De-Scripting Schenker, Scripting Music Theory

STEPHEN LETT

In “The De-Scription of Technical Objects,” Madeleine Akrich develops a vocabulary for studying relationships between technologies as designed and technologies as used. As designed, technologies offer a “script” for their use. Designers imagine and seek to create “the world into which the object is to be inserted” (Akrich 1992, 207–8). This involves “defin[ing] actors with specific tastes, competences, motives, aspirations, political prejudices, and the rest, and they assume that morality, technology, science, and economy will evolve in particular ways” (1992, 208). Yet, Akrich warns, these scripts are often fantasies: “it may be that no actors will come forward to play the roles envisaged by the designer. Or users may define quite different roles of their own” (1992, 208). In this way, users “de-script” the technology. Nonetheless, even when a script is more imagined than actually used, Akrich argues we should not simply dismiss it. To understand how technologies circulate and create worlds, she insists, “we have to go back and forth continually between the designer and the user, between the designer’s projected user and the real user, between the world inscribed in the object and the world described by its displacement” (1992, 208–9, emphasis in original).

Treating Schenkerian analysis as a technology, I propose that Akrich’s framework offers a productive lens for contemplating the ethical and political concerns that accompany our use of his method. Her approach directs us to examine how the world Schenker hoped to create through his analytical tools relates to the world described by their displacement—our world, the academic discipline of North American music theory. She challenges us to ask whether we are performing some version of Schenker’s script as “actors with specific tastes, competences, motives, aspirations, political prejudices, and the rest,” or whether we are forming new roles for ourselves. Through a study of Carl Schachter’s “Elephants, Crocodiles, and Beethoven: Schenker’s Politics and the Pedagogy of Schenkerian Analysis” (2001), I argue that the role Schachter plays—which is also often the role we play—aligns in significant ways with Schenker’s script. I further argue that Schachter’s scripting of Schenkerian analysis falls in line with another foundational disciplinary script that leads us to defer responsibility for the effects of our discourse. In doing so, I aim to highlight how, through our music-theoretical work, we cultivate a disposition toward the world that aids and abets harmful political projects. To conclude, I contend that if we wish to develop a music theory accountable to its worldly effects, we must both recognize the politics we perform through our research and begin imagining how we might strategically re-script our worlds through academic production.

In “Elephants, Crocodiles, and Beethoven,” Schachter works to save Schenker’s analytical tools from Schenker’s script. He begins by recounting the strategic and partial de-scripting of Schenker’s ideas in the English translation of Der freie Satz. As others have noted, some wished to censor the text to shield Schenker’s valuable music-analytical concepts from readers who would dismiss them on political grounds, while others considered such censorship intellectually dishonest. As a compromise, “a number of Schenker’s statements about matters philosophical, pseudo-scientific, political, social, and esthetic” were placed in an appendix (Schachter 2001, 2). For Schenkerians, the following decades brought increasing prestige and expanding influence. Writing in response to recent critical studies that highlighted the relationship between Schenker’s politics and his music theory, Schachter aims to dispel any “facile connections” (2001, 13) between the practice of Schenkerian analysis and the method’s intellectual history. He lays out his plan for the article:

“What I want to do in this paper is first of all to survey Schenker’s political views and attempt to place them in historical context. Secondly I wish to consider whether the musical and political ideas are necessarily bound together for Schenker’s readers today (few of whom would welcome the kind of societal regeneration he sought). And finally whether the teaching of his approach nowadays needs to incorporate references to his political ideology.” (2001, 4)

Schachter answers the latter two questions by appealing to a presumed common sense: of course, Schenker’s musical ideas are not necessarily bound to his political ideas for our music-theoretical practice, and of course, we do not need to mention his political ideology in our teaching. By historicizing Schenker’s thought, Schachter seeks to sever Schenker’s script—a residue of his era’s politics—from his analytical method, which Schachter regards as an enduring intellectual achievement.

In Akrich’s terms, Schachter argues that although Schenker invented a set of analytical technologies with an extensive manual, we users can (and should) discard parts of his script and apply the technology in ways Schenker never intended. According to Akrich, Schachter is quite right—we users possess agency. We may de-script the technology, refuse the roles Schenker wrote for us, and write new ones for ourselves. Indeed, Schachter provides just such a script for Schenkerian technologies, centering on the theme that Schenkerian analysis offers insights into tonal music without parallel in the long tradition of tonal theory. This script, Schachter argues, relieves us of any involvement in the political project that inspired and informed the technology’s construction. Yet we should not simply accept Schachter’s assurance. Following Akrich’s insistence that a technology’s script envisions a world, we must ask: what world does Schachter imagine in his script? And to understand the relationships between their respective scripts, we must then ask how Schachter’s imagined world might echo or attempt to undermine Schenker’s.

