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 plainly 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)

JMT series, part 6b-3

This continues from yesterday's post to examine linear analyses of Beethoven, Symphony no. 1, III, and also to discuss its pervasive figure of the rising fourth.

In the previous post, I noted that Schachter's analysis of tonal structure was "bizarre, in my view radically un-Schenkerian." The sense of this assessment is apparent enough in the background/first middleground (63), which I have reproduced and annotated:

Far more (on traditional terms) mechanically and (in my view) musically plausible readings are shown below.

One can, of course, always read from ^3. This analysis takes the E5 in bar 3 as its focal tone--not unreasonable as it is the endpoint of the tonic prolongation in the opening phrase. The reading positions the "flat-key" area within a dominant prolongation, which matches our expectations about tonal design and formal functions. And the ending is conventional too, though ^2 must be implied (not shown that way, here) if one is taking the first violins, first oboe, and first flute as the line. There is a simple ^3-^2-^1 in the first horn and viola. Details of this reading may be found on my Google Drive page: link.

The traditional reading from ^5 fits the music as well as the one from ^3, with the exception that ^5 appears in the first obviously non-tonic moment (I've whisked that away in the graph, but you can see it in the score -- top of the previous post). This graph also shows more clearly that V in the retransition has been replaced by iii (as iii6/4).

A descending line from ^8 is not possible, but one can hear a stable ^8 -- surrounded by neighbor notes -- if one takes the strongest shape of the opening, the rising fourth motive, and chooses its goal tone as a long range focal tone. Details of this reading may be found on my Google Drive page: link.

The rising fourth motive and the persistent register play make a reading with a proto-background quite convincing. For more on proto-backgrounds, see my essay on Texas Scholar Works: link.

Finally, a reading meant to support the previous two, but I think also quite strong on its own. The fourth motive is stated three times, as three 2 bar ideas, in the first strain. A cadential gesture finishes. In the B section, the motive is continually present, as an obvious inverse, then expanded to a sixth in the approach to the cadence on bII. After that, the original and inverse are combined in the "codetta" to the Db cadence. A distorted version in the retransition is followed by the 14-bar expansion of the main theme in the reprise (bars 45-58), where the motivic idea is heard six times before the cadence formula. In the second half of the coda the rising motive and the falling melodic formula are opposed.

The three main cadences (not counting the one in Db major or bars 67-76) have versions of the same rhythmic figure and falling shape. At (a), the accented bar is on V/V. At (b), it is on the cadential dominant 6/4, but at (c) it is on the tonic -- the cadence came before it this time. It is this motivically driven dramatic plan that allows us to hear the final bars and not the earlier formula as the proper end of this menuetto/scherzo.

References:
Schachter, Carl. 2000. “Playing What the Composer Didn’t Write: Analysis and Rhythmic Aspects of Performance.” In Essays in Honor of Jacob Lateiner, edited by Bruce Brubaker and Jane Gottlieb, 47-68. Pendragon.

JMT series, part 6b-2 (note 31, the waltz ninth)

Beethoven, Symphony no. 1, Scherzo. As we saw in the earlier post, part 6a-1, the scherzo of the Second Symphony clearly draws on the "waltz ninth" device -- that is, positioning both ^6 and ^7 over the dominant. The Menuetto in the First Symphony is equally clear in its final cadence—see below—but the analysis of the background will not be as simple.

My comment in the note: "if the structural cadence is taken to be at the end and not in mm. 57-58." That was a somewhat risky statement, as the usual formal functions would certainly point to bars 57-58. In an essay on analysis and performance (that is, recordings), Carl Schachter predictably took me to task on that point: "The phrase that begins with m. 52 represents the Menuet’s structural cadence, closing into the final structural tonic in m. 58. The emphasis on ^1 starting in m. 58 is so unremitting that we must regard the closing measures as a coda; David Neumeyer's suggestion that the structural close might be at the very end, with an ascending Urlinie ^5-^6-^7-^8 is not very plausible, at least to my ear." On the face of it--thinking of it in terms of 18th century formal function clichés--he is right. Here is the reprise (in Singer's transcription) with annotations following Caplin. Everything is "textbook": the reprise offers a complete theme (a 14-bar sentence) with a PAC in the tonic at the end, after which a pedal point tonic runs along for several bars before giving way to accelerated V-I figures culminating in one last emphatic cadence. The two cadences are boxed.

Nevertheless, this menuet/scherzo strikes me as an early instance in which the rising gesture, common to codas in this period, begins to contest priority with the standard structural cadence that complies with the expected formal functions. As I have written elsewhere in this blog and in essays, this change was in part due to the historical shift away from partimento practices; that is to say, from the Italian models that had dominated European music for well over a century. The muddling of the formal functions themselves was the principal route for a changed role for rising gestures, including the rising line, as we saw in the scherzo of the Second Symphony. Beethoven doesn't rethink cadence and coda so fundamentally in the First Symphony—basically, I agree with Schachter's objection as based on routine formal functions—but I will argue for the final bars as the culmination of a developmental process that bypasses—skips over—the structural cadence.

