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The Schenker Project: Culture, Race, and Music Theory in Fin-de-siecle Vienna.

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The Schenker Project: Culture, Race, and Music Theory in Fin-de-siecle Vienna. By Nicholas Cook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. [xi, 355, p. ISBN-13: 9780195170566. $ 65.] Illustrations, music examples, bibliographic references, index.

"If Schenker's theory was the solution, then what was the problem?" So begins Nicholas Cook's The Schenker Project in which he attempts to place Heinrich Schenker's music-theoretical writings in the social, cultural, and political context of finde-siecle Vienna, in order to gain insight into the way we read Schenker today. This context includes music criticism, architectural modernism, German cultural conservatism, and Schenker's position as a Jewish immigrant to Vienna. For Schenker, music and society were inextricably linked. Such a study is long overdue and enables us to-better understand how Schenker's polemics were integrated into his concept of musical coherence in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Western art music, and to come to terms with contradictions in his theory. Ultimately, the book contributes to the recent debate over whether Der freie Satz represents the summation or an aberration of Schenker's theory, or whether it is merely a collection of practices and not a theory at all. Cook issues the caveat, however, that "any story of the development of Schenker's theoretical thought is less a reflection of the facts of the...

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