theory", College Music Symposium 1911 (1979):
114.
29. "The musical object", Current Musicology 5 (1967): 56-87.
30. Carl Dahlhaus, Schoenberg and the New Music: Essays by Carl Dahlhaus, trans. D.
Puffett and A. Clayton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). p. 221.
31. Kalib, op. cit., ii, p. 170.
32. "I was given a vision of the urlinie, I did not invent it!" (Kalib, op. cit., ii, p. 218).
I have discussed this issue in more detail in "Schenker's theory of music as ethics",
Journal of Musicology (forthcoming).
33. See Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgensteink Vienna (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1973), especially pp. 183-4. Darstellung is of course a perfectly standard
German word meaning "model" or "representation" and does not necessarily carry
the particular interpretation I am discussing here; for instance, Schenker called his
study of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony a Darstellung.
34. Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony (London: Faber, 1978 [Harmonielehre,
Vienna, 1911, trans. R. E. Carter]), p. 10.
35. Schoenberg's account of "good comparison" seems to echo Goethe: "Thinking by
means of analogy . . . has the advantage that it concludes nothing and aims at nothing
final. Induction, on the other hand, is easily tainted; it holds a predetermined goal
before its eyes and sweeps true and false on before it as it works toward that goal"
(from Marimen und Rejlexionen; translated by William Pastille in "Ursatz: the musi-
cal philosophy of Heinrich Schenker" [Ph. D. diss., Cornell, 19851, pp. 87-8).
36. It is extraordinary how much twentieth century analytical thinking has its origins in
Vienna. Boretz, who was particularly influenced by Carnap, was working in the tra-
dition of Viennese positivism. Schenker came from what is now Poland but worked in
Vienna, and his first-generation disciples were Viennese. So were Schoenberg and the
main analysts who worked under his influence (Keller was born in Vienna; R6ti was
born in Serbia but studied and worked in Vienna). Perhaps this reflects the enduring
influence of Eduard Hanslick, who was the first professor of music at the University
of Vienna, and whose writings in effect demonstrated the necessity for structural anal-
ysis, without clarifying in what specific ways it might be done; all the analysts I have
mentioned might be seen as trying, in different ways, to carry out Hanslick's program.
As for style analysis, the program for this was spelt out by Hanslick's successor at the
University, Guido Adler.
37. Or more precisely, the freely elaborated surface visible in the score of the piece in
question. To the extent that the score itself is (as I said above) a metaphor or model,
we are dealing with a double metaphor, a model of a model (cf. Martin, "Modes of
explanation in analytical discourse", p. 183).
38. In his Octaven u. Quinten u. A . , which Schenker edited and annotated (English ver-
sion "Brahms's Study, Octaven u. Quinten a. A., with Schenker's Commentary Trans-
lated by Paul Mast" in The Music Forum 5 [1980]: 1-196).
39. "The principles of voice-leading, organically anchored, remain the same in back-
ground, middleground and foreground, even when they undergo transformations"
(Free Composition. pp. 5-6).
40. Free Composition, p. 56. For a discussion of Schenker's contradictory statements
about middleground consecutives, see William Benjamin, "Schenker's theory and the
future of music", Journal of Music Theory 25 (1981): 163-4.
41. See Robert Dentan's "Response to Field and Roseman" in Erhnomusicology 28
(1984): 464.
42. Kenneth Gourlay, "Towards a reassessment of the ethnomusicologist's role in
research", Ethnomusicology 22 (1978): 10.
43. Carl Dahlhaus, Foundations of Music History (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983 [Grundlagen der Musikgeschichte, Cologne, 1967, trans. by J. B. Robin-
son]), p. 88.
44. See for instance Taruskin's "On letting the music speak for itself: some reflections on
musicology and performance", Journal of Musicology 1 (1982): 338-349.
45. The phrase is taken from Arthur Nestrovski, "Music theory, Saussure, Theoria:' In
Theory Only 1016 (1988): 10.
46. Maybe, as Benjamin seems to imply in "Models of underlying tonal structure: how can
they be abstract, and how should they be abstract?'(Music n e o r y Spectrum 4 [1982]:
48), the difficulty of "hearing" music in terms of such abstract analytical models as set
theory is simply a consequence of their not being built on such familiar foundations.
At the same time, I have difficulty in imagining quite what it might mean to "hear" the
difference between, say, a K and a Kh relationship. But it is easy to be too glib about
this. There is a continuum from "hearing" to abstract conception, and perhaps all one
can sensibly propose is that no analytical model should be more abstract than it has to
be in order to communicate the analyst's interpretation of a work.
47. "Music theory, phenomenology, and modes of perception", p. 382. This, it seems to
me, is really Boretz' position too. Despite the scientific appearance of Boretz' earlier
writings (the later ones, to put it mildly, look different), Brown and Dempster's char-
acterization of him as a would-be scientific theorist obscures what is surely the pri-
mary aim of his work: to contribute to the experienced "vividness (in the senses of
individuality, lucidity, and depth) of musical works" ("Two replies'', p. 241). Perhaps
we would all have understood Meta-kriations better if it had been called "Poetics of
Music Theory in the Form of Six Lessons".
