Alternatives to Monotonality in Early Nineteenth-Century Music

Abstract

Nineteenth-century theorists generally regarded every modulation, however transient, as establishing a new key, and their analyses therefore came to look like bowls of alphabet soup. Heinrich Schenker, dissatisfied with the nineteenth-century view of tonality, set against it a stunningly original theory of tonal unity, or monotonality. He maintained that on the most fundamental level, a tonal work consists of two lines-an upper line that composes out one of the intervals of the tonic triad by means of a stepwise descent and a lower line that horizontalizes the tonic fifth in the form of the progression I-V-I. These two lines combine to create a horizontal statement of the tonic triad which spans the complete composition. Thus, a tonal work ultimately prolongs only one triad-its one and only tonic; all triads prolonged on a smaller scale within the work are prolongations of the scale steps of that tonic. Schenker applied his monotonal approach in all of his analyses of eighteenth and nineteenth-century music. He did so even in analyses of nineteenth-century works which at first glance appear to violate the theory of monotonality-works that apparently begin in one key and end in another. In his analysis of Chopin's Scherzo, Opus 31, for example, he labelled the final Db triad as the tonic, and the initial Bb minor prolongation as the subsidiary harmony VI. He showed that the