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Okay! Clearly, you people want to read about Schenker! Here, I will add some context to this NY Times article so you can understand who this Schenker person is, what his contribution is to music theory, and why you should care. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/14/arts/musicology-journal-race-free-speech.html
Disclaimers: I am not a Schenker specialist. I did write about him in grad school a bit, but there are many people here who know his work better than I do. I'm sure they will be responding to this thread with corrections and clarifications and I defer to them in advance.
Another thing. I'm biased! I think Schenker was a pretty terrible human being and that his influence on the American music academy has been malign. If you want a more evenhanded or pro-Schenker explainer, I am not your guy.
Okay! So. To understand this whole drama, first you have to know a little music theory. Western European musical tradition revolves around a particular chord progression called a cadence. Here are some cadences: https://www.noteflight.com/scores/view/b70f3854e66e7e7d18f45700c778cf4c77778b30
The first chord in each pair (the ones labeled G7) sound tense and unresolved. The second chord in each pair (the ones labeled C) sound relaxed and resolved. Western European music uses lots of other chord combinations, but this one is the foundation of the house.
Schenker's big idea about the canonical masterpieces was this: not only are cadences very important in this music, but at the deepest level, they are really the *only* things happening.
When you listen to Beethoven or Brahms, all that complexity is just surface decoration for big, slow cadences.
The joke about Schenker is that he tries to reduce all of music down to "Three Blind Mice." "Three" is a relaxed/resolved sound, "Blind" is a tense/unresolved sound, and then "Mice" is relaxed/resolved again. "Blind" to "Mice" is the cadence.
Many many music theorists here in the US find Schenker's theory to have profound explanatory power when applied to the great Germanic masterworks. That's true even of his biggest critics! Phil Ewell, the Schenker critic who set this whole thing off, is among them.
Schenkerian analysis does not work so well outside of the Germanic symphonic masterpieces, however. You can kind of apply it to older and more modern European classical, but it's awkward.
And the further you get from Western Europe, the more difficult it is to apply Schenker's theory. For example, some theorists have tried applying his approach to jazz, blues, or rock. Sometimes it works! Sometimes it really doesn't.
For Schenker, this wasn't a problem, because if a style of music wasn't amenable to analysis in his terms, it's because it isn't very good music. And if it can't be analyzed in his terms, then it isn't music at all.
Schenker wasn't just trying to explain the music of a particular time and place. He was trying to explain all music. Or at least, all valid music. And the music that he couldn't explain wasn't valid.
As you have no doubt read by now, Schenker was super racist. For example, he compared the music of Turkey and Japan to "the babbling of infants" - sometimes charming, but meaningless. He also didn't think much of non-German Europeans and their music.
Schenker also insisted that his political/racial beliefs were inseparable from his music theory. He saw the dominance hierarchy of notes and chords in music as mirroring the dominance hierarchy of the world's peoples.
Now comes the twist: Schenker was Jewish. He died before the Nazis came to power, but he was sympathetic with the broad strokes of German nationalism and superiority. Still, maybe he would have felt differently if he had lived longer? We'll never know.
Timothy Jackson, the Schenker scholar who mounted the scholarly attack on Phil Ewell, says that Schenker couldn't have been *that* racist, because he was a member of an oppressed minority! Ewell and other Schenker haters are guilty of anti-Semitism.
Bracketing the fact that there were plenty of racist Jews of Schenker's era and there are still plenty today, Schenker's repulsive personal beliefs are only part of the issue with his theory.
The main problem is Schenker's idea that he had developed a grand unified theory of musical structure, objective and valid in all circumstances.
The American music theory academy picked up Schenker and ran with him because this idea of an objective, math-like structure for the whole world's music was an extremely appealing one. Music theory could be a real science, not just a bunch of opinions!
The way they handled Schenker's racist ranting was to politely ignore it. They left it out of textbooks, and didn't talk about it in class. Up until very recently, you could learn tons about Schenker without ever finding out about it.
For example, when I did my masters at NYU, not so very long ago, the entire theory core was based on Schenker, and every music major had to learn his ideas, regardless of specialty. Like, I was a music tech student and I had to do it.
I reacted very negatively to this idea that everything can be reduced down to cadences. Even if you just limit yourself to the study of Western "art" music, that is not true. And if you're talking about, say, the blues, it's hilariously untrue.
Whether or not Schenker had the right idea about Beethoven is one argument (and not one that I'm interested in.) The bigger problem is the idea that a theory designed to explain Beethoven also explains everything else in the world.
