Schenker’s Argument and the Claims of Music Theory

Heinrich Schenker's theoretical and analytical method occupies a central (and often troubling) position in modern Anglo-American musical studies. His writings claim to resubstantiate the unique artistic presence of the canonic work, and reject those disciplines, such as psychoacoustics and systematic musicology, which derive from the natural sciences. This book rereads Schenker's project as an attempt to reconstruct music theory as a discipline against the background of the new empirical musical sciences of the later nineteenth century, such as the psychological and historical investigations of music.