How We Got into Analysis, and How to Get out

Author(s): Joseph Kerman

Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Winter, 1980), pp. 311-331
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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How We Got into Analysis, and How to Get Out

Joseph Kerman

As a matter of general usage, the term "criticism"is applied to music in

an anomalous and notably shallowway. This is regrettablebut not easy
to change so long as the usage has the consent of musicians and nonmusicians alike. When people say "music criticism," they almost invariablymean daily or weeklyjournalistic writing, writing which is prohibited from the extended, detailed, and complex mulling over of the
matter at hand that is taken for granted in the criticism of art and
especiallyof [Link] music is posited on and
formed by this prohibition. The music critic may accept it grudgingly,
keeping a higher end in view, or he may depend on it to hide what may
gently be called his lackof intellectualrigor;in any case, the prohibitionis
central to his metier. The music critic's stock-in-tradeconsists of the
aesthetic question begged, the criticalaphorism undeveloped, the snap
judgment.
In fact a body of less ephemeral, more accountable professional
criticismdoes exist in this country and elsewhere: which is the first thing
I wish to argue (or just point out) in this paper. The discipline in question is called by musicians"analysis,"not criticism,and by nonmusicians
it is seldom recognized or properly understood-this for a number of
reasons, one of which is the simple matterof nomenclature. In conjunction with music theory, musicalanalysisenjoys a relativelylong academic
history going back to the nineteenth-century conservatory curricula.
In a slightly different form, this paper was first read as one of the 1978-79
Thalheimer Lecturesin Philosophyat Johns Hopkins [Link] will be publishedwith
the four other lecturesin a forthcomingvolume by Johns Hopkins UniversityPress.
O 1980 by Joseph Kerman. All rights reserved. Permission to reprint may be obtained only from the author.

311

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312

Joseph Kerman

How We Got into Analysis

Today all university as well as conservatory musicians are into analysis.

They all have to study it and generally do so with much respect. Many
practice it, either formally or, more often, informally. They do not,
however, like to call it criticism-and one reason for that may be traceable to phobias in the profession at large caused by prolonged exposure
to journalistic critics.
Thus even those who have dealt most thoughtfully with music criticism in recent years have shown a marked reluctance to affiliate criticism
and analysis. I am thinking of such commentators as Arthur Berger,
Edward T. Cone, David Lewin, Leonard B. Meyer, Robert P. Morgan,
and Leo Treitler. Indeed, some words of my own, written about fifteen
years ago, can perhaps be taken as representative:
Criticism does not exist yet on the American music-academic scene,
but something does exist which may feel rather like it, theory and
analysis. ... Analysis seems too occupied with its own inner techniques, too fascinated by its own "logic," and too sorely tempted by
its own private pedantries, to confront the work of art in its proper
aesthetic terms. Theory and analysis are not equivalent to criticism,
then, but they are pursuing techniques of vital importance to criticism. They represent a force and a positive one in the academic
climate of music ... .
Fifteen years later, I can only regard this as waffling. According to
the Harvard Dictionaryof Music, the true focus of analysis, once it gets past
the taxonomic stage, is "the synthetic element and the functional
significance of the musical detail." Analysis sets out to discern and demonstrate the functional coherence of individual works of art, their "organic unity," as is often said, and that is one of the things-one of the
main things-that people outside of music mean by criticism. If in a
typical musical analysis the work of art is studied in its own self-defined
terms, that too is a characteristic strategy of some major strains of
twentieth-century criticism. We might like criticism to meet broader
criteria, but there it is. Perhaps musical analysis, as an eminently professional process, fails to open access between the artist and his audience,
1. Kerman, "A Profile for American Musicology,"Journal of theAmericanMusicological
Society 18 (Spring 1965): 65.

Joseph Kerman, professor of music at the Universityof California,

Music. His books include
Berkeley, is the editor of Nineteenth-Century
Operaas Drama,TheElizabethanMadrigal,The BeethovenQuartets,Listen
(with Vivian Kerman),and TheMassesand Motetsof WilliamByrd.

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CriticalInquiry

Winter 1980

313

and perhaps it does indeed fail "to confront the work of art in its proper
aesthetic terms"-such failures, too, are not unknown in the criticism of
literature and the other arts. Many tasks are ritually urged on criticism
that cannot be incorporated into the concept of criticism itself. In other
words, I do not see that the criteria suggested above can be included in a
definition of criticism that corresponds to the practice of modern critics.
We may consider it very desirable that criticism meet these criteria, but
we cannot reasonably insist on it. What we have here is a matter for
adjustment between music critics of different persuasions rather than
some sort of stand-off between adherents of distinct disciplines.
It may be objected that musical analysts claim to be working with
objective methodologies which leave no place for aesthetic criteria, for
the consideration of value. If that were the case, the reluctance of so
many writers to subsume analysis under criticism might be understandable. But are these claims true? Are they, indeed, even seriously entered?
Certainly the original masters of analysis left no doubt that for them
analysis was an essential adjunct to a fully articulated aesthetic value
system. Heinrich Schenker always insisted on the superiority of the towering products of the German musical genius. Sir Donald Tovey
pontificated about "the main stream of music" and on occasion developed this metaphor in considerable detail. It is only in more recent times
that analysts have avoided value judgments and adapted their work to a
format of strictly corrigible propositions, mathematical equations, settheory formulations, and the like-all this, apparently, in an effort to
achieve the objective status and hence the authority of scientific inquiry.
Articles on music composed after 1950, in particular, appear sometimes
to mimic scientific papers in the way that South American bugs and flies
will mimic the dreaded carpenter wasp. In a somewhat different adaptation, the distinguished analyst Allen Forte wrote an entire small book,
The CompositionalMatrix, from which all affective or valuational terms
(such as "nice" or "good") are meticulously excluded. The same tendency is evident in much recent periodical literature.
But it scarcely goes unnoticed that the subject of Forte's monograph
is not a symphony by Giovanni Battista Sammartini or a quartet by
Adalbert Gyrowetz but a late sonata by Beethoven, the Sonata in E Major
opus 109, a work that Forte accepts without question as a masterpiecewithout question, and also without discussion. Indeed, this monograph
sheds a particularly pure light on the archetypal procedure of musical
analysis. This branch of criticism takes the masterpiece status of its subject matter as a donneie and then proceeds to lavish its whole attention on
the demonstration of its inner coherence. Aesthetic judgment is concentrated tacitly on the initial choice of material to be analyzed; then the
analysis itself, which may be conducted with the greatest subtlety and
rigor, can treat of artistic value only casually or, as in the extreme case of

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How We Got into Analysis

Forte's monograph, not at all. Another way of putting it is that the

question of artistic value is at the same time absolutely basic and begged,
begged consistently and programmatically.
In fact, it seems to me that the true intellectual milieu of analysis is
not science but ideology. I do not think we will understand analysis and
the important role it plays in today's music-academic scene on logical,
intellectual, or purely technical grounds. We will need to understand
something of its underlying ideology, and this in turn will require some
consideration of its historical context. Robert P. Morgan is an analyst
who has reminded us on a number of occasions that his discipline must
be viewed as a product of its time-a corollary to his conviction that it
must also change with the times. The following historical analysis owes
something to Morgan's but is, I think, framed more radically or at any
rate more polemically.

2
By ideology, I mean a fairly coherent set of ideas brought together
not for strictly intellectual purposes but in the service of some strongly
held communal belief. Fundamental here is the orthodox belief, still
held over from the late nineteenth century, in the overriding aesthetic
value of the instrumental music of the great German tradition. Of this,
the central monuments are the fugues and some other instrumental
compositions of Bach and the sonatas, string quartets, and symphonies
of Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms.
Viennese or Pan-German in origin, and certainly profoundly
guided by nationalistic passions, this ideology took hold in other countries depending on the strength or weakness of their native musical
traditions. It took no hold in Italy, some hold in France, strong hold in
Britain and especially in America. The ideology drew to itself many
familiar currents of nineteenth-century thought about art and music.
Among these were an essentially mystical notion of spontaneity and
authenticity in musical performance, a romantic myth (owing much to
the example of Beethoven) which cast the artist as sage and suffering
hero, and-most important for the present purpose-a strain of Hegelian aesthetic philosophy, which now runs from Schopenhauer to Susanne
K. Langer with an important backtrack by way of Eduard Hanslick.
For Hanslick, instrumental music was the only "pure" form of the
art, and words, librettos, titles, and programs which seem to link music to
the feelings of ordinary, impure life were to be disregarded or deplored.
Music, in Hanslick's famous phrase, is "sounding form in motion." Later
aestheticians such as Langer have labored to preserve this central insight
without denying, as Hanslick did, that music was anything more than
that. The concept is an important one for the essential criterion of value

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Critical Inquiry

Winter 1980

315

that is built into the ideology. For if music is only "sounding form," the
only meaningful study of music is formalistic; and while Hanslick was
not an analyst, later critics took it on themselves to analyze music's
sounding form in the conviction that this was equivalent to its content.
To these analyst-critics, needless to say, content (however they defined it)
was not a matter of indifference. The music they analyzed was that of the
great German tradition.
The vision of these analyst-critics was and is of a perfect, organic
relation among all the analyzable parts of a musical masterpiece. Increasingly sophisticated techniques of analysis attempt to show how all
aspects or "parameters" or "domains" of the masterpiece perform their
function for the total structure. Critics who differ vastly from one
another in their methods, styles, and emphases still view the work of art
ultimately as an organism in this sense. From the standpoint of the
ruling ideology, analysis exists for the purpose of demonstrating organicism, and organicism exists for the purpose of validating a certain body
of works of art.
I do not, of course, ignore that broader philosophical movement of
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries which focused on
organicism and which some musicologists have recently been trying to
relate to the development of musical style. But together with this historical process went an ideological one, in the service of which the concept of
organicism began to lead a charmed existence. Organicism can be seen
not only as a historical force which played into the great German tradition but also as the principle which seemed essential to validate that
tradition. The ideological resonance of organicism continued long past
the time of its historical impetus.
The origins of the ideology can be traced back to the famous biography of Bach published in 1802 by J. N. Forkel, director of music at the
University of G6ttingen and the first real German musicologist. "Bach
united with his great and lofty style the most refined elegance and the
greatest precision in the single parts that compose the great whole,...."
wrote Forkel in his exordium to this work. ". .. He thought the whole
could not be perfect if anything were wanting to the perfect precision of
the single parts; . . . And this man, the greatest musical poet and the
greatest musical orator that ever existed, and probably ever will exist,
was a German. Let his country be proud of him; let it be proud, but, at
the same time, worthy of him!"2 We can see the concept of the musical
organism taking form with the new attention given to fugue in the early
nineteenth century. There was a swift Viennese co-option only a few
years later, when E. T. A. Hoffmann began to view Haydn, Mozart, and
Beethoven with much the same reverence we do today and began to
2. Johann Nickolaus Forkel, "On Johann Sebastian Bach's Life, Genius, and Works,"
in The Bach Reader, ed. Hans T. David and Arthur Mendel (New York, 1945), pp. 352-53.

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How We Got into Analysis

marvel at the way works such as Beethoven's Fifth Symphony seem to

grow from a single theme as though from a Goethean Urpflanz. The first
great ideological crisis was precipitated by Richard Wagner-Wagner,
who could not launch a paper boat without making waves, let alone a
revolutionary theory of opera. As Wagner asserted his claim to the Beethovenian succession, the youthful Brahms and his imperious friend
Joseph Joachim proclaimed their opposition to symphonic poems, musicdramas, and other such novelties. Hanslick had already closed ranks
around the concept of purely instrumental music. He soon came to
support Brahms, the most instrumental-minded as well as the most
traditional-minded of all the great nineteenth-century composers.
But the ideology did not receive its full articulation until the music
in which it was rooted came under serious attack. This occurred around
1900 when tonality, the seeming linchpin of the entire system, began to
slip in Germany as well as elsewhere. Lines of defense were formed at
what Virgil Thomson used to call "the Brahms line," first in opposition
to Richard Strauss and then to Arnold Schoenberg. The situation was
exacerbated after 1920 when Schoenberg, in an astonishing new cooption, presented himself and his music as the true continuation of the
Viennese tradition. It is against the background of this new crisis that we
must see the work of the founding fathers of analysis.
Schenker was born in 1868, Tovey in 1875. The first significant
writings of both men, which appeared shortly after 1900, are peppered
with polemics and were obviously conceived as a defense against the new
modernism. Tovey was no Viennese, of course-Balliol was his beat, and
before that Eton-but over and above the general reliance of Victorian
England on German music and musical thought, he himself was deeply
influenced by the aging Joachim. Concentration on the sphere of harmony and the larger harmony, namely, tonality, led Tovey ultimately to
the organicist position, though he was never as dogmatic in this regard as
the Germans. In his major essays on the Schubert Quintet and the Beethoven Quartet in C-sharp Minor opus 131, he went beyond his usual
terminus, the individual movement, and saw tonality inspiring the whole
work, with each "key area" conceived of as a functional element in the
total structure. And in what he called the "superb rhetoric" of Bach's
F-sharp-minor setting of Aus tiefer Noth in the Clavieriibung, part 3-a
chorale in which the melodic and rhythmic substance of the given cantus
firmus is drawn into all of the polyphonic voice parts according to a
rigorous system, so that every note is practically predetermined by an
external scheme-Tovey found unshakable evidence that form in art is
equivalent to content. "The process miscalled by Horace the concealment of art," wrote Tovey, "is the sublimation of technique into aesthetic
results."
In many ways Tovey was a typical product of the litteraehumaniores

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Critical Inquiry

Winter 1980

317

at the Oxford of Benjamin Jowett and F. H. Bradley. He came by his

neo-Hegelianism honestly. Schenker, on the other hand, was a typical
product of the Vienna Conservatory, where the great systematic theorist
Simon Sechter had been the teacher of Bruckner, himself the teacher of
Schenker. Slowly, stage by stage throughout his career, Schenker labored to construct a grandiose general theory to account for all the
music of the great tradition. Tovey's analytical method may be said to
involve a reduction of the melodic surface of music to the level of the
articulated system of tonality. Schenker's method involved a much more
systematic reduction to the level of a single triad, the tonic triad. In his
famous series of formalized reductions, he analyzed music on "foreground," "middleground," and "background" levels-the latter comprising the Urlinie and the Ursatz, a drastically simple horizontalization of the
vertical sonority of the tonic triad. (We shall see an example of such an
Ursatz later.) The concept of hierarchies or levels and the technique of
their manipulation constituted Schenker's most powerful legacy to the
structuralist future.
Beethoven occupied the dead center of both Schenker's and Tovey's
value systems. Schenker's most exhaustive studies concern Beethoven's
Third, Fifth, and Ninth Symphonies and the late piano sonatas. Indeed,
the list of some fifty compositions which Schenker discussed formally
and at full length presents a striking picture of musical orthodoxy. With
a few exceptions (including most honorably those late sonatas), they are
drawn from the stable of symphony orchestra war-horses and from the
piano teachers' rabbit hutch. In his tacit acceptance of received opinion
as to the canon of music's masterpieces, Schenker exemplifies more
clearly than any of its other practitioners one aspect of the discipline of
analysis.
His work looms so large in academic music criticism of the recent
past that analysis is sometimes equated with "Schenkerism," as it is called.
The movement is much broader, however, and therefore more
significant than any intellectual current which was the province of just
one man and his followers could be. Schenker is not the only impressive
and influential figure among the older analysts. I have already
mentioned Tovey. Rudolph Reti, a disciple at one time of Schoenberg
and later an emigre to America, developed a nineteenth-century strain
of analysis based not on tonality, line, or triad but on motif. Reti's demonstrations of the hidden identity of all themes in a musical
sort of poor man's organicism-has had a particular
composition-a
in
Britain.
Alfred Lorenz, also originally from Vienna, extended
impact
organic analysis over a larger span than had been thought possible
and into forbidden territory, the four great music-dramas of
Wagner. While modern Wagner scholars seem not to tire of disproving
and rejecting Lorenz's work, it receives sympathetic attention from the

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How We Got into Analysis

Verdians, among others. It is possible that both Reti and Lorenz have
been written off a little too hastily by modern American academics.
More important-indeed, crucial-is the role of Schoenberg himself
in our story. In his relatively limited body of writings on music, Schoenberg showed himself to be a brilliant theorist and critic, and, justly
enough, the fact that he was the composer he was gave those writings
immense authority.
Schoenberg's really decisive insight, I think, was to conceive of a way
of continuing the great tradition while negating what everyone else felt
to be at its very core, namely, tonality. He grasped the fact that what was
central to the ideology was not the triad and tonality, as Schenker and
Tovey believed, but organicism. In his atonal, preserial works writtenjust
before World War I, Schoenberg worked out a music in which functional
relations were established more and more subtly on the motivic,
rhythmic, textural, and indeed the pitch level, with less and less reliance
on the traditional configurations of tonality. So for Schoenberg, Brahms
was the true "progressive" of the late nineteenth century-Brahms, who
had refined the art of motivic variation, rather than Wagner, who had
refined and attenuated tonality to the breaking point. Twelve-tone
serialism was not far off, and indeed in retrospect one can see implicit
from the start the ideal of "total organization" which was to be formulated by the new serialists after World War II.
Schoenberg himself was never interested in developing the sort of
analysis that has subsequently been practiced on his own and on other
serial music. But once he had entered his formidable claim for inclusion
within the great tradition, it was inevitable that a branch of analysis
would spring up to validate that claim. For analysis, I believe, as I have
already said, exists to articulate the concept of organicism, which in turn
exists as the value system of the ideology; and while the validation provided by analysis was not really necessary for the Viennese classics, it
became more and more necessary for the music of each succeeding
generation. What Schenker did for Beethoven and Lorenz did for
Wagner, Milton Babbitt and others did later for Schoenberg, Berg, and
Webern.
The universal impetus behind analysis was expressed with particular innocence by Rtetiwhen he recalled asking himself as a young student
why every note in a Beethoven sonata should be exactly that note rather
than some other. Rteti dedicated his career as an analyst to finding an
objective answer to this question. And questions of the sort can indeed be
answered in respect to the totally organized serial music of the 1950s.
Every pitch, rhythm, timbre, dynamic, envelope, and so on can be derived from the work's "precompositional assumptions" by means of simple or slightly less simple mathematics. Whether this derivation provides
the right answer-that, to be sure, is another question. But the answer
provided by serial analysis is, undeniably, objective.

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Critical Inquiry

Winter 1980

319

3
I come at last, after this lengthy historical digression, to the current
state of music criticism in the American academy. Analysis, as I have
already indicated, is the main, almost the exclusive, type of criticism
practiced in music departments today. I believe also that analysis
supplies the chief mental spark that can be detected in those departments. Musicology, a field considerably larger and better organized
than analysis, involving mainly historiography and quasi-scientific scholarly research in music, is also cultivated; but American musicology in its
academic phase-which has now lasted about thirty or forty yearsseems to me to have produced signally little of intellectual interest. What
it has assembled is an impressive mass of facts and figures about music of
the past, codified into strictly nonevaluative histories, editions, bibliographies, and the like. One is reminded of the state of literary studies in
the 1930s. Musical analysis has also reminded many observers of the
New Criticism which arose at that time. This analogy, though it is not
one that will survive much scrutiny, does point to one of the constants of
intellectual life as this applies to the arts: as intellectual stimulus,
positivistic history is always at a disadvantage beside criticism. It is precisely because and only because analysis is a kind of criticism that it has
gained its considerable force and authority on the American academic
scene.
Still, as the years and the decades go by, the predominant position of
analysis grows more and more paradoxical; paradoxical, because the
great German tradition of instrumental music, which analysis supports,
no longer enjoys the unique status it did for the generation of Schenker
and Tovey and Schoenberg. There is no need to enlarge on the various
factors that have so drastically changed the climate for the consumption
and appreciation of music today: the wide variety of music made available by musicological unearthings on the one hand and recording
technology and marketry on the other; the public's seemingly insatiable
hunger for opera of all sorts; the growing involvement with nonWestern music, popular music, and quasi-popular music; and also a
pervasive general disbelief in hierarchies of value. It is not that we see
less, now, in the German masters; but they no longer shut out our
perspective on great bodies of other music, new and old.
Another factor contributing to this change in our musical climate
stems from the crisis in which musical composition has for some time
found itself. Heretofore the great tradition had been felt to exist in a
permanent condition of organic evolution, moving always onward (if not
always upward) into the future, into what Wagner confidently called
"Die Musik der Zukunft" and what we were still calling "New Music"
with the same upbeat accent in the 1950s. Forkel saw the German tradition originating with Bach; Hoffmann saw Beethoven following

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from Haydn and Mozart; and Schumann, when he turned resolutely

from songs and piano pieces to fugues and symphonies, tactfully added
his own name. Less tactfully, Wagner did the same. Hanslick countered
with Brahms, Adorno nominated Mahler and Schoenberg, and it was
still possible in the 1960s to think of Karlheinz Stockhausen, followed at
a discreet distance even-who could tell?-by some non-German figures.
Now that there are no candidates from the 1970s, a void has been discovered very close to the center of the ideology.
The paradox has been working itself out in recent American
analysis. True, a newly published anthology of Readings in Schenker
Analysis holds primly to the traditional core of J. S. Bach, C. P. E. Bach,
Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms. But for more
and more analysts it has become a matter of importance-perhaps of
supreme importance-to extend the technique to all the music they care
deeply about. That is the impetus behind serial analysis, the most impressive American contribution to the discipline at large, which was developed under the general inspiration of Babbitt at Princeton in the late
1940s and '50s. It is the impetus behind efforts such as those of Morgan
and others to extend analysis to the so-called nonteleological music of
the 1960s and '70s. At the other end of the historical spectrum, analyses
of pre-Bach, pretonal music were published as early as the 1950s by Felix
Salzer, Schenker's most influential follower in this country. Salzer has
also sponsored other such analyses in the current periodical Music
Forum. More or less Lorenzian methods have been applied to the Verdi
operas. Not only opera but also other music with words and programs
has been subjected to analytical treatment: the Schumann song cycle
Dichterliebe,for example, and the Berlioz Requiem and Symphoniefantastique. The blanket extension of analysis to genres with words and programs has important theoretical implications, of course. For in spite of
Hanslick, the verbal messages included with a musical composition have
a strong prima facie claim to be counted in with its content, along with its
analyzable sounding form.
These new analyses are, as always, conducted at different levels of
sophistication and insight. Even the best of them leave the reader uneasy. They come up with fascinating data and with undoubtedly relevant
data; yet one always has a sinking feeling that something vital has been
overlooked. For however heavily we may weight the criterion of organicism in dealing with the masterpieces of German instrumental music, we
know that it is less important for other music that we value. This music
may really not be "organic" in any useful sense of the word, or its organicism may be a more or less automatic and trivial characteristic. Its
aesthetic value must depend on other criteria. Cannot a criticism be
developed that will explain, validate, or just plain illuminate these other
musical traditions?
The obvious answer would seem to be yes, and indeed one can point

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Critical Inquiry

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321

to a number of recent efforts along these lines. These efforts have not
been followed up to any significant extent, however-at least not yet.
Musicians in the academic orbit have always dragged their feet when it
comes to developing alternative modes of criticism. This is as true of the
musicologists as of the analysts and of the large, less clearly defined
group of musicians whose inclinations may be described as broadly
humanistic and who care about musicology and analysis without having
made a full commitment to either (one could point, for example, to th'e
constituency of the College Music Society). Among these many people, it
is not uncommon to hear criticism invoked, discussed in general terms,
sometimes praised, sometimes even practiced, and occasionally even
practiced well. But there seems to be a general disinclination or inability
to formalize-much less to institutionalize-the discipline on any scale
broader than that of analysis.
There is a real problem here which I do not believe can be attributed entirely to some massive failure of imagination or intellectual
nerve. I should prefer to believe that at least part of the problem stems
from the prestige of analysis--or, to put it more accurately, from the
genuine power of analysis which is the source of that prestige. For
analysis, taken in its own terms, is one of the most deeply satisfying of all
known critical systems. ". .. music has, among the arts, the most, perhaps
the only, systematic and precise vocabulary for the description and
analysis of its objects": that is an envious quotation from Stanley Cavell, a
philosopher and critic well versed in music, who knows how much more
fully one can fix a melodic line as compared to a line in a drawing, or a
musical rhythm as compared to a poetic one, or even an ambiguity in
harmony as compared to an ambiguity of metaphor. The discipline of
analysis has made a very good thing out of the precise, systematic vocabulary which music possesses. But as Cavell goes on to remark, thinking of
the nonexistence of what he calls a "humane criticism" of music,
Somehow that possession must itself be a liability; as though one
now undertook to criticize a poem or novel armed with complete
control of medieval rhetoric but ignorant of the modes of criticism
developed in the past two centuries.3
The liability must stem from the power of analysis and its consequent
seductiveness. Its methods are so straightforward, its results so automatic, and its conclusions so easily tested and communicated that every
important American critic at the present time has involved himself or
implicated himself centrally with analysis.
Not all these critics would consider themselves primarily analysts,
3. Stanley Cavell, "Music Discomposed," Must We Mean What We Say? (New York,
1969), p. 186.

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How We Got into Analysis

and some would probably be begrudged that epithet by the analysts

themselves.4 Charles Rosen, for example, prefaces The Classical Style:
Haydn, Mozart,Beethovenwith a critique of analytical systems en masse: the
limitations of Schenker, Tovey, Reti, and others are cataloged incisively.
Nevertheless, Rosen's procedure in the book is basically analytical, if by
analysis we mean the technical demonstration of the coherence of individual pieces of music. He also presents a trenchant, controversial, historical interpretation and a steady stream of brilliant apercus on all
aspects of music. But at heart his book is a wonderfully readable and
original essay in musical analysis. Rosen speaks not of organicism but of
"balance" and "coherence," and it is his sensitivity to the harmonic and
melodic determinants of these criteria that provides The Classical Style
with its greatest power.
Leonard B. Meyer, in his impressive first book Emotionand Meaning
in Music, proposed a comprehensive theory of musical aesthetics. A
wide-ranging scholar, he moves on in his fourth book, Explaining Music, to
spell out his recipe for criticism. Again there are telling arguments
against Reti and Schenker, and again the proof of the pudding turns out
to be analysis-a detailed exemplary study of the first twenty-one bars of
a Beethoven sonata according to the author's own analytical principles.
(An even more detailed analysis of another German masterpiece has
since appeared in Critical Inquiry.)5 Meyer sees musical events as embodying multiple implications for other events that will ensue, implications which are realized or not in various ways. This follows perfectly the model of an overriding system of relationships between all
musical elements which has always animated analytical thinking.
To turn now from the sublime to the confessional, my own criticism
has returned repeatedly and, as I now think, immoderately to the manner and method of Tovey. There have been digressions to the left and to
the right, but in its biggest manifestations, my work, too, has been centered in a kind of analysis.
Finally, I cannot resist mentioning the recent BeyondSchenkerism:The
Need for Alternatives in Music Analysis by a new young writer, Eugene
Narmour. This is probably the sharpest, most comprehensive attack on
Schenker that has ever appeared; and it culminates in the modest proposal of a new analytical system developed by the attacker. The musician's instinctive tendency is always to choose among rival analytical sys4. "Work ... by 'one-off' analysts like Rosen or Kerman [is] frequently held to be
suspect in its theoretical focus," writes Jonathan M. Dunsby. "They seem to embed the
most penetrating and original insight about specific musical objects in an all-embracing
cultural critique that can be ultimately confusing, without the deep-rooted convictions--often hard to live with but always comprehensible-of the Schoenbergian analytical tradition" (review of David Epstein's Beyond Orpheus:Studies in Musical Structure [Cambridge,
Mass., 1979],Journal of the Arnold SchoenbergInstitute 3 [October 1979]: 195).
5. See Leonard B. Meyer, "Grammatical Simplicity and Relational Richness: The Trio
of Mozart's G Minor Symphony," Critical Inquiry 2 (Summer 1976): 693-761.

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Critical Inquiry

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323

tems or principles rather than to look for a broader alternative to

analysis itself. Where we should be looking is not only Beyond Schenkerism but also Beyond Narmourism.6
4
I dislike seeming to preach in the abstract, especially when I seem to
be preaching against, so I shall now sketch out some conceivable
alternatives to analysis in reference to the criticism of one particular
short piece of music. I have chosen a familiar, standard Germanmasterpiece-type example, hoping to show how much can and should be
done even in the area where analytical methods traditionally work best.
The piece is from Schumann's song cycle Dichterliebe, the second number, "Aus meinen Thrinen spriessen" (fig. 1). The poem is
from Heine's LyrischesIntermezzoin the Buch der Lieder. I have chosen it
partly because, in the somewhat overheated words of the analyst Arthur
Komar, "In recent years, the song has aroused an extraordinary amount
of interest, much of which can be attributed to its selection as the principal illustration of Schenker's analytic technique in Allen Forte's important introductory article on Schenker's theories."7 In my view,
Schenker's analysis of this song, which bids fair to attain exemplary
status, shows up the limitations of the discipline as a whole with
exemplary clarity. It constitutes a strong argument for alternatives.
Those unacquainted with the Schenker system will be interested to
see his analysis of the song (fig. 2).8 From the "foreground sketch," on
the bottom line, more than seventy-five percent of the notes in the actual
6. Another widely discussed new analyst, David Epstein, prefaces his Beyond
Orpheus (see n. 4 above) with this statement about "the limitations imposed on the
[analytical] studies that follow": "First, they are concerned with music written within
the era commonly known as classic-romantic, in effect from Haydn and Mozart
through the middle nineteenth century, as delimited by Brahms. Secondly, these
studies are restricted to music written in what might be called the German-Viennese
tradition-the most seminal body of music that emerged during this broad period. Third,
they are confined to absolute music. . .. A fourth and final limitation: the matter of
'expression' in music is beyond the confines of these studies" (p. 11). One hears the sound
of windows closing.
7. Arthur Komar, "The Music of Dichterliebe:The Whole and Its Parts," in Dichterliebe,
ed. Komar (New York, 1971), pp. 70-71. "Schenker's Conception of Musical Structure,"'
one of Forte's earlier articles, first appeared in Journal of Music Theory 3 (April 1959):
1-30, and has since been reprinted in Komar's casebook (Dichterliebe,pp. 96-106) and as
the first item in Readings in SchenkerAnalysis and OtherApproaches,ed. Maury Yeston (New
Haven, Conn., 1977), pp. 3-37. In a graded list of "Initial Readings in Schenker" prepared
by another leading analyst, Richmond Browne, for In TheoryOnly 1 (April 1975): 4, Forte's
article appears as the second item from the top.
8. From Free Composition(Derfreie Satz) by Heinrich Schenker, edited and translated
by Ernst Oster. Copyright ? 1979 by Longman Inc., New York. Reprinted with permission.

