Music in Trains

I have to admit that I am only now reading through the theories of Heinrich Shenker for the first time. I am reticent to mention this in an atmosphere of assumed understanding. This is not to say that I have been oblivious; rather, quite the opposite. What may be more accurate is that I have never taken the time to read the theories from the horse’s mouth/pen (the mixed metaphor clearly falls apart.)

One tenet that keeps sticking out in my mind as I read is the connection between analysis and performance in Schenker’s mind. Perhaps he takes it a bit far to suggest that there is only one true performance of each piece, or, even more so, that performance is superfluous to the music that exists in the score. He does, however, demonstrate that performers can lead the listener through each piece by performing an analysis (not the literal graphs that so many recognize, but rather the resultant understanding.)

One of the great things about composition in today’s world is the vast social library of styles and media. In a short span of about 100 years, we have gone from mere national stylistic differences to ‘isms’ for any and everything that comes along.

I recently read a passage written by The New Yorker music critic, Alex Ross that made clear to me the value of these enormous stylistic differences. In preparations for translations of his popular book The Rest is Noise, his goal was to include all quotes in their original languages in order to obtain the best translation. Here is an example:

“Il y a trop de musique en Allemagne,” Romain Rolland wrote, back in the heyday of Mahler and Strauss. Something was lurking, the French writer suspected, in these humongous Teutonic symphonies and music dramas—a cult of power, un “hypnotisme de la force.” Germans themselves recognized the demonic strain in their culture. During the First World War, the not yet liberal-democratic Thomas Mann wrote a manifesto titled Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, in which he praised all the backward German tendencies that he would later come to lament in the pages of Doktor Faustus. In the earlier work, Mann states that die Kunst “hat einen unzuverlässigen, verräterischen Grundhang; ihr Entzücken an skandalöser Anti-Vernunft, ihre Neigung zu Schönheit schaffender ‘Barbarei’ ist unaustilgbar…“