I am, however, obliged to disagree almost entirely with Schachter's Schenkerian analysis, which is, to put it mildly, bizarre, with chromatic parallels in the first middleground, notes plucked out of the bass when they don't need to be, and an imagined ^3 and ^2 in the background descent.

Schachter describes his essay as a study in “how an awareness of large-scale connections can help one in working out appropriate strategies for pacing, accentuation, and other rhythmic details of performance. I shall be concentrating on a few small details, but they are details whose shaping depends upon a conception of the work as a whole, for these details—far from having a simple location in their immediate environments—reverberate throughout the entire piece. . . . These intimations of the whole suggest to me ways of playing that one might not adopt if the detail were of purely local significance” (48).

He looks at three pieces on these terms, the last of them being the scherzo in the First Symphony. A “Menuetto” in name only, this movement is in a tempo fast enough to push it well out of the realm of dance music—the topical basis of the third movement in 18th century symphonies, including Mozart’s and (most of) Haydn’s—toward autonomous instrumental music. Or, better said, toward a different and largely new topical association. Had he followed 18th century conventions, Beethoven would have notated the movement in 6/8 time, as a gigue.

Beethoven, Symphony no. 1, III, opening (reduction):

Notation of the opening melody as a gigue:

As we know now, in the 18th century notation itself had strong topical associations (Allanbrook 1983; cited in Mirka 2014). Listening to the examples above, it is obvious that the "Menuetto" is no jig either, practical or stylized: it is frenetic, quixotic, sometimes dramatic, and sharply profiled in dynamics, register, and treatment of instruments. In other words, the topic is new, perhaps born out of the late symphonies of Haydn or perhaps an intensified (but also warped), stylized version of the German dance (Deutscher), the faster and usually louder alter ego of the Ländler.

We will pass through the early history of "scherzo" quickly. It apparently originated about 1600 as a verse form and therefore was linked to vocal music. When the term moved over into instrumental music later in the century and in the early 18th century, it almost always designated a movement in a multi-movement set, in duple meter (most often 2/4) and without trio. It may well have been an alternative title to the ambiguous "aria." Haydn in his string quartets, opus 33, used the term deliberately to designate movements that take the place of the menuet in a sonata cycle, and Beethoven eventually followed suit. According to Hugh McDonald, "it was Beethoven who established the scherzo as a regular alternative to the minuet and as a classic movement-type. From his earliest works the scherzo appears . . . in place of the minuet, and he took the term literally by giving the movement a light and often humorous tone." Of the pieces immediately preceding the First Symphony, which is Opus 26, four (opuses 20, 23-25) contain scherzi. Here are incipits:

From the Septet, op. 20, in Carl Czerny's reduction. As in opus 26, instrumentation, register, dynamics, and meter/accent are all in play.

 From the Violin Sonata, op. 23. "Scherzoso" here is obviously a qualifier for "Andante," not a topic on its own.

From the Violin Sonata, op. 24:

From the Serenade, op. 25 in a later reduction:

And here are incipits from pieces following the First Symphony:

From the Piano Sonata, op. 28:

From the String Quintet, op. 29 in a later reduction:

From the Violin Sonata, op. 30n2:

Not surprisingly, the issue at hand for Schachter with respect to performance is hypermeter; like Beethoven’s later scherzi, the First Symphony's "Menuetto" is written in 3/4 meter but without question each bar is like a beat. Schachter focuses on the problem of the proper downbeat for the hypermeter: is it in bar 1 or bar 2? I have rewritten the opening melody in 6/4 meter to try to capture these two versions:

To Schachter, "b" is the proper meter, and "a" is a "shadow meter," maintained sufficiently that it *could* become the primary meter by means of later developments in the movement. The drama of the piece is the conflict between these two and its late resolution (in the reprise). Engaging though the account is on its own terms, it founders on two points: (a) as I said earlier, a bizarre, in my view radically un-Schenkerian reading of tonal structure; (b) in Schachter's final recommendation, small fruit from all the detailed analysis: he suggests making the accents of bars 3 & 4 roughly equal, the larger gestures of the reprise then bringing the metric conflict to resolution. Those larger gestures were going to happen anyway, the aural legacy of subtle differences in the opening measures being negligible.

The figure of the rising fourth motive, on the other hand, will remain memorable throughout.

I'll discuss point (a) in tomorrow's post.

References:
Allanbrook, Wye. 1983. Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart. University of Chicago Press.
McDonald, Hugh, and Tilden A. Russell. "Scherzo." Oxford Music Online.
Mirka, Danuta. 2014. "Topics and Meter." In The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory, 357-380.
Schachter, Carl. 2000. “Playing What the Composer Didn’t Write: Analysis and Rhythmic Aspects of Performance.” In Essays in Honor of Jacob Lateiner, edited by Bruce Brubaker and Jane Gottlieb, 47-68. Pendragon.