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324

Joseph Kerman

How We Got into Analysis

Nicht schnell.

en
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Fig. 1

Fig. 2

song have already been reduced away. Only those considered structurally most important remain, with their relative structural weight indicated by the presence or absence of stems, by the note values-halfnote forms are more important than quarter, and so on-and by the
beams connecting certain groups of quarter- and half-notes (in this
sketch). Above it, the "middleground sketch" carries the reduction one
step further, and above that the "background sketch" completes the
process. The basic structure of the song is indicated by the unit at the top
right of this Ursatz: a simple three-step arpeggiation of the A-major
triad, going from the third degree C-sharp to the tonic A by way of B as a

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Critical Inquiry

Winter 1980

325

passing note in the middle. The unit at the left shows the original thrust
toward this same Urlinie interrupted at the midpoint; the motion is then
resumed and completed as shown at the right. Every middleground and
foreground detail can be seen to play its organic role as subsumed by the
Ursatz. And indeed the Ursatz is indicative of organicism on a higher level
yet: for the Ursiitzeof all musical compositions in the great tradition are
essentially the same. Although naturally the interruptions differ, and
sometimes the tonic triad is arpeggiated 5-3-1 or 8-5-3-1, rather than
3-1, as here, in principle the Urlinie always consists of a simple downward
arpeggiation of the tonic triad, which Schenker took to be the "chord of
nature."
It seems interesting, incidentally, and possibly significant that this
apparently simple song still leaves room for debate as to the precise
location of the principal structural tones. Schenker put ? on the upbeat
to bar 1, 2 on the upbeat to bar 9, 3 on the upbeat to bar 13, 2 and 1 in
bar 15. Forte proposed a modification: the second A on the C-sharp in
bar 14 (beat 2). Komar accepts this and proposes another modification:
the first 3 on the C-sharp in bar 2. More serious interest might attach to
this debate if someone would undertake to show how its outcome affects
the way people actually hear, experience, or respond to the music. In the
absence of such a demonstration, the whole exercise can seem pretty
ridiculous.
As is not infrequently the case with Schenkerian analyses, the fragile
artistic content of this song depends quite obviously on features that are
skimped in the analytical treatment. The song's most striking featurepractically its raison d'etre, one would think-is the series of paired cadences in the voice and then the piano at the conclusion of lines 2, 4, and
8 of the poem. How are these rather haunting, contradictory stops to be
understood (or "heard," as musicians like to say) at the two points within
the body of the song? And how are they to be heard at the end? From
Schenker's foreground sketch one gathers that in bars 4 and 8 he
counted the voice's half-cadences as primary, whereas in bar 17 he
counted the piano's full cadence. But there is no explanation for this
disappointingly conventional interpretation, nor any appreciation of the
whole extremely original and suggestive situation, nor indeed any relic
of it on the middle- and background levels. The Ursatz confuses the
issue, for in bars 4 and 8 the cadences lack status because they are
regarded simply as details of prolongation, along with many others, and
in bars 16-17 they are trivialized because true closure is conceived as
happening a bar earlier.
Forte and Komar, with their Ursatz revisions, do nothing to help the
situation. Ambiguities such as those set up by Schumann's cadences are
likely to strike a critic as a good place to focus his investigation, to begin
seeing what is special and fine about the song. The analyst's instinct is to
reduce these ambiguities out of existence.

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Joseph Kerman

How We Got into Analysis

Another prime feature of the music skimped by Schenker is the

climax at the words "Und vor deinem Fenster soll klingen," in line 7.
This Schumann achieved by a classical confluence of thickened piano
texture, intensified rhythms, a crescendo, and harmonic enrichment by
means of chromaticism; for a moment the emotional temperature spurts
up into or nearly into the danger zone. Schenker's foreground sketch, so
far from "explaining" the chromaticism here, barely acknowledges its
existence. Once again his very first reduction employs too coarse a sieve
to catch something of prime importance. Schenker seems often to have
derived a sort of grim pleasure from pretending not even to notice
certain blatant foreground details in the music he was analyzing.
In this case, the pretense was too much for Forte, and he draws
attention to what he rightly calls a "striking" chromatic line, an inner
line, and to its parallelism to others in the song. The emotional temperature, however, does not interest him any more than does the symbolism
(of which more later); he is interested only in the fact that the line serves
as "an additional means of unification." Forte finds a particularly vexing
problem in the G-natural of bars 12-13. Komar too dwells on this as the
"major analytic issue" of the whole song.
Neither of these analysts troubles to say (though they surely must
see) that both this chromatic G-natural and also the chromatic F-natural
in bar 14 give the word "klingen" a richer emotional coloration than
"spriessen" and "werden" at the parallel places earlier in the song.
Sooner or later we shall have to retrace the course taken by the composer
himself and peek at the words of the poem:
Aus meinen Thranen spriessen
Viel blfihende Blumen hervor,
Und meine Seufzer werden
Ein Nachtigallenchor.
Und wenn du mich lieb hast, Kindchen,
Schenk' ich dir die Blumen all',
Und vor deinem Fenster soll klingen
Das Lied der Nachtigall.
"Klingen" is a verb applied by the man in the street to coins, wine glasses
and cymbals; poets apply it to the song of nightingales. Was Schumann
trying to insist on the poetic credentials of this verb? He certainly declaimed it strangely: the vowel should be short, as of course he knew
perfectly well. Also harmonized very richly is the parallel word in the
previous couplet-the assonant and no doubt hugely significant word
"Kindchen." So presumably the curious accents in lines 2 and 4 on the
words "spriessen" and "werden" (rather than on "Thrlinen" and
"Seufzer") were planned with "Kindchen" and "klingen" in mind.
Schumann's personal reading of the poem begins to take shape. That

