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Heinrich Schenker, ca. 1919. (Photo courtesy of the Oswald Jonas Collection at the University of California,
Riverside.)

The Schenker Controversy

Timothy L. Jackson
20 Dec 2021
• 20 min read

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In the realization of my plan, I will not permit myself to be distracted by anything in

 the world, and it is my conviction that the truth, however anybody may try to
assault, ignore, or otherwise abuse it, will nevertheless prevail.
~Heinrich Schenker

Located in the Neue Israelitische Friedhof [the New Jewish Cemetery] just outside
Vienna, the epitaph of one of the greats of music theory reads, “Here lies he who
perceived the soul of music and proclaimed its laws in the spirit of the greats like
no one before him, Heinrich Schenker.” The author of the epitaph lies buried
beneath it. While Schenker might still be unknown to the general public and even
to many music theorists, his glowing self-assessment has been taken seriously by
scholars since the 1960s. With a gigantic musical mind and vision, Schenker has
assumed the status of an Albert Einstein or a Sigmund Freud in the arena of
classical music theory, upon which he bestowed the gift of his analytical approach,
and his superb ear and musicality.

Yet virtually the entire profession of music theory in America now believes that
Heinrich Schenker was a “virulent racist”—a Jewish Nazi sympathizer, no less. In
July 2020, the Journal of Schenkerian Studies, which I founded at the University of
North Texas, and I were both subjected to a massive cancellation attempt over our
efforts to counter an attack on Schenker, Schenkerian music theorists, and the
methodology itself, by Philip Ewell of Hunter College. I, too, was branded a “racist”
for my critique of Ewell’s views and the university initiated an ad hoc investigation
of me and the journal in the name of “combating racism.” In response, I filed a
lawsuit against my own university and some of my colleagues, in which litigation is
ongoing.

Among the many accusations made against Schenker and his legacy was the
insinuation that Schenker’s disciples—most of whom were German Jewish
refugees who fled the Nazis—deceptively colluded to hide the racist character and
origins of Schenkerian music theory. In this recent retelling of history, these
emigres were said to be responsible for imposing what critical race theorist Joe
Feagin has called a “White Racial Frame” on music theory, to the exclusion of
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blacks and people of color. But is it really plausible or historically accurate to
associate Schenker’s refugee students with contemporary white supremacists?
Were these German Jewish emigres, and their Jewish students here in America,
socially constructed as “white”? The claims being made about Schenker are not
only false, but are part of a legacy of antisemitic views and practices that plagued
both him and his students during the 20th century, and continue to harm the
reception of his work today.

In fact, in German-speaking Europe during the interwar period, Jews were

differentiated from Germans not by skin color but by the designation “non-Aryan,”
and, after Hitler came to power, by a “J” stamp or the names "Israel" and "Sara"
inserted into their passports. Once the Nazis conquered Europe and large parts of
European Russia (the former Pale of Settlement), the euphemistic designation
"nicht Arisch" became a death sentence.

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Jeanette “Sara” Schenker's passport dated June 11, 1941, with her Jewish ethnicity noted.
And when they arrived in America, Schenker’s students continued to be subjected
to racial prejudice. Many major American universities were reluctant to hire Jewish
refugees due to the antisemitic attitudes widely prevalent among faculty and
administrators. And if they were hired, they were deliberately underemployed. For
example, when Schenker’s student Hans Weisse joined the music faculty at
Columbia University during the 1930s, he was engaged only as an adjunct lecturer,
despite the fact that he had studied with Guido Adler as well as Schenker, and had
earned a prestigious doctorate in musicology from the University of Vienna. He
was forbidden from teaching Schenker’s theories.

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 Schenker's unpublished analysis of a Handel Fugue from the F major Keyboard Suite (Picture courtesy of the
author)

...

Ewell’s claim that Schenker was an adherent of Nazi ideology and an admirer of
Hitler dates back to Schenker’s own lifetime. As early as the 1920s, his critics
accused him of hiding his Jewish identity and supporting the Nazi cause. In
response, Schenker noted that he had refused to convert to Christianity, unlike
many of his Jewish detractors. In a letter to his student Otto Vrieslander on May
6th, 1923, he wrote:

All baptized Jews everywhere, who adopt foreign names, foreign religion, foreign

language, have appointed me, tax-free, to the position of “swastika wielder”—
though I am the only one among them who has no business in these matters.

Schenker emphasized his refusal to undergo baptism:

I have not been baptized and, when asked, confessed my Jewish faith with pride
and love, indeed with the utmost conviction that no writer of history can share
with me, not even the most enlightened Jew.

