II - The historiological imperative

Summary

THE AUTHORITY OF HISTORY

Lest we become too comfortable with a psychologistic Free Composition, we need observe that Schenker's analysis could likewise be read in terms of a second, perhaps even more ramified engagement with the later nineteenth-century sciences of music, the beginnings of which are to be found in an essay roughly contemporaneous with Harmony and Counterpoint I. Schenker's A Contribution to the Study of Ornamentation stands as a companion piece to his critical edition of C. P. E. Bach's keyboard works. As in the respective prefaces to its two theoretic siblings, Schenker moves quickly in the opening of Ornamentation to differentiate his work from that of his predecessors, casting himself as the champion of C. P. E. Bach's keyboard writing against a certain school of false or naive historicism. His primary target is von Bülow's venerable edition of several of the keyboard works. In accord with a general notion that because of the nature of Bach's instrument, the clavichord, these works are excessively parsimonious in their sonority, over-extravagant in their embellishment and in general under-notated, von Bülow thickens textures through the addition of inner voices and harmonic supports, simplifies the melodic line through the deletion of ornament, and clarifies the whole through the addition of dynamic and articulative markings.