5.4. Discusión de resultados
5.4.3 Respecto al Objetivo Específico (b)
One indication that Schenker was suspicious about ‘The Myth of Scales’ is that he seldom, if ever, discussed scales explicitly. Yet, through a number of passing comments, he left us in no doubt about his views. Among the most colorful of these appears at the start of Kontrapunkt 1, in a general discussion of prototypical cantus firmi.
Although Schenker’s immediate goal was to discuss the essential behavior of tonal melodies, he took the opportunity to explain why a simple appeal to scale type provides an inadequate explanation.14If we ignore his condescending attitudes to music written before Bach and to music theorists before him, Schenker’s objection to ‘The Myth of Scales’ is clear enough: since scales can at best describe only purely linear relationships, they are incapable of explaining how voice leading and harmony interact in functional monotonal con-texts.15In other words, scales may describe what pitches are present in a given context, they do not explain why these pitches are related in some ways and not others. Whatever value they may have as
“descriptive tools” for classifying melodic patterns, scales have little power to explain the behavior of specific notes or chords.16
To support these bold claims, Schenker began his onslaught against scales with a brief synopsis of modal theory. According to him, the church modes were “modest efforts to categorize horizon-tally conceived melodies” whose purpose was “simply to capture theoretically the beginning and end of a given melody as well as other relationships in the course of the horizontal line.”17He added,
“Earlier periods further divided, for similar descriptive purposes, all modes into authentic and plagal or so-called perfect, imperfect, and mixed modes just to catalog and categorize the various melodic phenomena.”18 Schenker insisted, however, that once theorists began to recognize that melodic lines behave differently in poly-phonic contexts, then it became necessary for them to consider the vertical as well as the horizontal dimension of music. As he put it:
Consequently they need no longer limit themselves to providing a highly detailed horizontal description; rather, by the application of harmonic crite-ria (even to the horizontal line—compare Harmony, par. 76), therefore pre-cisely by virtue of their deeper penetration, they are able to reveal all the more accurately the true inner core of the melody.19
Schenker made similar arguments about attempts to explain exotic harmonies by appealing to exotic scales: “Even though the inten-tions in all these cases seem to be so diverse, the error is one and the same, since neither the so-called church modes nor exotic scales should be considered real systems.”20To be considered a ‘real system’ in any explanatory sense, Schenker insisted that the system must not only list what pitches appear, it must also explain how they behave. This inevitably requires formulating explicit laws of voice leading and harmony, and rejecting ‘The Myth of Scales.’
If Schenker thought that scales do not represent ‘real systems’
in any explanatory sense, how did he explain the diatonic nature of the tonal system? How did he get rid of any primitive notion of scale membership? Quite simply, Schenker believed that the dia-tonic properties of functional monotonal music arise from compos-ing out triads. To quote from Der freie Satz:
The series of tones thus created in the Urlinie, represents diatony (Diatonie).
In the narrowest sense, Diatony belongs only to the Urlinie. But, in accord with its origin, it simultaneously governs the whole contrapuntal setting [of the Ursatz], including the bass arpeggiation and the passing tones . . ..
Diatony therefore does not stem from the so-called Greek or Gregorian modes, but rather from the composing-out process, which is governed by the principle of the fifth.21
In other words, diatonic scales are not the basis of functional monot-onality; rather they result from composing out triadic prototypes.
But Schenker went further. Since he believed that tonal sur-faces could be fully chromatic, Schenker proposed that modal and exotic effects could be produced by mixture and tonicization. For example, in the Harmonielehre, he included two charts that demon-strate how various modal inflections can arise from varying degrees of mixture (see figure 4.2, Schenker’s account of mixture).22Figure 4.2a shows the major system, with its natural third, sixth, and sev-enth degrees, on the top staff, whereas the minor system, with its lowered third, sixth, and seventh degrees, appears on the bottom staff. Between these two extremes, there are six rows, each one cor-responding to the six possible combinations of natural and lowered degrees. In Rows 1, 2 and 3, the lowered third, sixth, and seventh degrees appear individually: Row 1 illustrates the ascending melodic
Figure 4.2. Schenker’s account of mixture.
a. Schenker, Harmonielehre, par. 41, p. 110.
minor scale and Row 3 Mixolydian mode. In Rows 4, 5, and 6, the various pairs of lowered degrees occur: Row 4 illustrates the har-monic minor scale and Row 5 Dorian mode. The arrows along the right hand side of figure 4.2a indicate that mixture can occur in varying degrees.23 Figure 4.2b lists the tonic, subdominant, and dominant triads for each row.24 Since simple mixture cannot account for all modal inflections, Schenker was forced to invoke tonicization as well. For example, to explain so-called Lydian mode, Schenker suggested that
4 arises to tonicize 5; similarly, he sug-gested that Phrygian II arises from a mixture within the minor sys-tem. Although he did not discuss Locrian mode, he presumably derived it from mixtures of 2, 3, 5, 6, and 7.Once Schenker realized that he could explain a wide range of different modal inflections using mixture and tonicization, he was
able to reject the notion that the modes were systems equivalent to tonality. To quote him:
In dropping the Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, and Mixolydian “rows” we have apparently reduced the number of possible relationships into which each tone could enter, to the detriment of its vitality and egoism. However, this Figure 4.2 (continued).
b. Schenker, Harmonielehre, par. 48, p. 117.
loss is merely apparent only. The tone itself bravely stood its ground, and it seems it was the tone itself that forced the artist to leave the door ajar for relationships of a Mixolydian, Dorian, etc. character, even when the artist no longer believed in the validity of those systems.25
As he explained, “If the so-called Dorian and Mixolydian qualities are established by the major and minor systems alone (these under-stood correctly, of course), then why should we burden ourselves with still more independent systems?”26
Schenker made similar claims about the origins of exotic inflec-tions in functional monotonal contexts. At the start of Kontrapunkt 1, he outlined the traditional view of exotic scales:
Finally, a parallel exists in that the Orientals, exactly like our ancestors—
and this is proof enough!—submit to the puerile preoccupation with scale systems they commit to paper simply by following the horizontal direction of the melodies. They assume, for example, a pentatonic system consisting of five degrees: C D E. G A.C or C D E. G A.C; or a heptatonic system con-sisting of seven degrees: F G A B C D E F (Chinese), D E F G A B C D (Japanese), C D E F G A B C (Gypsy), F G A B C D F (Chinese whole-tone scale), or C D E F G A B C (Indian), and so forth. In addition, all these so-called systems, like our old church modes, can begin with any of its tones, whereby the number of systems is increased to monstrous proportions.27
But once again, he suggested that these phenomena stem not from alternative systems, but from transformations within the tonal system:
Skillful artists, still, have always successfully limited the problem of musical exoticism in practice. They solved it by attempting to make the original melodies of foreign peoples (often original only because of their imperfec-tions and awkwardness) accessible to us through the refinements of our two tonal systems. They expressed the foreign character in our major and minor—
such superiority in our art, such flexibility in our systems!28
In short, Schenker did not deny that Common-Practice composers wrote music that sometimes sounds modal or exotic; rather, he denied that these inflections can be explained merely by invoking various independent scale systems. In place of this plethora of scale systems, Schenker drew on just two processes: mixture and tonicization. This
step represents a remarkable simplification of theoretical concepts. To see the consequences of Schenker’s arguments, let us now see how he analyzed some specific pieces with clear modal inflections.