The theories of Heinrich Schenker (1868–1935) have had no small impact on musical thought over the past seventy years, no doubt due in part to the interest that both the man and his writings have attracted from different populations: not just music theorists and analysts, but also cultural historians, cognitive scientists, linguists, performers, and aestheticians. As is widely known, Schenker travelled from the outer reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of the nineteenth century to live, study, and work in its capital, Vienna. It was from there that he produced an impressive body of musical writings, including critical editions, analytical pamphlets, and a tripartite tome titled Neue musikalische Theorien und Phantasien that explored what he saw as the essence of music's fundamental laws of harmony, strict counterpoint, and free composition. Bringing together worldviews that encompassed the tradition of nineteenth-century German metaphysics and Romanticism as well as a burgeoning age of aesthetic and philosophic modernism, Schenker ultimately proposed a theory of musical genius using his theory of the Ursatz, a fundamental musical organism embodying a synthesis of tonal music's core attributes—the linear unfolding of the consonant triad counterpointed by music's essential bass progression of the tonic and the dominant. For Schenker, this synthetic unity governs every stage of the creative process and also every hierarchic level of a composition, from the very surface of the music to its deepest recesses. ‘The combination’, Schenker writes:

At least within North American musicological discourse, few have undergone so sustained a critique as Schenker has. Many may even question whether his ideas can still be taken seriously in an age that is ubiquitously inflected by what Jean-François Lyotard famously dubbed the ‘postmodern condition’.