Beyond Assimilation
Often seen as the summation of Schenker's work but in fact an extreme development of its tendencies towards abstraction, Free Composition (1935) can be understood as a form of “inner emigration”, a withdrawal from an increasingly tolerable sociopolitical situation; this is illustrated by a comparison between Free Composition and Adalbert Stifter's novel, The Indian Summer. It is this tendency towards abstraction, as well as the emigration during the 1930s of many of Schenker's (predominantly Jewish) pupils to North America, that enabled Schenker's theory to take root in the positivist atmosphere of post-war American academia. In its Americanized form, Schenkerian theory lost contact with the social and arguably even the musical values that had originally informed it. The purpose of this book is to recapture these dimensions of Schenker's thought and so argue for more broadly conceived Schenkerian practice.
Keywords: abstraction, emigration, America, Adalbert Stifter, Free Composition
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .