Can we ignore Schenker’s political thoughts and pronouncements when considering his theories? The doctrine of “only the work, not the life,” advanced by the postwar New Criticism movement, has made some limited sense to me on its home turf in literature, to the extent that an intense focus, a “close reading,” of a text itself, with blinders on, can yield insights that might be blurred by other considerations. On the whole, though, I’ve always thought that the losses outweigh the gains if one excludes the creator from his or her creation, and when it comes to interpretation in any of the arts of the act, one cuts oneself off from an indispensable source of intellectual and emotional understanding by doing that. But theoretical constructs are different from works of art. Carl Schachter’s Elephants, Crocodiles, and Beethoven: Schenker’s Politics and the Pedagogy of Schenkerian Analysis  ^(I)is a keynote article on this subject in relation to Schenker. While by no means sympathetic to Schenker’s political views, Schachter places them in historical context and lends them some nuance. He presents the central Schenkerian propositions with clarity, and with examples that do not require advanced theoretical comprehension. And, with full awareness of Schenker’s own insistence that his musical and political ideas belong together, Schachter says: “I firmly believe that the ideology is in no way an essential component of the analytic practice.” Ewell, obviously, disagrees. That wouldn’t serve his purposes (and note that Schachter is careful to say “essential,” not “permissible”). Looking at this disagreement in theoretical analytics from the fringe of this territory, I agree with Schachter.

And again from the fringe, here’s how it looks: Heinrich Schenker developed a method for analyzing much of the great music of the Western tradition. To put it a bit reductively, it’s a tool. While it can be used for purely explanatory purposes or abstract argument, it was intended first to put into performers’ hands a means of seeing structure with greater clarity, and thus of playing or conducting with a more revelatory sense of destination and emphasis. (Schenker was himself a pianist of professional standing, which no doubt helps to account for the presence of those covert Germans, Scarlatti and Chopin, in the Pantheon. Keyboard players are the soloists who of necessity deal most directly with the relationship between the vertical and horizontal dimensions, and are most responsible for the wholeness of musical structure and expression.) While Schenker himself found only the composers of his Pantheon worthy of his method’s attention, his followers have applied it much more widely. The one Schenkerian event I have personally attended was a presentation on the finale of Norma—an unusual operatic excursion, following which one of subjects of the Q & A was “To Schenk or not to Schenk?” Schenking has extended as far as Puccini and The Beatles, and its influence on the teaching of theory has grown rapidly in recent decades.