So even at NYU, as woke an institution as exists in this world, the "music theory" sequence was exclusively concerned with this theory of Beethoven et al. They didn't call it "classical music theory" or "German music theory", they called it "music theory."
The Eurocentrism and white racial frame of academic music theory is not entirely Schenker's fault. He wasn't exactly an outlier in his era, he was just unusually outspoken in his beliefs. But he is a prominent and influential figure, and a useful object of criticism.
There are plenty of wonderful music theorists out there! Many of them are on Twitter. But the version of music theory you get in intro-level college classes hasn't changed much in a hundred years. It is a very small-c-conservative field of study.
I'm hardly an expert on the Germanic masterworks. But on the music that I am an expert in, Schenker's approach is hilariously terrible. For example! Remember my string of cadences? This thing? https://www.noteflight.com/scores/view/b70f3854e66e7e7d18f45700c778cf4c77778b30
In some contexts, like funk and blues, the roles of the two chords can be exactly reversed! The G7 chords can feel like home base, safe and resolved, and the C chords can feel like a departure from home base.
In groove-based musics, chord function is much more about *when* the chords happen than whatever notes they happen to contain. And dissonance and consonance work very differently in blues-based music than they do in 19th century German music.
Not all music has cadences. Not all music has chord progressions! Not all music even has chords, or piano-key pitches for that matter. And I'm not talking about "non-Western" music here. I'm talking about rap and dance music!
Schenker would say, well, no problem there, those things aren't music. Ben Shapiro's music theorist father who went to music school would agree.
My grad school music theory profs are good people, and not (outspokenly) racist. However, they do advance Schenker's politics by teaching his theories uncritically, and by excluding all the musics that those theories can't address.
Oh yeah, another thing. Schenker's main analytical technique is the "reduction" where you strip off the surface detail to reveal the deeper structures beneath. Not a terrible idea on its face.
However, by showing relationships across long stretches of musical time, Schenker is asking you to ignore musical time
For the Germanic masterworks, maybe the relationships between the chords are way more important than the specific time when those chords occur. I'm skeptical of this, but what do I know.
However, in the musics that I'm interested in, the specific timing of musical events matters a lot. It's the most important thing! Timing variations that you can measure in milliseconds can be the structural underpinnings of a groove.
What does Schenker have to say about "Papa Was a Rolling Stone" by the Temptations, which is twelve minutes long without any chord changes at all, and which revolves entirely around the nuances of its groove?
That's a rhetorical question. Schenker wouldn't have cared about the Temptations. The problem is that due in part to his influence, very few subsequent music theorists have cared about them either.
There's a large extent to which "music theory" as represented by core curricula is really just "harmony theory." This idea extends far beyond the traditional classical world. Academic jazz theorists are overwhelmingly obsessed with harmony as well.
Jazz theorists have to at least point to the importance of groove as a thing. But it's still a marginal topic. In jazz! And outside of the jazz specialists, groove barely exists at all.
While I'm on a roll, let's talk about the freedom of speech aspect of this whole drama. It's the silliest aspect. Timothy Jackson is arguing that the leftist mob ganging up on him represents a growing threat to academic discourse. Okay.
Jackson is complaining about being canceled in the New York Times, Fox News, uncountable conservative blogs and podcasts, etc. So it seems like his freedom of speech is doing fine. But that's beside the point.
The real thing is this: you can study music theory for a long time at many universities and encounter zero music written by black people, women, non-Europeans etc.
I had a grad school advisor who got an entire PhD in music composition from an extremely fancy university and who had never heard of the blues scale.
There's a widely used tonal theory textbook called The Complete Musician. It's written by a Schenkerian and 100% of the music in it is by white men. And it's called the "Complete" musician.
Phil Ewell, who Jackson is so concerned about, is himself an expert on Schenker. He has taught Schenker for years. He published an article in Jackson's very own Journal of Schenkerian Studies a few years back.
Meanwhile, Schenkerians are allowed to be shockingly ignorant of the world's music outside their area of specialty. Not to mention the music of their own cultures!
Whether or not Schenker gets canceled, I really don't care. I'm much more concerned about all those artists and traditions who are preemptively canceled by their exclusion from the curriculum.
As for Jackson and his putative cancellation, he made his bed. No one forced him to accuse Phil Ewell of being an anti-Semite, or to make ignorant and atavistic generalizations about black people and their musicality.
Jackson calls his treatment "cancellation," I call it "appropriate social consequences for being belligerent on a public forum without a lot of provocation."
