Why did Schenker write a theory of music?
‘Inferior instinct and (often) complete lack of secure knowledge on the part of today’s performing musicians are the reason that the master works – how bitter a truth! – have not been heard in our time in their authentic shape’ (Heinrich Schenker – Counterpoint, p. xviii) Schenker was not afraid to criticise what he saw as a general lack of theoretical and practical understanding amongst musicians. As a keen performer, composer, teacher and editor of music himself, he believed that the professional practice of all these activities suffered from serious misunderstandings of how tonal music works. He gradually developed his theory in order to remedy this situation, which he feared was causing the death of the Austro-German tradition that he loved (i. e. the music of Bach through Mozart to Beethoven and beyond). The Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg shared these fears but his solution was to invent a new technique (the twelve-tone or serial method of composition) that would allow compos