48. "On some properties of Schenker's pitch derivations", p. 224.
49. After all, Schenker introduced his earliest full-scale reductive graph (in the Erlaute-
rungsausgabe of Op. 101) with the words: "Here are shown the lines that Beethoven's
imagination followed". And his method of presentation in Der Freie Satz follows a
generative, not a reductive, sequence.
50. Wilson Coker, "Richmond Browne (ed.), Music Theory: Special Topics" (review),
Music Theory Spectrum 4 (1982): 130.
51. Brown and Dempster, p. 84. This is reminiscent of Lewin's argument, in "Behind the
beyond: a response to Edward T. Cone" (Perspectives of New Music 712 [1969]: 62).
that "analysis is really antithetic to theory"; analysis, that is to say, focusses on the
individual case whereas theory is concerned with generalization. But, as Lewin
implied and as Cone made explicit in his reply (pp. 70-2). the antithesis is a matter
of emphasis rather than of underlying principles. It is not, in other words, a question
of contradiction.
52. Kalib, op. cit., ii, p. 82. Elsewhere in Das Meistenverk Schenker writes that "The
general . . . easily seduces man into becoming complacent, into taking no further
pains with the particular. Continued misperception of the particular unsouls, so to
speak, the understanding of the general; it no longer ripens into truth; it solidifies into
a schema" (translated in Pastille, "Ursatz", p. 159).
53. "Models of underlying tonal structure", p. 36.
54. Joseph Kerman, Musicology (London: Fontana, 1985; American edition, Contemplat-
ing Music, Cambridge [Mass.]: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 82. Kerman's
remarks about "Aus meinen Thdnen spriessen" will be found in "How we got into
analysis, and how to get out'', Critical Inquiry 7 (1980): 311-31; for Schenker's anal-
ysis see Allen Forte, "Schenker's conception of musical structure", Journal of Music
Theory 3 (1959): 1-30, reprinted in Maury Yeston (ed.), Readings in Schenker Anal-
ysis and Other Approaches (New Haven, 1977): 3-37.
55. Nicholas Cook, A Guide to Musical Analysis (London: Dent and New York: Brazil-
ler, 1987). pp. 61, 77.
56. What Kerman might have reasonably complained about is the fact that Forte did not
draw attention to this in his commentary on Schenker's analysis. The trouble with
Kerman's attack on Schenkerism, as he calls it, is that he tends not to distinguish
between the analytical methodology on the one hand, and the manner in which it is
used-which may be sensitive or insensitive, critical or uncritical-on the other.
57. Schenker's sketch, shown in Fig. 3, is taken from Der Freie Satz, E x . 109a, (1).
58. See Pastille, "Ursatz", pp. 67ff., 134. Present-day Schenkerian analysis, it seems to
me, tends to put too much emphasis on unity per se, rather than on the dynamic rela-
tionships between different levels.
59. See Milton Babbitt (ed. S Dembski and J. N. Straus), Ubrds about Music (Madison:
Wisconsin University Press, 1987), pp. 139-40.
60. Gustav Nottebohm, Two Beethoven Sketchbooks: a Description with Musical Extracts
(London: Gollancz, 1979 [Ein Skiuenbuch von Beethoven, Leipzig, 1865, and Ein
Skiuenbuch von Beethoven aus den Jahre 1803, Leipzig, 1880, trans. J. Katz]), p. 98.
61. Stephen Davies, "Attributing significance to unobvious musical relationships", Jour-
nal of Music lheory 27 (1983): 204.
62. Patrick Gardiner, The Nature of Historical Explanation (London: Oxford University
Press, 1961), p. 90.
63. Translated in Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, ed. L Stein,
with translations by L. Black (London: Faber, 1975): 203-4.
64. See David Neumeyer's "Reply to Larson", In lheory Only 1014 (1987): 34.
65. "Attributing significance to unobvious musical relationships", p. 212.
66. "Models of underlying structure", p. 28.
67. Musicology, p. 13.
68. Judith and A.L. Becker, "Response to Feld and Roseman", Ethnomusicology 28
(1984): 455. See also Boretz' remarks in "What lingers on'', p. 106.
69. "Ethnomusicologist's role", pp. 25-6.
70. Anthony Newcomb, "Schumann and late eighteenth-century narrative strategies",
19th Century Music 11 (1987): 164-74.
71. Leo Treitler, "On historical criticism", Musical Quarterly 53 (1967): 191.
72. Leo Treitler, "'To worship that celestial sound': motives for analysis'', Journal ofMusi-
cology 1 (1982): 159.
73. Foundations of Music History, p. 27.
74. See Harold Powers, "Language models and musical analysis'', Ethnomusicology 24
(1980), p. 8.
75. Foundations of Music History, p. 35.
76. Free Composition, p. 27.
77. "'To worship that celestial sound"', p. 155.