In 1925, a parody issue of the contemporary music journal, Musikblätter des

Anbruch, printed a series of satirical responses to the question “What does New
Music mean to you?” in the voices of various luminaries. Schenker was the only
one singled out for portrayal as an antisemite and Nazi militarist. His supposed
response to the question (written by the authors of the parody) is a deliberately
pompous run-on sentence that’s impossible to render into clear English:

I received your survey, “What does New Music mean to you?” and I am extremely
astonished that this survey was sent to me. As you may know, I am the most
important living music writer, pianist and composer today and for a great many
years in my books and pamphlets as well as in my arrangements of Beethoven
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and other works, which are the best of all existing, that have existed, and will
exist, and even that could have existed, according to which New Music is hardly
 , , g y
a music at all, and that after Beethoven and Schumann (hallowed be the name)
and perhaps Brahms, but then no more [music] was created, and everything only
became clear once I discovered that it is so, and that I will proclaim it to
humanity, because we Germans do not allow ourselves to be mocked, and the
God of all still exists, and the Jews will experience that their world empire is
defeated in the name of German Art, in the name of Beethoven, in the name of
Bach, in the name of Schumann, in the name of Brahms and in the name of
Heinrich Schenker from Podwoloczyska. May God grant this.

The reference to the Jewish “world empire” alludes to the notorious antisemitic
fabrication, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, and the promise that “we
Germans” would overthrow Jewish hegemony in New Music was an antisemitic slur
unlike anything Schenker himself ever wrote or uttered. The parody also equates
Schenker with a “Piefke”—Viennese slang for a Prussian militarist. And Schenker's
assessment of Schoenberg and Hindemith as far inferior to the great Classical
masters is twisted to suggest that Hindemith is a bad composer because, like
Schoenberg, the actual composer of the tone-poem Pelleas und Melisande, he is a
Jew.

Schenker privately responded to these slanders in a diary entry on September

20th, 1925, in which he lamented that “the people who accuse me of Nazi
allegiances, or of insincerity, such as by hiding my Jewishness, do not prefer to
resort to factual refutations…”

Two years later, in an August 1927 letter to his friend Moritz Violin, Schenker
responded to the July violence in Vienna with this prognosis of its significance:

The events in Vienna have shocked me. Who knows how things will turn out as a
result. In any event, they signify one step closer to the abyss. The Germans are
sinking quickly, I refer to the Germans in general—in less than ten years one will
be able to read the fate of the Jews on the brow of every German, just as on the
brow of every Jew.
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Confronted with ascendant Nazism in 1933–34, Schenker rejected the Nazi

concept of biological racism and its concomitant antisemitism. Unlike many
contemporaneous thinkers (including German sociologist and musicologist
Theodor Adorno and Austrian Jewish philosopher Martin Buber), Schenker was
already expressing his opposition to the regime by mid-April 1933, two-and-a-half
months after the Nazis seized power.

...

However, until the end of the first week of April 1933, even Schenker—for all his
prescience in 1927 about the unhappy destiny of the Jews—seriously
underestimated the virulence of Hitler and the Nazis’ antisemitism, and the extent
to which it would motivate their future actions. But he was hardly alone in this
respect. In early 1933, there remained considerable uncertainty about whether
Hitler’s inflammatory cant was a matter of sincere conviction or demagogic
posturing. With the Nazis now in power, many Europeans—including many German
and Austrian Jews—waited to see how the new regime would behave.

Schenker lived in Vienna, so he was spared the immediate dangers faced by Jews
in Germany—his German students and colleagues would serve as his eyes and
ears within the Third Reich. This may be part of the reason that Schenker initially
failed to recognize the full depth of eliminationist hatred there. In a diary entry on
April 2nd, he wrote that the Nazis’ opposition to his work was “unconscious” and
complained that it was caused by “complete ignorance of the content and value of
my achievement” rather than antisemitism. By the middle of April, however, a
series of developments within Germany had disabused him of this delusion.

The April 7th Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service resulted in
the firing of thousands of Jews and university professors who had refused to
swear allegiance to Hitler. On April 11th, Goebbels informed Schenker’s friend and
informal student, the famous conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, that the Nazis would
assume full control of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. In an exchange of letters
published in the German press the following day (which Schenker’s diary confirms
he read), Goebbels condemned all support for the further participation of Jewish
musicians in German culture. And on April 13th, Furtwängler was forcedSubscribe
to submit
information on all Jewish and half-Jewish orchestral musicians to the regime,
including copies of their contracts
including copies of their contracts.

During a concert conducted by Furtwängler in Mannheim on April 29th, 1933, an

attempt was made to force the three leading Jewish orchestral violinists to sit at
the back of the orchestra, and Furtwängler was subsequently reprimanded in the
press for his “lax attitude in the Jewish question.” That same day, Schenker
recorded in his diary that a letter he’d received from another student, the
composer Otto Vrieslander, had been “sharply critical of Germany, but rightly so!”
This statement is among Schenker’s earliest condemnations of the new regime.

