Honestly. at first it seems daunting and the texts seem dense, but after spending 16 years in musical higher education, it doesn’t just seem like that at first. it stays that way forever.
Really? I struggled with music theory for years! until I found Shenker, it honestly makes a lot of sense to me now that I think about it in a different way rather than like math. Multiple correct solutions, one being more elegant than another is a really good way of putting it.
@@bassoskat What kind of ear trainning do you do at music university which is beyond AP music theory or Grade 8 ABRSM? do you recommend any books or links?
@@HelloooThere What kind of ear trainning do you do at music university which is beyond AP music theory or Grade 8 ABRSM? do you recommend any books or links?
I can appreciate Schenkerian analysis from a composer's perspective to understand the music more linearly. However, from an audience's perspective, how successive reductions of musical architecture down ultimately to "I-V-I" gives any value to appreciate the music he/she listens to? In tonal music, the majority would be reduced down to "I-V-I." It is saying as if "What matters is where you will eventually get, which is the tonic preceded by the dominant. The details of how you get there is not that important." This is so untrue than anything else I've seen. I truly appreciate anybody who can illuminate to me where I missed the point of this.
I appreciate the clarity and brevity, but let's be honest: the preferred solution is 3-2-1 because that's what all Schenkerian analysis prefers. One could easily argue that it's more "elegant" to give preference to events that occur on metrically strong beats. That should have been mentioned when discussing the two possibilities. I think many of us would be more curious about the practice if it didn't seem so dogmatic.
Thank you for explaining this approach to music analysis. I've heard the term "Schenkerian analysis" before but never realized just how useless and scholastic it is. By eliminating rhythm and meter as a first pass of reduction, approximately 70% of the musical content is immediately discarded. Furthermore the harmonic progression's relationship to the meter is also removed, and thus no serious harmonic analysis can actually be done. It's also puzzling that any idiomatic metro-rhythmic structures which might in fact comprise the primary content of the piece are totally disregarded as unimportant. How on earth a performer or composer (or anyone really) could find this form of analysis as useful in answering the question of "what is the content of this music and how can I best interpret / understand it?" is absolutely baffling to me. What a historical oddity that this form of "analysis" has become dominant in America (nowhere else by the way) when compared to functional approaches such as described by Riemann and elaborated by Xolopov! It seems everyone has forgotten that the point of music is to be emotionally expressive, and is thus primarily based on idioms. Any reductionist approach disregarding idioms is a nonstarter. Music is a temporal art. It's insane to disregard its primary axis of expression as a first pass of reduction (rhythm and meter). That's like saying the first thing you should do when analyzing a piece of fine art is to close your eyes.
Fantastic video! Your explanation makes this difficult concept very easy to understand. Are you going to make more Schenkerian Analysis in your channel? Maybe perform this analysis to a full piece of music? Thank you very much!
Thanks! I was going to but it seems someone else has uploaded a whole series on youtube: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Y6R5C4iy1Qg.html I do have plans for other music analysis things though!
The structures shown in Schenker graphs are not structures intrinsic to the music treated by Schenkerians. They are structures imposed upon the music by means of Schenkerian interpretation. Schenkerians don't analyze the music; Schenkerians analyze Schenkerian interpretation of the music.
I have not done Schenkerian Analysis since writing my master's thesis in the late 90s, so this is refreshing, but am I missing something? You refer to the third line of treble clef as a "D." I play organ weekly and know this as "B." Am I missing something , or is this an error on your part? Thanks. I remember enjoying this a long time ago and look forward to giving this a go as I approach retirement.
The video says there is another video on this channel that deals with roman numbering, scale etc. There is only one video I can find when I click on this channel which is this video on schenkarian analysis
Maestro; thank you much for sharing your musicality and teaching to someone like me. This is allows me/us to make progress. Sir do you have a reference sheet on this lesson, if not you should. Again, please do stop and continue. Respects, R
Schenker applied these principles to what he called "free composition", which is basically classical tonal music (from around 1750 to about the death of Beethoven). If the idea is to apply these techniques "word-for-word" then they will only really work with this kind of music. However, Schenker is based on and uses many analytical techniques that can apply to a wide range of musics. There is of course harmonic analysis that can be applied to any music built on chords (even things like jazz where harmony isn't always "functional"). Then there's the rules of voice leading which apply also in counterpoint music like Bach's chorales and Palestrina's ecclesiastic medieval music. Many modern forms of popular music (pop, rock, rnb, hip hop etc.) are often very simple uses of the tonal system (the organizing factor of music today is more timbre rather than harmony or melody). This means that you can usually find the kind of elaborations you would see at the foreground level in these kinds of songs, but not the larger background layer elaborations. That being said, you can always reduce a pop song to a basic harmonic progression (although it's usually very flat). Schenkerian analysis is a good starting point for getting into music analysis. It teaches us important techniques such as reduction and formalisation that, while may not be applied directly in the same way to other musics, are important skills to master when looking to understand musics that don't have a lot of analytical literature behind them. I'm currently working on an in-depth guide to Schenkerian analysis that is divided into sections - each section can be applied to other types of music. Look out for that soon! There are musics where I would argue that Schenker doesn't help us at all, such as noise music, spectral music, free improvisation... But there are others that could certainly prove me wrong!
