The Independence of Structural Parameters in
Schenkerian Accounts of Tonal Form
Any approach to large-scale
structure in tonal music must theorize the relationship between two different
kinds of musical phenomena: tonal
structure and thematic
design, or what Rothstein (1989) termed “inner form” and “outer form”.
This paper argues that the Schenkerian theory of form is a specific case of
this general question, and develops a framework in which Schenkerian and other
approaches can be meaningfully compared to one another. In any tonal repertoire, we can
pose two questions about tonal structure and thematic design. First, which is more important to determining
structure within the repertoire? Schenkerian theory, while not discounting the
importance of thematic design, has tended to take tonal structure as the more
important parameter. Second, to what extent do the two parameters agree with one another? While
Schenker’s original formulations of his ideas usually emphasized the ways in
which tonal structure and thematic design do not agree, a rich tradition of Schenkerian scholarship
has sought out ways to understand the two parameters as mutually
complementary. At the extremes of the question, P. Smith (2005) has seen the
two parameters as, in principle, totally independent of one another, in what
he terms “dimensional counterpoint,” while C. Smith (1996) is sufficiently
committed to parametric agreement that he revises a number of Schenker’s tonal
analyses in order to reconcile them with more traditional ‘outer-form’
readings. Out of these questions and
controversies, this paper develops a general construct and represents it
graphically with a geometrical device known as the ‘ternary plot’. It shows that the ‘importance’ and ‘agreement’
questions are not logically independent of each other: the more closely the
two parameters are in agreement, the less it is possible for either tonal
structure or thematic design to take precedence as more important than the
other.
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