I reproduced Schenker's graph from my personal copy of the volume, and commented that "[At the time,] I came up with quite a different reading myself—Urlinie from ^5—but on revisiting the matter over this past week [May 2017], I find [Schenker's] first reading of the piece the most convincing of them all. It charts the course of the upper voice beautifully and therefore also matches the bass and its implied (partimento) figures."
As the examples in that post show, "them all" means Schenker's original reading with a rising line; later readings with descent from ^3 by Schenker, Nicolas Meeùs, and Matthew Brown; my alternate reading from ^5; and William Drabkin's reading from ^8 (which actually conforms most closely to Schenker's notation of the background--though not his text commentary--in the Tonwille essay).
As he does in other analytical essays in the series, Schenker begins by showing the "ground-plan," in this case the composing out from a fourth (G5-C6) by gradual accretion of inner voices, then a short linear prefix (E5-F5-G5) elaborated with neighbors, and finally the insertion of bass tones to achieve consonances without parallels. He says that "these interpolated roots . . . are subsumed, along with the neighbor notes, under the concept of a dissonant passing motion, so that they lack the significance of harmonic design in spite of their unbroken progression by fifths" (141-42). This "lack of significance" happens to cover the bass progression as Bach borrowed it from Niedt. It is an irony—though not a lovely one—that Schenker ignores the basis in figured bass practice represented by Niedt and that by all accounts was consistently maintained in Bach's teaching, in favor of an abstract hermeneutics that could only be derived ultimately from Rameau's pseudo-Newtonian structure of tonic, upper dominant, and lower dominant, as that model grounded the harmonic theories (and also the experimental practices) of the nineteenth century.
Not surprisingly then, Schenker misses altogether the compositional assignment as I described it in part 2's post: He says "For the further decoration of the setting the master employs suspensions." That suspensions are built on top of the bass progressions is obvious enough, but the master is in fact doing something unexceptional: one may find in hundreds of partimenti a pedagogical progression that leads to the invention and performance of such devices. Schenker is undeterred: "It is an eternal, irrefutable law of creative nature to show life itself openly, but to keep hidden the germ from which it springs. The deep wisdom of the great German masters, to fulfill this law consistently •in their artistic creations, too, in the least of them as in the greatest, truly cannot be praised enough!" (142). I have already dealt with the absurdity of claims like this in part 3a (link), and since the rest of the analysis follows in a similar vein, we can safely ignore it. I would, however, like to provide a summary of Schenker's account of the remainder of the Prelude in terms of its elaboration of the Urlinie and also comment briefly on his radical (but not unexpected) misconstrual of BWV 924a.
Below is my rough notation of the Urlinie and its bass, as pulled from the graph.
See paragraph 4 above for the "Anstieg" of bars 1-3. The connection between ^5 and ^6 is described similarly in the essay, the descending seventh-line being progressively elaborated by the lower parts. Of the important motions of bar 6, he says almost nothing: "After the fourth-progression has come to an end in bar 6, the leading tone appears immediately in bar 7." Considerable attention is then given to the elaboration of the dominant and that leading tone. Because "the dominant [chord on the first beat of bar 7] still lacks the seventh," the eleven bars of the cadenza "spin a tale" that involves appearance and disappearance of this seventh and the leading tone. He then invites us to "acquaint ourselves with the miraculous fruits of this profound narrative art." Schenker finishes his account with the observation that "For the unfolding of his God-given powers, even eighteen bars were enough for Bach."
It is hardly surprising, then, that Schenker denigrates BWV 924a. "If one also observes the stasis of the third E5 in bars 1 and 2 (how misleading the descent to B4, when E5 is recovered again immediately after it!), if [--additional objections here--]. . . then one has every justification to declare this version with certainty to be an earlier one, perhaps even a draft." Schenker's conclusion, as we know, is wrong in almost every respect.
Fortunately for us, the translator, Joseph Dubiel, with experience as a professional composer, hits the mark in a footnote: "In many respects the alternative version looks like a rearrangement of figures that are used sequentially in the principal version into different sequences, especially ones moving in opposite directions to their originals. Thus the second bar of [Friedemann's] version is parallel to the first, but a third lower (instead of a second higher), the bass of the dominant reached in bar 8 alternates G2-G3 (instead of G3-G2, as in bar 7 of the principal version), and the figuration over this bass rises (instead of falls)."
Clark, Suzannah. 2007. "The Politics of the Urlinie in Schenker's Der Tonwille and Der freie Satz," Journal of the Royal Musical Association, cxxxii/1: 141–64.
Lubben, Robert Joseph. 1995. "Analytic Practice and Ideology in Heinrich Schenker's Der Tonwille." PhD diss., Brandeis University.
Lubben, Robert Joseph. 1993. "Schenker the Progressive: Analytic Practice in Der Tonwille." Music Theory Spectrum 15/1: 59–75.
Pastille, William. 1995. "Schenker’s Value Judgments." Music Theory Online 1/6. Link.
Schenker, Heinrich. 2004. "Bach's Little Prelude No. 1 in C Major, BWV 924. 2004. Translated by Joseph Dubiel. In Der Tonwille: Pamphlets/Quarterly Publication in Witness of the Immutable Laws of Music, Offered to a New Generation of Youth. . . ., edited by William Drabkin, issues 1-5, 141-44. New York: Oxford University Press.
Schenker, Heinrich. 2005. Der Tonwille: Pamphlets/Quarterly Publication in Witness of the Immutable Laws of Music, Offered to a New Generation of Youth. . . ., edited by William Drabkin, issues 6-10. New York: Oxford University Press.
Der Tonwille. The Will of the Tone. [2017] Schenker Documents Online. http://www.schenkerdocumentsonline.org/profiles/work/entity-001739.html
--------------------
Postscript:
Matthew Brown discusses two analyses of BWV 924, the first of which closely follows Schenker's from Free Composition (Brown 2005, 126-139). But since Brown's readings are used to demonstrate his theory, which if anything hardens still more some of Schenker's assumptions, they offer nothing that's useful to us here. In general, Brown's theory is a "philosophical" rationalization of Schenker's theory; the other (and precedent) rationalization of Schenker—by Lerdahl and Jackendoff—along the lines of cognitive science models (as they stood in the early 1980s) but tempered by Lerdahl's compositional intuitions, is both more creative and more practical.
(Brown, Matthew. Explaining Tonality: Schenkerian Theory and Beyond. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2005.)