In scripting Schenkerian analysis, Schachter imagines a world where certain people care deeply about tonal music. It is a world where tonal music remains a living tradition rather than a relic of past centuries. Indeed, Schachter’s script appears driven by a desire for the tradition to survive, as if its life were presently endangered. This dimension surfaces when he offers an aside on the state of the arts in the United States: “Whether a populist, anti-elitist society and government like ours can foster valuable artistic production is doubtful, at least in my view; in any case, recent trends in this country are not encouraging” (2001, 8). Schachter maintains that valuable artistic musical expression is produced not by individuals untrained in the tradition or for the demos, but by a gifted elite for those trained to recognize artistic value. Though Schenker finds something unique to genius in the German “humus,” Schachter believes such genius—which he rephrases as “artists of uncommon ability” (2001, 8)—can arise anywhere under the right conditions. For Schachter, Schenkerian analysis itself can help create better conditions for nurturing authentic art.

Schachter thus imagines a world where people value and work to sustain the tonal tradition. Yet maintaining this tradition, he recognizes, requires massive resources to train the musicians and discriminating listeners needed to keep it alive. That is, Schachter pictures institutions that cultivate such individuals. Schenker, as Schachter notes, addresses this idea directly: “Schenker believed that an aristocracy of some sort—at least in cultural matters if not also in political structure—would promote the selection and support of gifted individuals among whom the rare genius might emerge” (2001, 8). Although Schachter does not explicitly describe what kind of institution would best promote such selection and support, he seems convinced that Schenkerian technology is indispensable to any such institution.

Why does Schachter regard Schenkerian technology as so indispensable? As stated in his script, it is because the technology offers unparalleled insights into tonal music, possessing what he calls “explanatory power.” Beyond providing a foundation for quality performances of and meaningful listening to masterfully composed works, Schachter’s emphasis on insight and explanatory power hints at a world where a certain type of discursive formulation—“knowledge”—can be leveraged for various ends. While Schenker consistently acknowledged and engaged with the political aspect of his knowledge production, Schachter remains silent on this matter. Yet his article implicitly aims to intervene in two institutions that have historically sustained the tradition: the music-world that supports tonal music—a network of non-profit corporations creating a professional space for its performance—and the academy, another non-profit corporate space where knowledge is produced and dispositions formed. For these arts-supporting institutions to survive, they require funding, which increasingly comes from wealthy donors and corporate sponsorships. Schenkerian analysis thus partly serves to demonstrate the tonal tradition’s enduring value by producing insights that can translate into financial support.

Read in this way, Schachter’s script enacts a conservative politics. It aims to safeguard the tonal tradition by relying on institutions that have historically sustained it, rather than seeking to transform the broader political structure we inhabit. Indeed, instead of imagining a world otherwise, Schachter’s script seems simply to assume the current one.

How different, then, is Schachter’s script from Schenker’s? Certainly significant differences exist. Yet, as I see it, the chief distinction is that Schenker held an explicit political project—he had a vision. Schachter, on the other hand, concedes to our existing world, a world that, like Schenker’s, perpetuates white supremacy (if not necessarily the genius of the German humus) and is governed by a moneyed elite (if not an aristocracy).

Toward the end of his article, Schachter writes, “I must confess that I never think about Schenker’s politics, religion, or philosophy when engaged in analyzing a piece” (2001, 13). This is because, as he had stated earlier, Schenker’s political investments do not “deal directly with music-theoretical issues” (2001, 2). The irony, however, is that by ignoring Schenker’s “extra-musical” thought, Schachter fails to recognize that he is actually performing a political project continuous with Schenker’s. In particular, the scripts of Schenker and Schachter represent two complementary strategies within the ongoing projects of colonialism. This is blatant in Schenker’s case: his thinking is steeped in the tradition that formulated and spread ideas inspiring the “enlightened” Western desire to undertake projects of empire. It is less conspicuous but arguably more pernicious with Schachter—and, by extension, with us. Although his/our discourse rests on practices that deny any connection to such overtly bigoted intellectual projects, this denial conceals the fact that we continue to occupy indigenous lands for our benefit. Schachter’s discourse, that is, enacts a practice of elimination that settlers keep carrying out so that we can better ignore the fact that we still engage in colonial undertakings. In the earlier script, harm was deemed necessary for civilization. In the current one, we actively forget and continue to inflict harm. As Schenker’s motto goes: Idem semper sed non eodem modo (always the same, but not in the same way).