Despite these ominous developments, many remained reluctant to acknowledge

the lethal danger Nazism posed to Europe, and to European Jews in particular. On
May 14th, 1933, Schenker wrote a letter to his student Johann Felix-Eberhard von
Cube, a German gentile who was, at that time, still a supporter of the Nazi party.
Schenker noted the new constraints on teaching “Jewish music theory,” and
remarked that “Professor [Reinhard] Oppel in Leipzig … leads a national socialist

‘cell,’ in which he continues to teach Schenkerian analysis, now as before, insofar

as this is possible.”

In a letter from May 1933, Oppel informed Schenker, who had inquired about their
mutual friend, the Viennese Jewish pianist Richard Glas, that “Glas in Kiel naturally
is not in an easy position under the new circumstances, nevertheless it appears
from his last letter that he will be able to hold out. I trust his ability to bite through
[sich durch zu beissen].” Glas evidently believed that he might still be able to
continue teaching and performing. Indeed, he remained in Germany until 1938,
when he finally fled to London. Clearly, Schenker, Oppel, and Glas were worried
about the negative impact of Nazi antisemitism on Glas, but at that juncture (1933)
all of them underestimated the seriousness of the situation.

Oppel continued to collaborate with the Nazis until mid-July 1933, by which point
he had become disillusioned, a development he reported to Schenker in their
correspondence at the time. In a letter to Schenker on July 6th, 1933, Oppel wrote,
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“The exams are over and finally I have more time, especially since I am also taking
leave of absence from the Party.” In a diary entry on July 23rd, Schenker recorded
his response, in which he advised Oppel to disassociate himself from the Nazis:
“Letter to Oppel dictated. I strengthen him in his skepticism.” In his reply on
September 26th, Oppel confirmed, “I now keep everything that has to do with the
[Nazi] Party at bay.”

...

Today, Ewell claims that “Schenker was a fervent German nationalist whose racist
convictions lay at the very heart of his theories on people and on music.” But
Schenker—and many other German Jews besides—believed that the superiority of
German culture was based upon language, not on race. In his now infamous 1921
essay, “The Mission of German Genius,” Schenker praised German as “the one true
language,” and the “most exalted of all languages,” as the gateway to exalted
German culture.

But Hitler and the Nazis denied the possibility of Jews integrating with German
culture. In Mein Kampf, Hitler is explicit on this point: “[The Jew's language] is not a

means for expressing thoughts but a means for concealing them. When he speaks
French, he thinks Jewish, and while he turns out German verses, in his life he only
expresses the nature of his nationality.” On April 12th, 1933, this view was
reaffirmed by Karl Paul Schmidt, who later became press-chief of the Bureau of
Foreign Affairs. Schmidt published 12 theses in the German press that paved the
way for the national book burnings on May 10th. His fifth thesis stated: “The Jew
who can only think Jewish but writes German lies. … We therefore demand from
the censor that Jewish works appear in Hebrew. If they appear in German, they are
to be labelled as translations.”

Schenker’s reaction to these developments was to reaffirm and proudly proclaim

his affiliation to Judaism. In a letter to his student Felix Salzer on June 30th, he
wrote: “God in his infinite wisdom has called upon a Jew [Schenker himself] to
explain the art of music, who will thus remain first and last the true praeceptor
Germanorum [‘teacher of the Germans’].” In addition, Schenker often associated his
Jewish identity and faith with his musical theories. For example, in a diary entry on
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May 21st, he wrote: “[Oswald] Jonas … is shocked by my profession of Judaism.
Parallels: in the cosmos, the one origin in God—in music, the one origin in the
Ursatz [fundamental structure]—thus monotheistic thinking in both cases.
Everything else with respect to world and music [is] a heathen adherence to the
foreground.”

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 Heinrich Schenker, 1868–1935. (Photo courtesy of the Oswald Jonas Collection at the University of
California, Riverside.)

After the Nazis banned jazz in 1933, Theodor Adorno observed: “The [Nazi]
ordinance that prevents the radio from broadcasting ‘Negro jazz’ may have created
a new legal reality—artistically, however, this drastic verdict only confirms what
had long been decided on the basis of fact: the end of jazz music itself. Because
regardless of what you mean by White and Negro jazz, there is nothing here to
rescue.” Compare Adorno’s undisguised contempt with Schenker’s more generous
contemporaneous remark: “The recently repudiated dynamic of jazz was almost
more fun than that of nationalistic art.”

As Barry Wiener observes in a forthcoming study, “Schenker’s letter demonstrates

both that he considered Nazi culture to be beneath contempt, and that he judged
the art of African-Americans by purely artistic criteria. Even though Schenker
admired jazz no more than other manifestations of popular culture, he preferred it
to the artistic products of the ‘master race.’”

...