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Critical Inquiry

Winter 1980

327

reading may fairly be suspected of having influenced his musical decisions.

A good deal more can be done along these lines. Musico-poetic
analysis is not necessarily less insightful than strictly musical analysis,
whether of the Schenkerian or some other variety, as is evident from the
subtle and exhaustive analyses of Schubert songs by Arnold Feil and the
late Professor Thrasybulos Georgiades in Germany. In America, unfortunately, the one serious recent study of the German lied is valuable
mainly as shock therapy. In Poem and Music in the GermanLiedfrom Gluck
to Hugo Wolf, the late Jack M. Stein prods all the great nineteenthcentury lieder composers for their misreadings of poetry; our song, for
example, he dismisses on account of its '.'mood of naivete and sentimental innocence." There is often something in what Stein says. But while
Schumann certainly comes dangerously close to sentimentality in his
setting of the word "klingen," we should also reckon on the clipped and
dryly repetitious musical phrase that returns unvaried for "Das Lied der
Nachtigall." Does this not effectively undercut the sentimental tendency?
On this occasion, at least, Schumann has not smoothed away the celebrated irony of his poet.
Komar's criticism of Schenker and Forte as regards the Ursatz stems
from his reading of the song in conjunction with the preceding song in
the cycle, "Im wundersch6nen Monat Mai," the beautiful and wellknown opening number. He is right as far as he goes, though he does
not go so far as to make the obvious point that since "Aus meinen
Thrainen" directly follows the famous C-sharp-seventh chord on which
that opening song is left hanging, its first few notes do not announce an
unambiguous A major, as Schenker so brutally assumed, but rather, for
a fleeting moment, the expected resolution in F-sharp minor. So even
the first half-prominent gesture in the song, the articulation of "spriessen," sounds more poetic and less naive, less sentimental, than Stein
would have us believe.
Komar says that Schumann forged the two songs "virtually into a
single entity" from a strictly musical standpoint. If so, that shows that,
unlike his analysts, Schumann cared that the two poems also form a unit:
Im wundersch6nen Monat Mai,
[Link] Knospen sprangen,
Da ist in meinem Herzen
Die Liebe aufgegangen.
Im wundersch6nen Monat Mai,
Als alle Vogel sangen,
Da hab' ich ihr gestanden
Mein Sehnen und Verlangen.

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How We Got into Analysis

Aus meinen Thranen spriessen

Viel bliihende Blumen hervor,
Und meine Seufzer werden
Ein Nachtigallenchor.
Und wenn du mich lieb hast, Kindchen,
Schenk' ich dir die Blumen all',
Und vor deinem Fenster soll klingen
Das Lied der Nachtigall.9
The "Knospen" of the first song open into "blhihende Blumen" in the
second, the "V6gel" identify themselves as "Nachtigallen," and so on.
In terms of critical methodology, Komar's emphasis on the cycle's continuity merely transfers his organicist investigation from the level of the
song to the higher level of the cycle. Still, there is some use to his procedure in that it indicates a broadening out, and one may ask what the real
subject of the critic's attention should be-that G-natural which Komar
calls the "major analytic issue" of the song, or the total music of the song,
or its music taken together with its words, or the full sixteen-song Dichterliebe cycle, or perhaps the entire output of Schumann's so-called
song-year, 1840. As is well known, Dichterliebewas composed along with
about 120 other songs in a single burst of creative energy lasting for
eleven months, a period which encompassed the composer's marriage,
after agonizing delays, to Clara Wieck.
All the songs of 1840 were written for Clara, and many of them
were written directly to her. Dichterliebe begins in the way that
Schumann's earlier Heine song cycle, opus 24, ends: with a song of
dedication. The poet-composer offers his work to his beloved, work that
is formed out of his love and his longing. Heretofore, however,
9. Heine's poems appear in Dichterliebe,ed. Komar, with translations by Philip L.
Miller:
In the lovely month of May,
when all the buds were bursting,
then within my heart
love broke forth.
In the lovely month of May,
when all the birds were singing,
then I confessed to her
my longing and desire.
From my tears spring up
many blooming flowers,
and my sighs become
a chorus of nightingales.
And if you love me, child,
I give you all the flowers,
and before your window shall sound
the song of the nightingale.
[Pp. 15-16]