Because my turn to settler colonialism may seem out of left field, I wish to close by elaborating how another foundational disciplinary script performs a logic of elimination based on practices analogous to legal approaches. As I have hoped to demonstrate through Akrich, to adequately address how music-theoretical work performs a politics that aids and abets ongoing harm in the world, we must trace complicated networks that quickly explode any simple relation between designer’s intention and user’s practice. Unfortunately, we have not yet done this work. Instead, like Schachter, we simply insist that our analytical technologies have been re-scripted and recuperated from their designer’s nefarious intentions. Moreover, we argue that by producing knowledge about music, we are causing no significant harm. Responding to a critique of his work, Joseph N. Straus offers the clearest articulation of this pervasive music-theoretical script:

“We [music theorists] like imagining and describing musical structures. I know that the concepts of a ‘work,’ a ‘larger whole,’ and ‘structure’ are hotly contested in contemporary critical theory. Nonetheless, until it can be shown that our pleasures and enjoyments are immoral or harmful to others, I hope we may continue to indulge them. … I hope we will not abandon [our traditional analytical modes] on the false grounds that they suffer some ineradicable stain of their origin.” (Straus 1995, 7–8)

We are told we should not worry about the possible adverse effects of our technologies until harm from their use is demonstrated—until evidence is presented. The pernicious aspect of this argument is that the work of tracing those effects is continually written out of our field: we refuse to admit such evidence into music-theoretical discourse. Music-theoretical discourse operates by precisely this refusal.

Harm Through Disciplinary Deferral

We have created a system where certain scholars are deemed to lack standing, and their evidence is considered inadmissible for demonstrating harm. This rests on a narrowly legalistic conception of harm that lets us perpetually defer responsibility for our complicity in sustaining it. Music theory has cultivated precisely this disposition of deferral. Yet our proper task should be fostering a disposition that “attends to all our relations.”

Rather than stopping our ears and fleeing into musical imaginaries, we need to recognize that theorizing music inevitably opens us up to the world.

Universities as World-Making: Three Dispositions

The harm we cause may be less flagrant than what would sway some of us. Still, as university scholars and educators, we must recognize, following la paperson, that “the university is world-making” (2017, xiv). Central to this world-making work is the cultivation of dispositions. La paperson identifies three such dispositions that universities foster.

First is training students to accumulate knowledge, along with resources and power. Second is training students to critique this accumulation—while simultaneously reinforcing that accumulative logic. Third is training students to strategize, cultivating an attitude that treats the first two stances as technologies for decolonization.

So far, music theory—like academia at large—primarily fosters the accumulative and critical dispositions. We imagine ourselves as simply studying music, not participating in politics. But we must recognize that we have always been enacting a politics, building a world. Acknowledging this opens possibilities for producing knowledge and worlds differently—for strategizing.

If we want to do so less destructively, we first need to retrain our ears so we can resonate with and value the knowledge coming from voices outside our white racial frame.

Political Parallel

I want to be clear about the context of harms inflicted continuously. Consider that even after overwhelming evidence was presented against President Trump, Republicans acquitted him. Immediately afterward, Trump removed the witnesses who had offered damning testimony from their administrative positions.

Relational Framework and Sources

My emphasis on attending to all our relations derives from Kim TallBear’s “Caretaking Relations, Not American Dreaming.” She “foreground[s] an everyday Dakota understanding of existence that focuses on ‘being in good relation.’ … Thinking in terms of being in relation, I propose an explicitly spatial narrative of caretaking relations—both human and other-than-human—as an alternative to the temporally progressive settler-colonial American Dreaming that is ever co-constituted with deadly hierarchies of life. A relational web as spatial metaphor requires us to pay attention to our relations and obligations here and now” (2019, 25).

Here I have reframed la paperson’s exposition of the primary actions of the First, Second, and Third Universities according to the dispositions they urge upon students (2017, 37–53). Another book that has informed my approach to strategic academic work is Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013).