The current revisionist portrayal of Schenker as a racist is predicated upon

quotations from his letters and diary entries, as well as his publications. To
understand Schenker’s writings, a strong command of German is a sine qua non, so
that his words can be understood in his native tongue. Equally necessary is
knowledge of the context in which they were written: when Schenker was writing
privately to his friends, students, and colleagues, he was often expressing himself
in bantering or ironic tones informed by a series of shared experiences—
animosities and allegiances and prior communications—and references to books
and articles shared within the group. Various shades of meaning and connotations
are often superimposed.

Example 1:  Decontextualized mistranslation and misinterpretation

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Ewell quotes an English translation by William Drabkin of Schenker’s May 1933
letter to his student von Cube who was still a Nazi supporter at this point This is
letter to his student, von Cube, who was still a Nazi supporter at this point. This is
what Schenker wrote:

Das geschichtliche Verdienst Hitlers, den Marxismus ausgerottet zu haben, wird

die Nachwelt (einschließlich der Franzosen, Engländer, u. all der Nutznießer der
Verbrechen an Deutschland) nicht weniger dankbar feiern, als die Großtaten der
größten Deutschen! Wäre nur der Musik der Mann geboren, der die
Musikmarxisten ähnlich ausrottet: dazu gehörte vor Allem, daß sich die Massen
dieser in sich versponnenen Kunst näherten, was aber eine—contradictio in
adjecto ist u. bleiben muß. „Kunst“ und Massen haben nie zusammengehört,
werden nie zusammengehören. Woher nun aber die Quantitäten der Musik-
„Braunhemden“ nehmen, mit denen es gelingen müsste, die Musikmarxisten
hinauszujagen?

Unfortunately, Drabkin’s translation of this passage is both inaccurate and

misleading in certain key respects, most notably his reference to “our intrinsically
eccentric art” in his translation of the second sentence. A more accurate
translation of the passage reads as follows:

Hitler’s historical achievement of having rooted out Marxism will be no less

gratefully celebrated by posterity (including the French, the English and all
the profiteers of the crimes against Germany) than the great deeds of the
greatest Germans. If only the man were born to music who would similarly get rid
of the musical Marxists; for this, above all, would require that the masses were
able to come closer to this art, convoluted in itself, [and which] is and must
remain a contradiction in terms. “Art” and “the masses” have never belonged
together and never will belong together. And where would one find
the huge numbers of musical “brownshirts” who would be required to hunt down
the musical Marxists?

Given the events of the previous month, Schenker’s expressed admiration for
Hitler’s successful extirpation of Marxism and his declared to wish to see
“brownshirts … hunt down” musical Marxists is at best a distasteful provocation.
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But it is also plausibly an indication that, in the narrow matter of anti-Marxism, he
had allowed himself to be seduced by the idea that the enemy of his enemy was
his friend. Many intellectuals saw the Nazis’ rise to power as an opportunity to
settle old scores. On April 4th, 1933, Thomas Mann noted in his diary: “As for the
Jews ... that Alfred Kerr’s arrogant and poisonous Jewish garbling of Nietzsche is
now excluded, is not altogether a catastrophe; and also the de-Judaization of
justice isn't one.”

Nevertheless, it is important to bear in mind that the point of this single passage—
written in a private letter to a pro-Nazi student—was not to celebrate Hitler but to
express Schenker’s bottomless disdain for the Modernist obscurantists (Hindemith,
Schoenberg, Stravinsky, etc.) whom he despised for creating art that was
unintelligible to the masses. In isolation, it is certainly insufficient to convict
Schenker of pro-Nazi sympathies, especially when set against his earlier
unequivocal criticisms of the Party and its ideology quoted above.

Schenker's reference to Hitler is further contextualized by Bruno Stürmer’s “Open

Letter” to Hindemith published in Die Musik in October 1930, a communication that
Schenker had distributed widely among his intimates and praised as “very strong
and effective,” including in a postcard he had sent to von Cube. The passage in
question reads, “You don't trouble yourself at all about the [current dire] situation.
... You know that you are a Leader [Führer] and at least, that you were considered a
Leader and could be one... .” For Schenker, probably alluding to Stürmer, Hindemith
imagines himself to be a musical “Führer,” analogous to Hitler in the political realm;
but Hindemith can never be a successful populist like the Führer precisely because
he cannot communicate with the Volk through his unintelligible, convoluted art.

In fact, Schenker, no less than the composer Alban Berg, was an ardent supporter
of Engelbert Dollfuss and Austria’s Austro-Fascist Christian Social Party, just like
Baron von Trapp (memorably portrayed by Christopher Plummer in Robert Wise’s
1965 film, The Sound of Music). As Wiener explains:

During the early 1930s, Schenker supported the Austrian clerical party, the
Christian Socials, which opposed both the Communists and the Nazis.
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Schenker’s political stance was akin to that of most Austrian Jews, who
perceived Christian Social Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß as a staunch defender of
 the Jewish community. Given the limited political options in Austria, even Karl
Kraus accepted Dollfuß as a “lifesaver” [Lebensretter]. After Dollfuß was
murdered in 1934, Schenker wrote in his diary, “Radio: appreciation of the
statesman Dollfuß. … Dollfuß towers like a giant above all other statesmen, he
brings to mind Moses’s leading of the Jews out of Egypt. An Austrian heroic age!”
Because Dollfuß had opposed the Nazis, Arturo Toscanini, Europe’s leading
musical antifascist, conducted the Verdi Requiem in his memory at the Vienna
Staatstoper on 1 November 1934.

Example 2: Misconstrual of quotation

As further evidence of Schenker’s putative racism, Ewell quotes him as saying

“‘race’ is good, ‘inbreeding’ [Inzucht], however, is dismal.” But Schenker was
criticizing, rather than endorsing, racial purity. Had Schenker intended to attack
racial mixture, he would have used the term “interbreeding” (Mischung or
Bastardierung)—the terms used by Nazis for the mixing of races. In this, he
differed, for example, from the Expressionist painter Emil Nolde, who wrote: “Some
people, particularly the ones who are mixed, have the urgent wish that everything

—humans, art, culture—could be integrated, in which case human society across

the globe would consist of mutts, bastards and mulattos.”

On January 1st, 1934, the 1933 Hereditary Health Act began to be enforced in Nazi
Germany, legalizing the compulsory sterilization of individuals suffering from
hereditary diseases. The purpose of this law was the “elimination of the unfit for
reproduction” and the prevention of all “racial mixing,” specifically of Jews and
blacks with Germans. On January 13th, 1934, Schenker wrote to his friend, the
musicologist Anthony van Hoboken, expressing his hope that the latter would leave
Nazi Germany and resettle in Grinzing, on the outskirts of Vienna. Schenker’s
comment about racial mixing must be elucidated and evaluated in this context.

That you have acquired the plot of ground in Grinzing is ample grounds for us
all to rejoice very much; but why have you added to this wonderful report words
that make a reversal of the purchase seem possible? Thus I await theSubscribe
ultimate
decision—the superstition in me commands it so—then I will pay off with wish
d bl i Vi t d t t b th t l ibl l ti f
 and blessing. Vienna today seems to me to be the most plausible location for
you, just because here—don’t laugh—the Jews can make their mark in music and
show many varieties (e.g. annoyance, entertainment). “Race” is good,
“inbreeding” of race, however, is dismal (as the Romans used to say: even virtue
must not be overdone); Art occupies a completely different place, so it is
perfectly appropriate in the world that in Vienna racial aliens still represent
interesting flecks of color (Jews, Hungarians, Slavs, Italians, etc., etc.)

Schenker wanted to stress that, in Vienna, Jews were still allowed to perform
music, and foreign peoples—including Jews like himself—added “interesting flecks
of color” to the cultural mix. He was praising—not condemning—racial diversity. He
meant that, even if certain racial characteristics are valuable, he considered too
much communal separatism to be undesirable.

Timothy Jackson & Michael Thad Allen on Cancel Culture in Music Theory - H…
H…

A webcast I recorded on September 10th, 2020, in response to the initial attacks upon me and the Journal of
Schenkerian Studies.

Example 3: Tendentious ellipses

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Ewell writes approvingly of Schenker’s Austrian biographer, Martin Eybl, because

“[Eybl] acknowledges Schenker’s racism forthrightly.” He specifies that “in a
section entitled ‘Hierarchie der Völker’ (‘Hierarchy of Peoples’), Eybl builds a case
for Schenker’s racism,” and quotes his own translation of a paragraph from Eybl’s
monograph on Schenker:

The term “Menschenhumus” is based on the idea that Germanism unequivocally

constitutes the best natural conditions for the development of geniuses: in
“Menschenhumus of the highest category” the “German genius” is
manifest. … Anyone who considers the term “Menschenhumus” as a simple
translation of the burdened conceptual pair of blood and soil is ignoring the
pseudo-scientific bases of national-socialist racism and its predecessors.

This quotation from Eybl is a central plank of Ewell’s argument. But Ewell’s ellipsis
replaces a key sentence in the German original that categorically refutes and
undercuts his own argument. It reads: “Again, Schenker does not argue on the
basis of race, but of German national [culture].” [„Wieder argumentiert Schenker
nicht rassistisch, sondern Deutschnational.”]

Also omitted are the important two sentences that immediately follow this
quotation, and which reinforce the same thought: “At no point does Schenker
attempt to explain the superiority of Germanness genetically. The fact that the
German people can be defined by language and culture forms the open and
nebulous prerequisite for Schenker's German nationalism.”

...