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Schumann had been transforming his longing not into nightingale songs
but into piano pieces--which suggests a new irony to the word "klingen,"
a double (or by now a triple) irony if one thinks of the shallow virtuoso
pieces by Herz and Pixis on which Clara was making her reputation as a
pianist while Robert was attacking them angrily in his journalism, crippling his hand in a mechanism designed to strengthen it, and bit by bit
relinquishing his own ambitions as a performer. The sixteen songs now
dedicated to Clara speak of love's distress, not of love's happiness. Clara,
incidentally, was twelve years old when Robert first turned up as her
father's student, already a sick man and a rather alarmingly dissolute
one. "Aus meinen Thrdinen" is the only one of Schumann's love songs
which includes the word "Kind" or "Kindchen."
The comprehensive study of the Schumann songs published ten
years ago by the English critic and cryptographer Eric Sams has not been
much noticed in this country. Sams takes a strong antianalytical line and
also puts people off by his somewhat brazen pursuit of a special theory
about Schumann's compositional practice. This theory centers on the
composer's use of a complicated network of private musical symbolism;
thus Sams identifies several secret "Clara themes" in "Aus meinen Thrinen," among them the expressive descending-scale figure on the word
"Kindchen" which was mentioned above. The analysts cannot do anything with data of this kind. As far as they are concerned, the same notes
in the same musical context ought always to produce the same sounding
form, whether written by Schumann or Schubert or Mendelssohn. But
it is not unusual for composers to nurture private musical symbols. Berg
is a famous case in point. Schumann is unusual, perhaps, only in the
large number of studied clues he left around for future decoders. No
doubt Sams goes too far. But if what we value in an artist is his individual
vision, rather than the evidence he brings in support of some general
analytical system, we shall certainly want to enter as far as possible into
his idiosyncratic world of personal association and imagery.
Looking again, more broadly yet, at Schumann's songs and the
tradition from which they sprang, one must come to a consideration of
characteristics inherent in the genre itself. An artistic genre has a life of
its own in history; criticism cannot proceed as though history did not
exist. The nineteenth-century German lied began with a firm alliance to
a romantically conceived Volksweise,and while from Schubert on the history of the genre is usually seen in terms of a transcendence of this ideal,
composers have never wished to transcend it entirely. Evocations of the
Volkstiimlichwere handled excellently, in their different ways, by Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, and even Wolf, to say nothing of Mahler. But
Stein was right: Schumann's evocations are always tinged with "sentimental innocence." Some further examples may be cited: "Volksliedchen" opus 51 no. 2; "Der arme Peter" opus 53 no. 3; "Marienwiirmchen" opus 79 no. 14; "Lied eines Schmiedes" opus 90 no. 1;

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Joseph Kerman

How We Got into Analysis

"Mond, meine Seele Liebling" opus 104 no. 1; and "Hoch, hoch sind die
Berge" opus 138 no. 8.
Sams makes the same point and also stresses that in addition to word
cyphers and musical quotations, Schumann was also addicted to disguises, of which the impulsive Florestan and the introspective Eusebius
are only the most public-so much so, that in works like Carnaval and
Dichterliebe one sometimes feels impelled to ask the real Robert
Schumann to please step forward. In Dichterliebe,by contrast with the
song cycles of Beethoven and Schubert, not all but very many of the
songs seem to assume different personae: think of "Aus meinen Thranen" in contrast with "Ich grolle nicht," "Wenn ich in deine Augen seh',"
"Ich hab' im Traum geweinet," and others. Schumann's self-consciousness as regards the implications of genre and subgenre must be
taken into account for any comprehensive understanding of his artistic
intentions.
The term "persona" has been borrowed from literary criticism by a
musician whose commitment to analysis has never blinded him to what
Cavell calls a "humane criticism of music," Edward T. Cone. In his latest
book The Composer'sVoice, Cone's argument, which ultimately goes much
further than the lied repertory, begins with Schubert's Erlk6nig. He first
inquires who it is that sings the various "voices" in this well-known song
and next invites us to distinguish the vocal persona or personae from
that of the piano part which underlies and binds the whole together.
This seems a fruitful line to take with "Aus meinen Thrainen." At first
the vocal and instrumental parts run closely parallel, but they pull apart
at those ambiguous cadences to which attention was drawn earlier. The
voice and the piano stop in their own ways and in their own sweet times;
how are we to conceive of their coordination? A highly suggestive question that Cone asks about songs is whether the pianist hears the singer
and vice versa (more precisely, whether the instrumental persona hears
the vocal persona). There is no doubt that the pianist hears the singer in
bar 12 of "Aus meinen Thrainen." But I am less sure that he does so in
bar 4 and pretty sure he does not in bar 17. At this point, the attention of
the instrumental persona is directed elsewhere, toward some arcane and
fascinating musical thought process of his own.
Can analysis help us here? Cone always likes to address his musical
criticism to musical performance, and I believe that a resolution of this
question of the vocal and instrumental personae will also resolve one
performance problem with this song, this small, fragile, and haunting
song: namely, the treatment of the fermatas in bars 4, 8, and 16.

5
The alternatives that I have suggested to traditional musical analysis-in this case, to Schenkerian and post-Schenkerian analysis-are not

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CriticalInquiry

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331

intended, of course, to exhaust all the possibilities. They are merely examples of some lines along which a more comprehensive, "humane," and (I
would say) practical criticism of music can and should be developed. Nor
is the term "alternative" to be taken in an exclusive sense. One cannot
envisage any one or any combination of these alternative modes of criticism as supplanting analysis; they should be joined with analysis to provide a less one-dimensional account of the artistic matters at hand. What
is important is to find ways of dealing responsibly with other kinds of
aesthetic value in music besides organicism. I do not really think we need
to get out of analysis, then, only out from under.
As I mentioned above, there are a number of pressures today leadto
ing a new breadth and flexibility in academic music criticism. Of these,
one of the most powerful emerges from efforts to come to terms with the
newest music. The position of Morgan, for example, seems not far
from that outlined in the present paper, though the way he formulates that position is certainly very different. The traditional concept of
analysis as "the elucidation of a sort of teleological organism," Morgan
feels-the language is derived from Cone-must be made broader; the
analysis of new music
must examine the composer's intentions in relation to their compositional realization, must discuss the implications of the compositional system in regard to the music it generates, consider how the
resulting music relates to older music and to other present-day
music, examine its perceptual properties and problems, etc. There
is really no end to the possibilities that could enable this list to be
extended.
Indeed, "a pressing responsibility of present-day analysis is to indicate
how new music reflects present-day actuality."go
Within the narrow confines of the music-academic community, this
call for analysis to examine, discuss, and indicate what it never thought
of examining, discussing, or indicating before may well prove to be
perplexing. Outside the community, the only thing that will perplex is
Morgan's clinging to the term "analysis." What he seems clearly to be
talking about is criticism, and he is talking about it in a way that must
surely enlist sympathy.
10. Robert P. Morgan, "On the Analysis of Recent Music," Critical Inquiry 4 (Autumn
1977): 40, 51.

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