2 - Intentions

Summary

Here, in the study of counterpoint, the apprentice can obtain the foundation for the first insight and conviction that there actually is a connection between the artist's intention with regard to the tones and their effect, a marvelous connection of which the lay-world has no inkling, and that in the best of cases – these are precisely the geniuses, and they alone! – intention (i.e., prediction of effect) and effect completely coincide, while in by far the greatest number of cases the tones, acting of their own accord, as it were, and behind the backs of the authors, bring about an entirely different effect than they perhaps intended.

(Kp1 22/14–15)

At the end of 1891, two years after withdrawing from the Conservatory of Music and the Performing Arts in Vienna, Schenker slowly began a career as a writer with a few reviews for Ernst Wilhelm Fritzsch's “new music” journal in Leipzig, the Musikalisches Wochenblatt. But looking back in 1922, Schenker attributed his real start to the Berlin publisher Maximilian Harden, who had had the courage, he said, to publish his first attempts as a writer in Die Zukunft, a new journal started by Harden in 1892 (NTB 11). For over six years, from the fall of 1891 to the spring of 1898, Schenker earned part of his income writing essays and concert reviews, on and off for Fritzsch and Harden, and more regularly for two Vienna weeklies, Neue Revue and Die Zeit.