It can be difficult for Americans today to understand that racism in the interwar
period was not simply a matter of skin color. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about how
difficult it was for him, who had always faced color-based discrimination in
America, to confront the reality of the “Arisch”/“nicht Arisch” dichotomy and
prejudice in pre-war Europe. As he recalled:

A German student was with me, and when I became uneasily aware that all was
not going well, he reassured me. He whispered, “They think I may be Subscribe
a Jew. It’s
not you they object to, it’s me.” I was astonished. It had never occurred to me
til th th t hibiti f j di ld b thi b t l
 until then that any exhibition of race prejudice could be anything but color
prejudice. I knew that this young man was pure German, yet his dark hair and
handsome face made our friends suspicious. Then I went further to investigate
this new phenomenon in my experience.

Du Bois came to recognize that being Jewish can be like having an “invisible
disability”—one does not see it immediately, but in a given cultural context, as in
Europe after the Nazis assumed power, it could be dangerous, even fatal to
the bearer. The truth of this observation is proven by the dire fate that befell those
of Schenker’s Jewish students who were unable to escape in time. On January 8th,
1945—10 years after Schenker succumbed to ill health—his wife Jeanette also died
in the Theresienstadt ghetto where the Nazis had transported her following her
arrest in 1942.

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 Heinrich Schenker with his wife, Jeanette, who perished in Theresienstadt in January 1945, three weeks
before the ghetto’s liberation. (Photo courtesy of the Oswald Jonas Collection at the University of California,
Riverside.)

Schenker's animosity to Modernism explains why he wrote as he did, leveraging

Hitler’s purging Germany of Communism to articulate his artistic resentments. But
that fact does not make Schenker a Jewish Nazi. Schenker's thinking was never in
line with Nazi ideology, and, as a Jew, he rejected its pseudoscientific
racism. Furthermore, he modified his views of “Germanness” [“Deutschtum”]
towards the end of his life, and became more egalitarian in his opinion of who
could participate in high musical culture, which he reconceived as “a meritocracy of
the spirit.” In this sense, Schenker was very much like Thomas Mann, who evolved
in a similar direction, from being intensely pro-German to anti-Nazi and egalitarian.
Later lauded as the “conscience of Germany,” in his earlier years, Thomas had
denigrated democratic and pacifistic writers like his brother, Heinrich, as
“Zivilisationsliteraten” [“progressive and overly civilized”], admitting that a speech
by Goebbels was “roughly how I was writing thirty years ago.”

Any attempt to associate Schenker's German-Jewish emigre students in the United

States—Hans Weisse, Oswald Jonas, Felix Salzer, Ernst Oster, and others—with
Fritz Kuhn and the contemporary German-American Bund reverses the roles of
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victims with perpetrators, and resonates with the trope familiar from Nazi
propaganda, “Die Juden sind unser Ungluck!” [“The Jews are our misfortune!”]. The
f d d fJ i h h l ft 1933 lt d i “ i i i th
forced mass exodus of Jewish scholars after 1933 resulted in a “crisis in the
university world,” as described by the McDonald Commission of the League of

Nations. It must be noted that those few of Schenker's students fortunate to make
it to these shores were never as enthusiastic about “Germanness” as Schenker had
been, even prior to their forced emigration, and certainly not post-1933. Nor did
they all share Schenker’s implacable hostility to Modernism. Surprisingly, even
Oster (the scion of rabbis) deigned to perform Schoenberg’s piano music in a
public concert. Salzer analyzed Schoenberg and Stravinsky; Oster’s student
Edward Laufer, my teacher, developed a linear approach to analyzing post-tonal
music.

History is complicated, people are complicated, and Schenker himself was a

complex individual. Dying in early 1935, in spite of a sometimes-remarkable
prescience, he lacked the benefit of hindsight. The interwar period was fraught
with trepidation but also dilemma and doubt; the reality of Nazi power was
something with which Germans, Jews, and Europeans more broadly were forced to
come to terms, and the path the new regime would follow in the early 1930s was
ominous but uncertain. People were compromised by the political reality, by their
friendships and conflicting personal, religious, and political commitments, and by
their own biases and obsessions (such as Schenker's hatred of Modernism).

Schenker wasn't perfect—like almost everyone else during those fearful and
confusing years, he was human, all too human. My intention is not to canonize him,
nor to make him a subject of hagiography. He is a subject of history, and an ability
to appreciate nuance, context, and complexity is what makes for truly
sophisticated historical inquiry. This idea is being trampled by crude interventions
that seek only to condemn and denounce. People outside of music and music
theory may wonder why this debate concerning Schenker is of such tremendous
importance. At stake is not simply the narrow matter of Schenker’s reputation, but
the integrity of scholarly inquiry itself—the pursuit of truth and historical accuracy.

Art and Culture History Long Read

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 Timothy L. Jackson

Timothy L. Jackson is Distinguished Research Professor of Music Theory

at the University of North Texas, where he directs the Center for
Schenkerian Studies.

