As the school year approaches it occurs to me that I haven’t been teaching my Advanced Analysis course—a full year of Schenkerian analysis—as well as I might. A generation ago practical working musicians shunned Schenkerian theory as forbiddingly cerebral, but nowadays the broad outlines of Schenkerian analysis have gone mainstream. Happily, the esoterica haven’t come along for the ride. It has taken several generations of riffling through Schenker’s books, papers, and analyses to separate wheat from chaff.
However, Schenkerism still exhibits a fair amount of clubbiness amongst its devotées, who are likely to spout cascades of German gobbledegook that winds up alienating more than enlightening. Graphic analysis looks way cool, but it communicates nothing to the uninitiated. The very name of the thing—Schenkerian analysis—brands it as a pursuit set apart from good old analysis, which is generally expressed in terms that any reasonably educated musician is likely to recognize and understand. Modern-day Schenkerian theory is shedding much of its separatist lingo and attitudes, as it bloody well should. I’m a musician, not a propellerhead, and for me music theory is a living, breathing, and above all musical practice that can be just as viable a form of expression as playing the piano. I’m a blue-collar theory teacher. I have already jettisoned the German vocabulary, although I pass on the most common terms (urlinie, ursatz, anstieg, stufe, bassbrechung) so my students can navigate the literature should the need arise.
Yet I don’t think I’m getting it quite right for that critical first month or so, because by diving right into basic Schenkerian concepts, I have overlooked that my students need to improve their listening, hearing, and observing before they can progress. It doesn’t really matter what system they use if they listen to a piece of music and hear next to nothing, look at musical notation and see next to nothing, or fail to understand what it is they’re hearing and seeing. Schenkerian theory can’t help them there; in fact, it will probably make matters worse.
If I could point to the single most effective analysis class I taught in recent years it would be the morning I set my students on the task of making observations about a few measures of a Haydn symphony movement. The rules were simple: make an observation that isn’t analytical. So it’s fine to say that there is a tenuto over the B-flat on the first beat of the second measure, but I would prefer you shy away from the B-flat in the second measure is the resolution of the A-natural in the first measure. At least shy away from it for now; later on we’ll start making analytical comments on the basis of our observations.
We went around the room; one student, one observation. Everybody played, nobody could pass. As they got into the swing of the thing, the observations came more quickly. As we wound down, it became more and more difficult for students to find new things. But I persisted—I could spot a lot of stuff that had not yet been uncovered—and, with a bit of coaching here and there, we got the bulk of it.
It transformed the way they thought of the section analytically. Once we began examining the harmony, melodic figurations, rhythms, texture, and the like, they went deep fast. Then we went wide. Memorable morning for all concerned, I think.
Thus my decision to change the first part of the course and incorporate that observation-analysis drill, before dropping even the slightest hint of Schenkerian theory. Get them thinking closely about music, far more intensely than just your usual oh, this is a three-part song form or oh, that’s an inverted augmented sixth chord or even oh, that’s invertible counterpoint. Get them to look and listen, really look and listen, and not just sit there staring blankly or letting the sound flow into one ear and out the other.
The English language reveals that we haven’t thought much about close hearing. We don’t have a word for it. We have words for looking carefully: observe, scrutinize, pore over, examine, and the like. But those are all vision-oriented words. We don’t scrutinize by ear, after all, although there’s really no reason why we couldn’t. All we have are words such as hear and listen, and I’ll be damned if I’ll coin some loathsome techie term just to fill the need. (There is no hell hot enough for the tone-deaf solfège teacher who coined audiate.) Nope. We’ll just have to muddle through with the words we have, inadequate though they may be.
That’s why I’m going to distinguish between listen and listen up. “Up” as an intensifying particle is a dandy English practice: eat it all up, snap it up, wake up, fuck up. We already use listen up as an exhortation: now y’all listen up here when I’ze talkin’ to yer!
So we’ll learn to examine, to scrutinize, to observe. More than anything, though, we’re going to listen up, and we’re going to listen up real good.