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2 - The Music-Theoretical Content of Schenker’s Theory of Harmony (1906) and the Status of Harmony in His Later Work

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2020

Matthew Brown
Affiliation:
Rochester NY
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Summary

The Viennese Theory of Harmony at Mid-Century

Schenker's harmony teacher during the time he studied at the conservatory in the late 1880s was the Austrian composer and organist, Anton Bruckner (1824–96). Simon Sechter (1788–1867), the leading theorist in Vienna in the first half of the nineteenth century, had been Bruckner’s teacher between 1856 and 1861, the lessons consisting entirely of exercises in harmony, not composition. Indeed, Sechter forbade Bruckner to compose during the time he studied with him. Apparently, no archival material remains from Schenker's study with Bruckner, but Bruckner's teaching at the university has been well documented. It was essentially Sechter's system of harmony that Bruckner taught (in a lightly edited version), recently published when Bruckner studied with him. Schenker's study with Bruckner, however, was more than thirty years later, and Bruckner was famous for recycling the same lecture notes year after year. It is almost certain that he would have concentrated his teaching at the conservatory, where Schenker studied with him, on the same material he taught at the university. By the time Schenker studied Sechter's system, it was thirty-five years since its publication date. Heavily indebted to eighteenth-century sources as it was—and Rameau in particular—it had become that much more out of date by the late 1880s.

Sechter was an organist and composer of great industry, if not originality, steeped in the sacred music tradition of “strict composition” set forth most famously by his Viennese predecessor of the early eighteenth century, Johann Josef Fux (ca. 1660–1741). Sechter, from Bohemia (the westernmost region of the present-day Czech Republic), was highly regarded in Vienna as a composer and teacher of counterpoint by the 1820s, to the extent that Schubert had a lesson with him on the fugal answer. One of his first published works was a “figured-bass” book, apparently in the eighteenth-century tradition. In reality, however, it also looked forward to his main work, the Grundsätze. Sechter finally ascended to a position at the conservatory in 1851; very likely the Grundsätze emerged from his teaching there.

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Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2020

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