Search: "Ascending Urlinie"

All this long while it never occurred to me to do a simple internet search on "Ascending Urlinie." Having now done same, I have a couple comments about entries and their position in the list; and I will publish posts about some new items found through the search. NB: The search was done on 16 January 2017. As little as a week later, I noticed several changes in the search results, especially after page 1.

(Like everyone else, of course, I do occasionally check my name; recently, an internist from Burlington, Massachusetts, and a lawyer from Virginia ousted me from my longstanding top spot on a Google search, but I'm retired and they're welcome to it.)

Not surprisingly, my JMT article from 1987 came up first--that's due, no doubt, to a combination of longevity and the fact that it continues to show up on course syllabi. I do find it odd that JStor has altered the title to The Ascending "Urlinie" -- quotes rather than italics for the second word. That seems to be the rule for articles--I note that Steve Helfing's article on Quantz in the same issue has "Versuch" and not Versuch. Yet book titles in the reviews are italicized. Something clumsy left over from old library database programs?

The second entry in the search results is the first in a long series of posts responding to Carl Schachter's criticisms of the ascending Urlinie: link to that post. As I explain there, the opportunity for personal engagement on the question was cut short by the coincidence of my being out of the country when he delivered a talk at my home institution, Indiana University, and by the fact that I was already becoming heavily involved with film and film music studies; although I did publish a few things in the 1990s, including one of the first articles to focus on ideology in Schenkerian theory and practice, my mind was on Max Steiner, not Mozart. I am glad to see that readers do go to that page. Also, after two irrelevant entries (they find "ascending" and "Urlinie" separately) there appears my PDF essay that gathers all the posts in the series: link to that essay.

The sixth entry is this blog. [place pleasantly smiling emoji here] The seventh is my post giving title and abstract for Michael Buchler's SMT paper from 2015: link. I have no idea why that particular post should appear so early, but if it gives attention to Michael's work, I am pleased with that.

The last three entries on the first search page are a citation to the JMT article from one of those useless "open library" sites, then a citation to a book chapter by Schachter, and a citation to a footnote in an early article on Richard Strauss by Timothy L. Jackson.

Page 2 in the search has items 11-20. Among these are mentions in two research guides (by Benjamin Ayotte and David Carson Berry), two citations in work I have discussed elsewhere on the blogs (Schachter on Chopin E-Major Prelude; Matthew Brown on Schenkerian theory), PDFs of William Drabkin's chapter on Schenker from the Cambridge History of Western Music Theory (presumably meant for class use--I hope they were cleared).

On this and subsequent pages (I only went as far as page 6), there appeared links to several items that are of interest to us here: among them, a passage from Suzannah Clark's book on Schubert, Channan Willner's essay "The Polyphonic Ursatz," and articles on Sergeant Pepper and on jazz. In subsequent, if occasional, posts, I will have comments on these, as well as on Michael Buchler's published articles about popular music (but also the SMT paper examples).

On the "March" Prelude in Chopin's Opus 28

The steadily rising scale figures in each of the three phrases of Chopin's E-major Prelude are emphatic and obvious (so is the sudden drop at the end of the second phrase). In a recently published book The Art of Tonal Analysis: Twelve Lessons in Schenkerian Theory (Oxford University Press, 2016; edited as a labor of love, I suspect, by Joseph Straus), Carl Schachter says that "some people analyze this piece with an Urlinie that rises a fourth: B-C#-D#-E. I think, however, that it is quite possible to hear instead a very subtle and wonderful descending Urlinie, but to do so one has to be quite un-literal in one's use of the theory" (56). [You can read the chapter on two preludes in the Google Books preview window.]

Here is his Example 3.10, which shows the middleground and background shapes of the upper voice:

For the record, I was the first to assert the abstract pitch design by which a primary line descends from ^3 (while a secondary line rises from the lower ^5). I did this in a footnote to a well-known article, "The Ascending Urlinie" (Journal of Music Theory 31/2 (1987); in fn28: "Pieces which appear to use a rising line from ^5 but in fact do not include Chopin, Prelude in E Major, op. 28, no. 9; [instead it is] a three-part Ursatz with line from ^3 above; ^2 implied in the cadence."

In another article published the same year, I provided a graph: from "The Three-Part Ursatz," In Theory Only 10/1-2: 28.

This gives less emphasis to the arpeggios, but my point was to place attention on the inversion of the third G#-B to the sixth B-G#, in line with middleground transformations that I identify in the article. Here is a schematic version of the example below showing this:

Finally, here is a link to a facsimile of my sketch from 1982: holograph sketch of Op28n9.