7 replies

c.​d.​eastmannagle Dec '21

This attack on a very conservative and nationalistic German Jewish musicologist
during the turbulent period that marked the rise fascism, does not follow the
pattern of a normal critical discourse, because the Woke agenda driving it is to
both in general and in detail, solely designed to discredit and disestablish an
earlier modernist civilizational narrative, and replace it with a minoritarian race
one, that will empower and entrench a humanities trained Ascendancy as 'the
‘Mother Church’ of not a postmodern, but a decadent late modern period, whose
disintegration is destabilizing its cultural grip.

The rise of radical Islam in the late '80s and early nineties and its apotheosis in
the attack on the twin towers in 2001, was paralleled globally by increasing
assertive religious fundamentalism across all traditions, as the traditional
western secular liberal narrative started to lose its legitimacy and the
accumulated prestige it had built around itself over several centuries.

The threat response of this traditionally libertarian and secular cultural

establishment was to itself become a fundamentalist movement and take on the
same dogmatically orthodox style of its antagonists.

‘Race’ become its ideological dogma and the leitmotif for the manipulation of
minoritarianism-as-trumps, as part of an internal regime consolidation within late
modern capitalism to head off a rebellion against the authority and power of its
social administrators, driven mainly by traditionalist, conservatives, an
economically and culturally displaced working class and religiously
fundamentalist elements.

In 2016 this long-in-assembly confrontation between an established order and its

‘lowlife’ enemies came to a head in the election of Trump as US president, who
was put there to disrupt the hated and despised power of the humanist educated
coastal elites.

What that ‘hayseed’ consitituency really hated about its intellectual ‘betters’ was
their long-term collaboration in the deregulation and privatization of the social
system, that over a 50-70 year period had eviscerated and trashed most of the
social (and much of the economic production capacity that had been sent to
Asia) infrastructure; social infrastructure that had then been handed over lock,
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stock and barrel to the merchants of publicrelationsmarketingthink; that had
converted civil liberty and responsible moral agency into disinhibition without
boundaries or accountability or even adult agency.
 y g y

The panic in ‘liberal’ constituencies and particularly in the humanities schools in

universities was palpable, and their answer was to cut at both the familial
reproductive and civilizational roots of their antagonists. Sexual and racial
minoriies became the tools for a counterattack.

That counter attack does not have to be of particularly high quality to stick.
Smear by potentially ‘racist’ association is just fine for cutting down anyone who
represents a potential bulwark of opposition, no matter how obscure, qualified or
intellectually brilliant he or she might be.

Any academic within a humanities school who seeks promotion and credibility
only needs to do enough to make their ‘countercultural’ claims stick to get their
PhD and academic promotion…and no one within the system is going to ask too
many hard questions.

It does not matter if publications like Quillette show such work to be an

incompetent ideological charade. It does not matter if a guy like Professor
Boghossian shows his woke antagonists to be gullible and intellectually bumbling
fools, or a ‘professorial’ Australian indigenous ‘expert’ like Ian Pascoe is shown to
be delusional crank who shamelessly plays fast and loose with his historical
facts.

The ‘mistakes’ are ignored, denied, rationalized and if all else fails, forgiven,
because they are all batting for a final victory over ‘The Forces of Darkness’ that
must be defeated and then destroyed in detail to make the world safe for The
Forces of Light’.

Schenker is just another pawn in this game and what we end up doing is
defending a pawn when really we need to be going after the knights, bishops and
fortifications that sit behind the enemy lines. Timothy Jackson is forced to spend
enormous energy and effort in defending the man behind the work rather than the
work. The attack on him is clearly tangential and spurious, but if the effort isn’t
made, valuable work is lost.to our culture. His effort still leaves the other side
holding all the major cards.

The bottom line is that the humanities trained Ascendancy needs to be

systematically disestablished by defunding and being descredited as basically
fraudulent wastes of public money. They are as turgid and irrelevant as the late
medieval scholastics who thought it was important to work out how many angels
could be fitted onto the end of a pin. The Wokes are no better. The only difference
between their identity political drivel and that of the Nazis is the political intent.

It upsets me that guys like Tim have to labor over the detritus of morons and
incompetents while our world crumbles around us, despite his best efforts.

1 reply

EK-​1 ▶ c.d.eastmannagle Dec '21

Well, “distinguished music research professor at Subscribe
the University of North Texas” isn’t really much of a title but I challenge the
distinguished music professor to identify his "contemporary white supremacists;”
i i h i POC? A d h ll hi b J
is it everyone who is not a POC? And what all this nonsense about Jews not
being “white”?

Really, who cares about all this? Picking scabs that are now two or three
generations or even 200 years in the past is not going make things better.

1 reply

c.​d.​eastmannagle ▶ EK-1 Dec '21

That is the point dear EK, no target is too small or insignificant
or absurd to build a Woke career path towards the postmodernist rapture, world
domination…and academic tenure inside the neo clerical monoculture of
university humanities faculties.

