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Beyond Schenkerism: The Need for Alternatives in Music Analysis
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January 13, 2025
I gave it 5 stars merely on the basis that it should be more than sufficient to persuade any reasonable person that Schenkerism is too flawed to be kept as part of the curriculum.
On the other hand, more could always have been said in order to try to persuade less than reasonable persons.
Points that Narmour misses include:
1) That the Schenkerian mid-ground is not scientifically defensible because it neither has any basis in normal human cognition, nor represents anything the composer studied or theoretically treated; that Schenkerian analysts have to construct the mid-ground by pretending to read a dead person's mind, like some kind of tribal magician.
2) That Schenkerism assumes there to be no empirical limit to levels of prolongation recursion. This is, later, oddly mirrored in Narmour's own Implication-Realization Model, which assumes there to be no empirical limit to levels of Implication.
3) That, in addition to being charlatans who gaslight skeptical students, Schenkerians are also generally racists.
4) That a Schenker graph models nothing in particular and has no clear musical utilities.
5) That Schenker graphs normally reduce music works to a 2-voiced Ursatz which includes an octave approached by similar motion, which is bad counterpoint in 2 voices; that Schenkerism essentially claims all good music elaborates a specific species counterpoint error.
- Joshua Clement Broyles
On the other hand, more could always have been said in order to try to persuade less than reasonable persons.
Points that Narmour misses include:
1) That the Schenkerian mid-ground is not scientifically defensible because it neither has any basis in normal human cognition, nor represents anything the composer studied or theoretically treated; that Schenkerian analysts have to construct the mid-ground by pretending to read a dead person's mind, like some kind of tribal magician.
2) That Schenkerism assumes there to be no empirical limit to levels of prolongation recursion. This is, later, oddly mirrored in Narmour's own Implication-Realization Model, which assumes there to be no empirical limit to levels of Implication.
3) That, in addition to being charlatans who gaslight skeptical students, Schenkerians are also generally racists.
4) That a Schenker graph models nothing in particular and has no clear musical utilities.
5) That Schenker graphs normally reduce music works to a 2-voiced Ursatz which includes an octave approached by similar motion, which is bad counterpoint in 2 voices; that Schenkerism essentially claims all good music elaborates a specific species counterpoint error.
- Joshua Clement Broyles
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review