A few thoughts on Schenker in light of all the stuff going on, but in particular, something that Ethan Hein asked about re: a bit more nuance from those who aren't so orthodox.
First and foremost: there's no place for racism in our discipline, and what happened to Phil Ewell, the grad students at UNT, Megan Lavengood, and others caught up in this mess was awful. I don't condone in any way the behavior of any of the folks on the wrong side of history here.
My own experience with Schenker goes something like this: I wanted to be a classical double bass player--wanted to join the Philadelphia Orchestra someday--until I heard my teacher (who is in the Philly Orchestra) play and I realized I would never be remotely near his level. My professors always said that my playing was technically very good (one conductor praised my continuo playing, saying he'd never heard a bass so in tune), but it was always criticized as lacking musicality.
But I finished my degree in double bass performance and started a master's in music theory, something I *knew* I was good at. I suppose one could say I had a healthy skepticism about Schenker and his theories from the get-go. In my first Schenker class, I was like "is this guy for real? Well, if it's prolongation he's into, I'll write my final paper on Phillip Glass! HA!" My professor, Cynthia Folio, was gracious (?) enough to allow the project, and was actually rather supportive. I analyzed "Mad Rush" and learned a lot about how both the piece and Schenkerian analysis did and didn't work. I think her openness was in part due to her own work in jazz and more contemporary music, as well as the work of her long-time colleague Steve Larson, who had devoted a lot of his career to exploring the application of Schenkerian theory to jazz. In particular, the music of Bill Evans, who was a student of Salzer’s (if memory serves me correctly).
Next up, a course in post-tonal theory, alongside an independent study in Schenkerian analysis. A composition professor introduced me to the music of George Rochberg and I became fascinated with it. I did an analysis of the *Partita Variations* My intention was to show how the variations--which ran the gamut from tonal to very atonal--were related. I used set theory on the tonal parts, and a quasi-Schenkerian (emphasis on the "quasi" part) to explore relationships among the movements. This grew into my master's thesis, and (in part) earned me a spot in the doctoral program at CUNY.
I studied Schenkerian theory there (of course) with Bill Rothstein and David Gagne, and the more I studied, the more conservative I became in my applications of it. The more I graphed, the more useful I found it as a tool for informing my performance. I graphed the prelude to the second Bach cello suite as a final project—a piece I had tried to play more than a few times—and it finally started to click for me. I always tell people that Schenkerian analysis was the best thing I've ever done for my bass playing: it taught me to understand that music that I wanted to play in a way that I simply could not unpack otherwise. All the etudes, concertos, and orchestra excerpts in the world couldn’t make my playing more musical, but Schenkerian analysis did.
I do think that Schenkerian analysis does deal with aspects of rhythm and meter, as Schachter, Rothstein and others have demonstrated. In particular, I think that Rothstein’s ideas about phrase rhythm and hypermeter are invaluable to people who perform (and listen to) Western concert music. And no, I’m not convinced that one can “hear” the Urlinie, or Ursatz, or can perceive a lot of the long-range connections that Schenkerian analysis reveals on paper. I would argue that it’s not integral to the process that we do, in the same way that listening to a twelve-tone piece is not dependent upon hearing the row and its transformations.
I've taught Schenker at the graduate level a number of times, I’ve done independent studies with several students, and wrote a review of Yosef Goldenberg's Prolongation of Seventh Chords in Tonal Music at one point, which appeared in that journal.
The bathwater is long since overdue to be thrown out; I do think the baby is worth keeping (that all sounds really weird when I say it out loud). Schenkerian analysis is a tool—a very powerful one I would argue—when it’s used for what it’s designed for. “What it’s designed for” is a rather loaded phrase in this case: on the one hand, the theory was designed to prove the supremacy of a very narrow slice of Western concert music, and it does this by virtue of diminishing the value, importance, popularity, and structural characteristics of any music that’s not by Schenker’s thirteen favorite composers. On the other hand, it illuminates what I believe to be the essential long-range musical characteristics of that repertoire. There are some convincing extensions of his theories: I like Matthew Brown’s work on Debussy, for instance, as well as Goldenberg’s theories. Many others are far less compelling.
I tell my students (well, I don’t really anymore, since my students these days are first graders) that my goal is to fill their analytical toolkit with a variety of tools. As the saying goes, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Should Schenkerian analysis dominate our field in the way it has during the last fifty or so years? No—of course not. It’s one of many tools in the analytical toolkit, and I’d argue, a rather specialized tool. Set theory is another tool, useful for an admittedly small slice of music in general. Chord-scale theory is another… the list goes on. I’ve had students in my first-year theory courses (which was open to non-music majors) who wanted to be music journalists, rappers, mathematicians, app developers, etc. And what we taught in that class was completely useless to them. (I have my own nasty e-mail from a senior scholar story that I might share sometime…). “Music theory” should not signify a single tool, but rather a set of tools. I tell my students (well, told—the first-graders don’t care) that music theory gives us a language for talking about our musical experiences. These experiences vary from person to person, from day to day, from piece to piece, from style to style, thus the need for theories, plural.
Do we do a good job of providing this toolkit? I’m not convinced we do, unfortunately, and I think that’s what this battle is about. As others have said far more eloquently than I, we need not only to diversify the repertoire, but also to reexamine our toolkit.
Recently, I was on an academic job interview, and they asked me to talk about my work in hip hop as well as the ear-training book that I’m working on (they actually chose my research talk topic for me…). At one point, a committee member asked me about doing a harmonic analysis of rap music, to which I responded, “why would anyone do that?” (probably not a great idea at a job talk, but oh well…). I can’t imagine using theories of groove to talk about Beethoven, or set theory to study the blues. I suppose one could, but why would you?
I guess the big question that I’m left with (which I think was raised on Twitter not that long ago) is why do we study music theory? A carpenter and a woodworker might both use many of the same tools, and in the same way, but they use them to different ends. I enjoy the intellectual exercise of post-tonal theory, even though I rarely play or listen to the music that it’s most useful for understanding. If I’m working on a piece that I want to play on my bass (I play mostly Western concert music), then I’ll use the tools that are most useful to me as a performer, and Schenkerian analysis is an important part of that toolkit. I use a whole different toolkit for listening to and thinking about rap music, as one should—this was the impetus behind Listening to Rap: it comprises a dozen “tools” for listening to this music in different ways.