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 but certainly both more actively and more intimately musical.