It may be applied most easily to music written by tonal composers exposed to something called "The Rule of the Octave". But Schenker and other Schenkerians hold that music to which it cannot be easily applied is culturally inferior and not worth "analyzing" anyway.
samco I use lilypond to do the graphs - I think it's the best tool for it. It's also open source and free. I plan to do a video demonstrating how I use lilypond for this but that's quite far off I'm afraid - there are lots of resources online for learning lilypond though !
@@segno8163 Thank you both for a brilliant educational video which I found most informative and also for advice on software. Are you familiar with Sibelius Student Version 6.2 which I was required to use for a recent music course - if so how does it compare with lilypond please? In a handbook by Nicholas Cook the graphics for Schenkerian analysis look quite complex. I have just started studying music analysis and need to ensure I have the right software for higher assessed tasks.
samco I've always found Sibelius to be terribly clunky, but it is more polished and easier to pick up. Lilypond is similar to coding and at first can take a while to get used to. I think that it can be worth learning lilypond if you think you will do a lot of this stuff in the future, but probably sticking with Sibelius is fine, at least at first. Plus, I already had quite a bit of experience in coding when I learned lilypond so didn't have too much trouble figuring it out - if you don't you may find the approach a bit difficult to grasp. You can do anything with either software, I just find lilypond to be more efficient for me. Hope this helps!
Great explanation of a sad scam that still, with roman numeral theory, purports to "explain" music made by people who would have scoffed at these ideas. Composers will do better to get up to speed on partimento than Schenker, whose cult has wasted an entire century with non-musical distraction. Compose from the keyboard, and ignore specious reduction. The last useful music theorist was Fenaoroli, if you judge by results.
Allen and Gilbert's book is insane. They don't underline the point of the analysis and why its used in the intro so its not that helpful unless you already have a exellent understanding of harmony and the principles of this analysis.
This reminds me of the chemical analysis of chocolate chip cookies. Chemical analysis of chocolate chip cookies is not chocolate chip cookies. Analyzing music is not music. Analysis is a function of subjective perception and can therefore be done in more than one way. If Shenker had been a competent composer he would never have turned the majority of his efforts to analysis. He was primarily an analyzer, not primarily a composer, in the same way that Beethoven was primarily a composer, not primarily an analyzer, though each man was in some degree partly the other. Primary composers understand more than Shenker understood, and in a different way. It is not Beethoven's analytical ability that we love. Nor do we love Shenker's music I dare say. His analysis I can very well do without. Music itself is relevant in a way that analysis cannot be.
@@joshuabroyles7565 Thank you for this. I've finally watched a summary of this form of analysis and am baffled by how utterly arbitrary it seems to be. There is no clear "goal" of this analysis and it appears to be disinterested in "what makes the music expressive?" which should really be the whole point, since music is all about... you know... expressing emotion.
@@AndrewZey I don't have a real problem with the fact that it fails to address what makes music expressive. I have a problem with the circular epistemology.
Quite a Eurocentric way of seeing music actually, with a huge focus on pitch and leaving everything else aside. As anybody with experience in both "classical" and "popular" worlds can attest to, rhythm is considered but a minor detail in classical circles, but is absolutely paramount in popular music. I am not the only one who thinks this way, I know of a student of "classical" percussion that is coming from a Caribbean country with a strong tradition in rhythm, and he just can't believe how sloppy not only the students, but even the professors are (at a class of classical percussion in a major European conservatory). Their sense of rhythm is absolutely wanting, and it is not by chance. The "classical" education takes into account the pitches of the notes way too much and forgets the real core of music which is rhythm. Every time a classically trained musician plays a syncopated passage, well, you better fasten your sit belts.
just to make sure, it is not to criticize that this way of analyzing considers pitches, but the fact that it leaves aside the metrical placement of such notes, or the fact that they repeat, as if it were just a minor detail, is quite remarkable if you get to have a viewpoint a bit more distanced from the Eurocentric view of music, the view that people like this Schenker and Adorno exemplify so well.
Redundant, impractical and time consuming. I wonder if great artists like Horowitz, Grinberg, Feinberg, bothered with this.....they played like the invested time in practicing not in theorizing....
you made at least 2 mistakes not saying what you were doing. , saying d to g instead of b to g. so you didnt go over this before you made the video which is careless.
