- Learn about the origins of this type of musical analysis
- Figure out how to apply this to your own compositions and others’ works with a basic understanding
- Decide if this type of analysis is actually helpful to you
- Also, check out our post on types of music notes!
Schenkerian Analysis For Beginners
Like other types of musical analysis, Schenkerian analysis is a method that involves reducing the aspects of a musical work down to a basic structure so we can understand it more clearly.
Let me preface this by saying; if you’ve ever opened up the Wikipedia page for Schenkerian analysis, I’m sorry! Luckily, I’m here to translate Schenker’s theories into plain English. That is, welcome to Schenkerian Analysis for beginners.
I heard Schekerian analysis mentioned briefly while I was late into my bachelor’s of music. Still, I didn’t really think about it until one of my aleatoric composer friends brought Schenker up during one of our many long-winded conversations.
I realized that my undergrad music theory and orchestration classes used Schenkerian analysis, at least to some extent. It’s synonymous with the ‘Everything is Sol-Do’ and ‘Everything is Three Blind Mice’ theories.
While I’m no Schenkerian nor a die-hard, I’m here to explain the “how” of it all to you in layman’s terms.
Stufe, Urstatz, Urlinie…What actually is Schenkerian Analysis?
The short answer is that Schenkerian analysis is a sweepingly broad method that involves reducing a work to a fundamental structure and relating that to the full score.
Schenkerian analysis is based on the work of Heinrich Schenker, a Russian-born Austrian composer who lived from the 1860s until the mid-1930s.
Schenker claimed to have found a way to analyze all aspects of a tonal work at the same time. This analysis method is complex and especially common in collegiate music courses in America.
Schenkerian analysis isn’t something you learn to do in a day, as it’s very involved. But I can teach you about the gist of it in this article. Let’s get into some more details!
A DIY-Style Analysis
Gagné’s The Place of Schenkerian Analysis describes the composer’s method as being ‘heuristic’ – That is, Schenker wants us to figure out the meaning of the music by ourselves. (Spoiler alert: That is one of the aspects I like most about his method!).
First Steps (The Foreground)
Schenker encouraged musicians to look at the surface level of the piece of music first. These initial steps from Schenker Guide will get you going in understanding the foreground of the music.
- First, find the key it’s in
- Next, add the chords
- Simplify everything by taking away the rhythms and barlines
- Delete all repeated notes (Ex. if there are two A’s in a row)
The initial steps to this analysis eliminate the rhythms to see the harmony more clearly. Melodies are looked over for stepwise motion (1 note up or 1 note down) vs. jumps between notes.
It’s common to sus out recurring themes/ melodies and the musical lay of the land as well. You might also start by asking who the piece was by and what it was about.
Let’s use the classical piece Bolero as a first example. A French composer wrote Bolero named Maurice Ravel, in 1928.
Even with just that amount of knowledge, we can expect a particular sound and vibe, which helps inform us.
Finding Themes
Alongside looking at the musical structure at large, motifs (or recurring short themes) are some of the first things you should look at in a piece. I’d recommend starting with a line or a shorter phrase.
A motif is like Beethoven Fifth’s “Ba-ba-ba bum!” It keeps returning; it is longer than a note but doesn’t take up much of the work. It’s kind of like a short sentence.
You can find musical nuggets like this everywhere. Most songs and pieces have multiple.
This is the first iteration of Bolero’s main motif in the first-chair clarinet:
Later, the clarinet keeps a lot of the rhythm but changes up the notes:
Even if you don’t read sheet music, you can visually see the similarity in the music. You might notice that there are faster notes and repeated notes. To Schekener, a lot of this is just ornamentation, or as I say, ‘fluff.’
Ravel’s Bolero starts the piece off strong with a motif, repeated throughout different instruments within the piece. Later, the motif changes and grows.
It’s very much a variation of a familiar theme piece, making it a great piece to study when you’re first learning about motifs.
Bolero is interesting because there are only 1-2 motifs throughout the 15-minute piece, which is quite unusual in the classical world. I digress… As we get further into the analysis, the fluffy fast notes and variations matter less and less.
Rhythm isn’t very important at the beginning of Schenkerian analysis. This makes the below line from Bolero more of an ostinato- it’s more of an accompaniment part.
The tambour (drum) keeps this rhythm up for the entire length of the piece:
To hear what I mean, you can listen to a full recording of Bolero here.
In pop music, a motif might be a riff that reoccurs. Lady Gaga’s “Alejandro,” the little ‘boop-boop-ba-boop-beep!’ motif comes around in the vocal melody and synths multiple times.
Structure
Checking out the broad roadmap tune is another initial step. This would be like analyzing a song as being AABA (same-same different same) of ABCBA. Songs with a C and D section (aka new sections with different melodies that are not the bridge) don’t often get a lot of radio play.
That being said, they’re a lot more sonically interesting (think: “Some Day My Prince Will Come”).
Middle Ground: Simplify It More and More!
The next step is to take everything going on in the piece and simplify it. That said, beginners should focus on the first steps until they know their way around the music theory block. Some middle-ground analyses make more sense than others.
There’s a bit of a learning curve here- It’s all about finding out which notes are and aren’t important. The most important bass notes get note stems added during this step, and notable changes in the harmonic structure (Especially chords I and V) are marked.
The more ornamental parts of the melody are ignored, whereas the big vital moments are underscored, so to speak.
This simplification continues until we get to the last step, identifying the underlying structure.
Important Words to Know
As we get into the most profound step of the analysis, you’ll need to know these words:
- Stufe- German for step (as in a scale step)
- Urlinie- (Primal line, governing line)
- Bassbrechung- bass line
- Ursatz (Fundamental Structure)
Ursatz, or deep structure, is one of the most fundamental aspects of this type of analysis. But for beginners, the concept of Ursatz may be overwhelming.
Schenker believed that most melodies ultimately descended. This main melodic line he called the urlinie which could only start on one of three stufe’s, or scale degrees. Underneath this melody, there is the bassline or bassbrechung.
The Last Step: Background
Finding the background is the trickiest part. Ideally, the entire piece can be reduced to a couple of lines.
These two lines are a descending upper voice paired with a bass line (urlinie, and bassbrechung). The upper line is marked in scale degrees and always begins with the 8th, 5th, or 3rd scale degree.
The “Three Blind Mice” of it All
Some musicians will have you thinking that Schenkerian analysis means everything is the folk tune “Three Blind Mice.” What?! Yep, what is the correct response. There’s a lot more to Schenker’s work than that little ditty- but the people who say this aren’t 100% wrong.
Schenker believed that a descending line (me-re-do paired) with the 1-5-1 (so do so, C G C) chord structure pattern represented all (Western) music at its core. Everything is tension and then a release.
Most pieces start with an I chord or have a sturdy I chord somewhere in the beginning. After this, we arrive at a 5 chord, sometimes, we switch keys and modulate, but in the end, we almost return to that 5-1.
Example: “Flowers”
So, you could say that Miley Cyrus’s “Flowers” has a very catchy bass line/bassbrechung. Oddly enough, her initial motif, “We were good, we were gold,” has a three-note descending melody not dissimilar to the ‘reduction of everything’ notation we had at the beginning of this article.
This tune is a prime example of Schenker’s work and countless others!
What Else Is There to Know?
So, so much! In this type of analysis, modulation to another key isn’t modulation. It is tonicization. There are loads of other nuanced examples like that.
Reducing music to its more basic form is a (near-grueling!) exercise that requires knowledge of cantus firmus, an old-school way of writing and analyzing the relationship between melody and harmony with several interactions and many strict rules.
Schenker’s theory heavily relied on the harmonic series and claimed that the first 5 notes (which he called klang) in the harmonic series were the basis of our major chord.
Loads of verbiage can be challenging to understand for casual hobbyists. In this way, Schenkerian Analysis has a significant barrier to entry.
Arguments against Schenkerian Analysis
If you ask me, Schenkerian analysis is incapable of analyzing all music because much of non-Western is based on something other than 1 and 5, so other types of tension and release are inherently different.
Various pieces about not fully subscribing to Schenker’s theories have arisen, like Lodewijk Muns’ “Why I am Not A Schenkerian,” which compares musicians to take on the theory as if it were a religion- and they’re not wrong! It’s a little eerie how gung-ho some people are about this.
Personally, I can see both sides. As a person who went through learning Schenkerian Analysis via music school osmosis, it has been helpful to me.
But then again, it’s also harmful when you’re trying to really dive into Gamelan ensembles, and the Schenkerian part of you thinks, “Gee, that’s dissonant and odd!”.
More recently, a musicologist got into a bit of a kerfluffle with scholars at the University of North Texas for denouncing the theory. I personally prefer to stay away from those rapid-filled waters.
In my mind, Schenkerian Analysis is extremely helpful, but it does have its limits, a huge barrier to entry, and was penned by a pretty problematic man.
This All Is A Bit Off. Was Schenker…Normal?!
“ Schenker saw himself as a prophet, the sole true interpreter of a near-lost language.” –Lodewijk
Definitely not. Schenker lived during the height of German nationalism. He believed his work to be masterful…Essentially, he thought his method was the best and that he was a genius.
He scoffed at composers like Stravinksy simply because they were mainstream at the time (don’t we all know that one person who hates mainstream songs just because they are mainstream?! Ugh).
Unfortunately, there are a lot of problematic folks in classical music (cough, Wagner, cough). We are often tasked with moral issues when the usefulness and popularity intersect with their moral downfalls.
FAQs
What Are The Levels of Schenkerian Analysis?
The three primary levels of Schenkerian analysis are what we looked at today: the foreground (all the notes and little aspects of the score), middle ground (semi-reduced score), and background (The basic two-lines).
What Is Schenkerian Notation?
During the foreground stage, Schenkerian notation marks up melodies, such as slurs between step-wise notes and N for neighbor notes.
Passing notes, arpeggiations, and other musical aspects are marked. You can see a guide to this on this page.
How Is Schenkerian Analysis Applied?
Schekerian analysis can be applied to any amount of music, be it a microcosm of a phrase or an entire symphony. That said, we only usually do the background analysis on a full tune/musical work.
What Are Some Other Methods of Musical Analysis?
By Hyacinth – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47031690
Schenkerian analysis is one of the most popular types of analysis, but it’s not the only one. In discretization, you reduce the music down to smaller bits.
You can analyze music by guessing what the listener might think or feel, what the composer intended, or simply look at the blueprint of the musical in a numeric, mathematical sort of way.
There are a million fancy words to say it, but that’s what it comes down to.
Interested in expanding your music theory knowledge? Take a look at our comprehensive guides:
