Carl Schachter is the world's leading practitioner of Schenkerian theory and analysis. His articles and books have been broadly influential, and are seen by many as models of musical insight and lucid prose. Yet, perhaps his greatest impact has been felt in the classroom. At the Mannes College of Music, the Juilliard School of Music, Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and at special pedagogical events around the world, he has taught generations of musical performers, composers, historians, and theorists over the course of his long career. In Fall 2012, Schachter taught a doctoral seminar at the CUNY Graduate Center in which he talked about the music and the musical issues that have concerned him most deeply; the course was in essence a summation of his extensive and renowned teaching. In The Art of Tonal Analysis, winner of the Society for Music Theory's 2017 Citation of Special Merit, music theorist Joseph Straus presents edited transcripts of those lectures. Accompanied by abundant music examples, including analytical examples transcribed from the classroom blackboard, Straus's own visualizations of material that Schachter presented aurally at the piano, and Schachter's own extended Schenkerian graphs and sketches, this book offers a vivid account of Schachter's masterful pedagogy and his deep insight into the central works of the tonal canon. In making the lectures of one of the world's most extraordinary musicians and musical thinkers available to a wide audience, The Art of Tonal Analysis is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of music.

"This book consists of analyses of thirty-three musical passages or entire short works in a variety of post-tonal styles. The works under study are taken from throughout the long twentieth century, from 1909 to the present. Within the atonal wing of modern classical music, the composers discussed here, some canonical and some not, represent a diversity of musical style, chronology, geography, gender, and race/ethnicity. Composers studied include Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, Bartok, Stravinsky, Copland, Crawford-Seeger, Babbitt, Dallapiccola, Carter, Louise Talma, Hale Smith, Elisabeth Lutyens, Ursula Mamlok, Tania León, Tan Dun, Shulamit Ran, Kaija Saariaho, Joan Tower, John Adams, Sofia Gubaidulina, Thomas Adès, Caroline Shaw, Chen Yi, and Suzanne Farrin. The approach is pedagogical, in the somewhat informal style of a classroom. Musical examples and analytical videos carry the burden of the analytical argument, with relatively little prose. For each piece, the book suggests ways of making sense of the music, using basic concepts of post-tonal theory to tease out rich networks of musical relationships and reveal something of the fascination and beauty of this challenging music"--

Carl Schachter is the world's leading practitioner of Schenkerian theory and analysis. His articles and books have been broadly influential, and are seen by many as models of musical insight and lucid prose. Yet, perhaps his greatest impact has been felt in the classroom. At the Mannes College of Music, the Juilliard School of Music, Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and at special pedagogical events around the world, he has taught generations of musical performers, composers, historians, and theorists over the course of his long career. In Fall 2012, Schachter taught a doctoral seminar at the CUNY Graduate Center in which he talked about the music and the musical issues that have concerned him most deeply; the course was in essence a summation of his extensive and renowned teaching. In The Art of Tonal Analysis, music theorist Joseph Straus presents edited transcripts of those lectures. Accompanied by abundant music examples, including analytical examples transcribed from the classroom blackboard, Straus's own visualizations of material that Schachter presented aurally at the piano, and Schachter's own extended Schenkerian graphs and sketches, this book offers a vivid account of Schachter's masterful pedagogy and his deep insight into the central works of the tonal canon. In making the lectures of one of the world's most extraordinary musicians and musical thinkers available to a wide audience, The Art of Tonal Analysis is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of music.

Introduces the fundamental principles of Schenkerian analysis within the context of the music itself.

This book approaches Schenkerian analysis in a practical and accessible manner fit for the classroom, guiding readers through a step-by-step process. It is suitable for advanced undergraduates and graduate students of musicology, music theory, composition, and performance, and it is replete with a wide variety of musical examples.

An original, listener-based approach to harmony for popular music from the rock era of the 1950s to the present

Published originally by the David Mannes Music School, New York, in 1933 under the German title.