Carl Schachter

 The Juilliard School’s public announcement of Carl Schachter's death calls him “a leading expert in Schenkerian analysis, a method of analyzing tonal music.” I have to say I disagree with that label: in my view, Schachter was without dispute the leading expert in traditional Schenkerian analysis. 

Similarly, the Society for Music Analysis (UK) says of him that “[he became] one of the foremost interpreters of the Schenkerian tradition.” [SMA — UK]  I like this a bit more because “interpreters” acknowledges something central to what seems to me to be Schachter's own understanding, goals, and practice: he recognized that Schenkerian analysis was always about interpretation, that this was the goal of its system. For Schenker himself, the interpretative was ideological--strong statements of belief--in his last years even theological, as some of the formulations in the final version of Free Composition show. For Schachter some of those aspects may have been there (I don't know); if so their cultural scope was narrower than Schenker's but certainly it was both more actively and more intimately musical.

My views chime in tune with those expressed by Michael Buchler: "Schachter was hardly doctrinaire. He laid the groundwork for a changing practice, one that accounts for ever more musical features and that scrutinizes how we make musical decisions. And though the repertoire he studied was more limited to classical (Baroque, Classical, and Romantic) music than the music I most frequently study, the generalizability of his practice informs my own work in very deep ways." (post to Facebook 24 May 2026)

blog update

 For a list of all the essays I've posted to Texas ScholarWorks, 

go either to the platform's main page: link to Texas ScholarWorks, then to the front page of the UT Faculty/Researcher Works section: link.

or go directly to the front page of the UT Faculty/Researcher Works section: link. 

Scroll down and click on "Search"

Then click on Filters/Author, and my name will come up as one of the most frequent contributors. 

Alternatively you can search UT Faculty/Researcher Works by department (see at the right of the first graphic above), where all but 4-5 entries are mine.

Or you can look in the blog's "labels" list for "index." I have published several, not through the present, but at least through 2024.

New publication

 From a recent Facebook post:  

I just published an essay "American Songs, 1900-1930" as part of a series on ascending and upper-register cadence gestures. I was inspired by Michael Buchler's engaging and insight-filled work on this repertoire. https://hdl.handle.net/2152/136686

Irving Berlin, "Climbing Up the Scale" (1923)

 Irving Berlin, "Climbing Up the Scale" (1923). I admit this one's a bit embarrassing, but it's nevertheless in good company with "Doe, a Deer" from Sound of Music a few decades later.

van Alstyne, Ypsilanti

 van Alstyine, "Ypsilanti" (1915). Here ^8 is a prominent and expressive cover tone, and the line moves from ^5 in what is ultimately a simple rising line ^5-^8.

Henry Marshall, "Dinah!" (1913)

From March 2026: A post with information and links to galleries of simple ascending lines and to other essays of mine published on the Texas Scholarworks platform: link.

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Henry Marshall, "Dinah!" (1913). At the outset, ^5 is the main inner voice, with ^3 as the upper voice. In the altered repeat ("Dinah!"), ^5 moves up for a while, until the cadence, where it is again in the fourth octave, but as we've seen before, it could easily be shifted up an octave to close a stage performance of the song. As it stands, this is a wedge where the ascending lower voice is set against the upper descent from ^3 (bar 2, returns in bars 10-11), an assumed ^2 with ^3 then substituting in bar 15 before we reach ^1 in bar 16.

C. K. Harris, "Climb a tree with me" (1912)

From March 2026: A post with information and links to galleries of simple ascending lines and to other essays of mine published on the Texas Scholarworks platform: link.

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Charles K. Harris, "Climb a tree with me" (1912). It might not seem very promising to begin a song on climbing with an octave's worth of descending tonic-chord arpeggio, but there is a clue in the answering phrase, "As we climbed long years ago." The lower ^5, as Eb4, goes up to a firmly held ^6, and "all the birds sang" with ^7 suggests going further. In the end, the proto-background interval of the octave (shown with the unfolding in bars 1-4 and again later) maintains Eb5 while its lower element Eb4 closes to Ab4. This is not a wedge--Eb5 stays put and the principal line is the one that proceeds from Eb4.

Given the intervallic frame, it's not surprising that the common expressive ascent in the upper register should be easy to manage. Here is my alternate or second ending, following the model of songs discussed in a previous post: link.