The Analyst’s Voice

It is testament to the current security of music theory and analysis within the academy that recent years have witnessed a trio of substantial publications that, while augmenting the music-analytical literature on the ‘Bach to Brahms (and beyond)’ repertoire, more particularly celebrate – and, in two cases, capture – the pedagogical legacy of three scholars (my title honours a fourth ), two now deceased, another two centrally concerned with Schenkerian theory. Explorations in Schenkerian Analysis is a Gedenkschrift for Edward Laufer, who died in 2014. Its fifteen chapters reach from Bach (the C major Prelude noch einmal) to Debussy; Laufer, whose reluctance to publish restricted his principal influence to those he directly taught, is present only in the form of an interview from 2003. That same year saw the death of David Lewin, described by Richard Cohn as ‘the most original and far-ranging theorist of his generation’. And Cohn provides the introduction to David Lewin’s Morgengruß, the first publication of the text of a 1974 Yale graduate lecture that had been circulating informally ever since. Although Lewin’s approach is by no means exclusively Schenkerian, he straightforwardly acknowledges the role of Schenkerian theory in aspects of that approach; meanwhile, the Preface to Explorations records that ‘a projected volume on the teaching of Schenkerian analysis’ was a large-scale casualty of Laufer’s death.