Ella-​B Dec '21

Great essay. Particularly appreciated this part:

quillette:
History is complicated, people are complicated, and Schenker himself was a
complex individual.

Ironically for all the anti fascist posturing by both the left & right their actions
routinely reflect similar Nazi tactics of cherry picking, exaggeration,
dehumanising, demonising & scapegoating.

And frustratingly, even if complicated issues & individuals are stereotyped &
repackaged for propagandist consumption knowingly by consumers they are
willing to look the other way if it supports their my side bias. Facts just get in their
way & are only a ‘naive trap’ you see…

1 reply

c.​d.​eastmannagle Dec '21

‘Complexity’ is not so daunting that it prevents us from dissecting it and
displaying it parts in accessible and digestible form. But of course, that does not
necessarily lead to a truthful narrative.

Determining that requires some critical training, disinterested scholarship, good

and honest mentorship and a lot of disciplined practice; something that is always
in short supply within many constituencies, then and now, particularly
constituencies that have been subject to trauma, displacement and existential
desecuritization… caused by war, defeat, or in our case, the systematic demolition
of our social and cultural infrastructure in favor of market forces.

Writing.Com Subscribe
Towards the Mid 20th Century: The Totalitarian Template
- Writing.Com
chrischantrill Dec '21
Herr Doktor Schenker: are you now, or have you ever been an Anti-Semite?

But I would be more interested in understanding Schenker’s theory. I looked at La

Wik and I don’t understand a word.

So, geniuses: explain his theory of music to me, as simply as possible, but no
simpler.

Maybe we should ask Frederick the Great. He was a passable flautist, spent an
evening discussing music with Der Alte Bach, and was even a composer of music
– in between winning the Seven Years War.

Curious​Mayhem Dec '21

I learned a little of Schenker’s theory decades ago as a music student. It has to
do with the the unfolding of a musical idea, with sub-ideas embedded unfolding
within, to fulfill the piece’s destiny. Harmony, melody, rhythm, and tone color
collaborate to achieve this end on various time scales, shorter and longer.
Fractal-like, the smaller bits reflect the slower movement of the larger structure.
The composer’s process, while at work, is largely subconscious and only fully
analyzable after it’s done. Less Freudian, more Hegelian, it’s the unfolding of The
Idea from the realm of The Absolute into the humdrum empirical everyday. It’s a
modern kind of Neoplatonism.

It’s interesting that Schenker’s objection to Modernism wasn’t that it was made by
Jews, Communists, or black people. Rather, he objected to the deliberate
alienation of ordinary listeners. Schenker wasn’t a musical populist, but he did
share the older view stated by Brahms, Mozart, and others, that even difficult
“high” music should have aspects that non-experts could enjoy and appreciate.
Schenker regretted the growing split of popular and high art.

The nationalistic slant arose because musical modernism was, in many ways, a
revolt of the non-Germans against Austro-German musical hegemony. Only one
of the key modernist composers (Debussy, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartok) was
Jewish (Schoenberg). Except for him, they and the others (including American
composers like Ives, Gershwin, et al.) were part of this detachment from Teuto-
supremacy. Interestingly, Schoenberg himself, during and after WWI, also
expressed a desire to perpetuate Austro-German musical hegemony. Like
Schenker, he was also deeply disillusioned by what happened later.

In case you’re wondering, Schenker had a cool attitude toward Wagner. While
respecting Wagner’s genius, he didn’t approve of Wagner’s subordination of pure,
or absolute, music to the extramusical story. Defense of pure, or absolute, music,
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the Kantian thing-in-itself, was a thing for such people, like the earlier German-
Jewish critic Eduard Hanslick, a target of Wagner’s sarcasm in the Mastersingers
of Nuremberg.
 What the author says at the end about Schenker’s students losing their
enthusiasm for Deutschestum in the 1930s and 1940s is correct. Like Schenker
himself in his last years, they took a more pluralistic and open-minded turn,
applying Schenker’s ideas to modernist works and even to jazz compositions. In
other words, Schenker’s ideas had a validity far beyond what he himself could
see. A true sign of genius, almost in spite of himself.

(I have a book-length analysis of the The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway by

Genesis, that makes use of Schenker’s ideas, again demonstrating that his ideas
have a wide validity that would have astonished him.)

Like Mann, Schenker had a fervent belief in German high culture, like almost all
German Jews of the early 20th century. Their pivotal moment was 1914, not
1933. What started in 1933 – the introduction of Nazism and its racial theories –
marked the beginning of the end of widespread admiration for Germany as the
country of poets, thinkers, and musicians. When the emigre students came to the
US, in spite of America’s sometime frontier crudity, they admired its cultural
pluralism, individualism, and freedom from Hegelian monomania.

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