When, Jeffrey Williams, interviewing Stanley Fish, offered the now commonplace view that, in the 1970s and 1980s especially, "[literary or critical] theory provided a kind of bridge or lingua franca for literary studies, so that somebody in Renaissance could talk to somebody in twentieth-century American literature," Fish responded with comments on the preceding generation:
New Criticism provided a vocabulary, with its notions of tension and paradox and verbal artifacts, that could be as much a part of Chaucerian criticism . . . as of criticism, let's say, of Joseph Conrad's novels. So there was always a way, I think, that the techniques in one field could be generalized. What surprises me, though, and heartens me, is the survival through all of these changes of some commitment to close reading. I know that there are many, many complaints and laments that close reading is a lost art, but I see many people who still perform it. It still remains, at least in my experience, the most powerful pedagogical tool which can really awaken students' interest when they begin to realize that they can perform analyses of texts that remove the texts from the category of the alien and the strange, and then begin to actually understand the mechanics of how prose and verse work. (22)
In music studies, Schenkerian analysis and classical pitch-class set theory did much the same during roughly the same period (allowing for an offset of a decade or so). The difference was that the "tools" and "mechanics" of particular ways of reading/auditing became naturalized: in literary studies, every device, notion, or rhetorical gambit was closely scrutinized and often contested. Something like this happened with classical pc-set theory through Robert Morris's more thorough and more sophisticated reformulation of it and, more radically of course, through Lewin's GMIT, which opened the door to a wide field of theoretical and interpretative possibilities. Despite some good critical and historical work beginning in the 1980s, Schenkerian studies advanced only so far as meeting New Musicologists in a conservative practice of hermeneutics. Thus, as he does in "Schoenberg's Hat," Schachter can say in 1999 that "Schenker's description in Part I of Free Composition reveals some of the fundamental characteristics of the tonal system" (10). And the mechanics of that "system" are the naturalized "three Ursatz forms, [which are] the simplest pieces of tonal music, so simple that they have no artistic value at all, but still fulfill some of the basic needs of a tonal piece."
Between Neo-Riemannian rewriting of the history of harmony, the Schenkerian hermeneutics that must, if carried out sensitively and thoroughly, eventually break down the notion of a common practice, and the powerful new view of musical rhetoric in the 18th century that is coming out of partimento studies, a view like Schachter's is no longer sustainable.
References:
Williams, Jeffery L. Critics at Work: Interviews, 1993-2003. New York: New York University Press, 2004.
Morris, Robert D. Composition with Pitch Classes: A Theory of Compositional Design. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.
Lewin, David. Generalized Music Intervals and Transformations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.
Schachter, Carl. Joseph Straus, ed. Unfoldings: Essays in Schenkerian Theory and Analysis. New York/London: Oxford University Press, 1999.
