Presentation Schedule
The Legacy of “Uncanny Spirits” in the Music Academy: Two Theories of Harmony (108389)
Session Chair: María Eugenia Rabadán Villalpando
Saturday, 11 July 2026 16:05
Session: Session 5
Room: UCL Torrington, G12 (Ground Floor)
Presentation Type:Oral Presentation
The “unessential” Theory of Arnold Schoenberg's Harmony (Vienna, 1911) is a manifesto of ideas about the origins, evolution, and future of tonality or the “language of tones,” cloaked loosely in an already disintegrating system of harmony in post-romanticism. His aesthetic sensibility is grounded in phenomenology, where the materiality of musical experience and subjective intending toward meaning – not objectified eternal truths about art – yield possibilities in excess of those that have already been realized. What Schoenberg calls for is a system that does not pretend to clarify the ultimate nature of things presented, but instead chooses to present experience. This is speculative theory which desires both to enshrine and repress a musical tradition centred in German Idealism.
Another Theory of Harmony was published in 1911 for a primarily Viennese audience. Heinrich Schenker--whose theoretical-analytical method of structural reduction (based on an Hegelian notion of dialectic tension in which dissonance is synthesized and absorbed into the primary chord within a “standing structure”)--has made a dominant mark on music theory scholarship in the tonal music tradition of analysis.
Schenker believed that the task of the composer was to manipulate dissonance in the interests of consonance, to rationalize all performative ruptures within the confines of a dominant tonal hierarchy-–the triad--which was understood to be the key element of musical/tonal order and stability. For Schoenberg, the harmonic tradition orders musical discourse and new musical utterances always exceed tradition. "Excess" does violence to Schenkerian sensibilities: tonality=a closed system, yielding a fascinating exploration of discursive fragmentation.
Authors:
Linda Schwartz, Booth University College, Canada
About the Presenter(s)
Dr Linda Schwartz is a Independent Scholar at Ambrose University in Canada
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