Just a Thought

After my celebration of J.S. Bach's 324th birthday, I began to remember some controversy concerning the Prelude I in C Major, BWV 924(a). Controversy is rarely without a protagonist and this controversy would not be possible without the help of well known theorist Heinrich Schenker.

Schenker developed a method of musical analysis justly named Schenkerian Analysis and touted this method as the last word for analysts and critics of tonal music. In short, Schenkerian Analysis places a hierarchy on pitch class and harmony, exposing the important details of the piece through reduction.

Schenker spent many hours analyzing BWV 924 constantly referring to it as either a draft of another work or even dictating that it was written by J.S. Bach's son Wilhelm Friedmann Bach. The fact is that J.S. Bach wrote these works (included in the Well-Tempered Clavier) to aid his son in learning not only to play the keyboard, but to also tune it himself (see this great analysis I found concerning Bach's tuning using BWV 924). Schenker went so far as to omit pitches from BWV 924 and in the early 20th century during which he had a great hold over the world of concert music, his "corrections" were eventually published as accurate and used instead of the original score.

Schenker failed to realize that instead of what he noticed as erroneous harmony in the middle (I must mention that it is in the exact center of the piece; some sort of palindromic puzzle?) of the Prelude that Bach was also giving lessons in counterpoint to his son. Schenker decides that omitting the leading tone in mm. 22 and 23 (this is from memory folks; measure numbers could be slightly off) would give him the ability to analyze the harmony as a II chord rather than an unresolved leading tone. Schenker does NOT realize, however, that Bach was using a canon at the 7th to modulate quickly to a new key. This is precisely where Schenker did not know about Bach's tuning methods (see link above) which augmented the frequencies of the thirds for all keys in order to modulate very quickly and smoothly without notice from the listener. Bach also used the wolf tone to create a more uniform tuning system, closer to equal temperament, but more closely to Pythagorean and Just intonation. Schenker was working in a strictly equal-tempered mind frame that limited his analysis.

Rather than turn this into a long analysis, I will end with this:

Schenkerian analysis is not to be taken lightly as it is respected to this day as a very important technique in musical analysis. But I do not agree with his idea that analysis (especially his) can be used to critique the validity of music and it's author.