The present volume brings together some 450 pieces of correspondence to and from the Austrian music theorist Heinrich Schenker. These have been arranged in six sections, each concerned with an aspect of Schenker’s long and wide-ranging career in music. Each section contains several individual chapters that cover the correspondence relating to a specific topic or episode: the publication of a single work, the negotiations with a publisher over a series of publications; an exchange with a particular correspondent at a particular time, a musical work that became a focal point in Schenker’s life, and so on. Broadly speaking, the chapters are arranged in chronological order, as are the larger sections themselves.

The title of this volume avoids the word “letters” so common on the title pages of editions of correspondence. While letters may be in the majority in the Schenker correspondence, many other formats are found therein too, including postcards, picture postcards, telegrams, calling cards, printed announcements and invitations, bank documents, and so on. Nor is this the only sense in which our volume is more inclusive than some other editions of composers’ correspondence. The editors treat the “Schenker correspondence” as not just those items emanating from Schenker’s pen but rather as the whole, two-sided exchange of communications. There are several reasons for making this decision.

The first is a practical one: despite what has been said in the Preface, there are still many instances of correspondence for which only the “other” side is available—those of Dahms, Dunn (with the exception of one item), and Weisse (with five exceptions), for example. It should be said immediately that the Schenker correspondence is in general not a trivial one; on the contrary, it is a substantive body of material, long on discussion of deep and important issues, short on appointment-making and small talk. And that holds true for both sides of the exchange of letters; thus where Schenker’s side is absent, there is value still in presenting the incoming communications, from which in any case some of what Schenker has previously said can be retrieved.