[Reply to Joseph Lubben]Author(s): Richard KramerSource: Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Autumn, 1999), p. 652Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/831800 .

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652 Journal of the American Musicological Society

why, in an otherwise elegantly translated essay, he should falter precisely in the two passages in which Schenker posited a deep-level inner voice as the progen- itor of the surface bass. The errors now brought to the foreground by his re-

sponse have convinced me to look no further. Oberlin College

RICHARD KRAMER replies:

But before Professor Lubben settles himself too comfortably out on his limb, three very brief comments:

1. "That Schenker's graphs can speak for themselves and require no expla- nation ... is a claim that Schenker himself did not make until at least five years after the publication of this first volume of Das Meisterwerk," writes Lubben, from which it must follow that he intends a paradigmatic conceptual shift to have occurred at some ascertainable and defining moment. No doubt it is this untenable scenario that induces the grotesque notion that it was Schenker's intent deliberately to suppress "analytical evidence that contradicted voice- leading hierarchy."

2. "The sixth of the 5-6 above a stationary bass represents the root of the second chord ... in the succession." Yes, but it is the sense of the sixth as dis- sonance with respect to the bass, and decidedly not as root, that is to the point here: 5-6 as simple contrapuntal device deployed precisely to disable the func- tion of the bass as root. The impressive theoretical artillery marshaled by Lubben only further obscures the sense in which Schenker's interpolation, in this text in this instance, means only to eradicate a fundamental motion of par- allel fifths. When Lubben writes "But Schenker, unlike Kramer, does not con- sider the G# to be an essential part of the harmonic structure until the actual arrival of E in the bass," he misreads my "its G# making a dissonance of D and powerfully implying (but not sounding) a root E somewhere in its midst," a commonplace understanding of the power of dissonance, in its phenomeno- logical aspect, as the implication of something yet to happen.

3. Writing of "Utopian analytical models [that] ... would encompass, em- brace, and even exalt the constant play of tension and balance among musical and/or analytical parameters" and of "constructive, nonviolent analytical en- gagement of these tensions," Lubben convinces me that his project means to float blithely above the imponderables, theoretical and otherwise, deeply rooted in this repertory of music that so stringently circumscribed Schenker's unpeaceable kingdom. The extremities of an ultimate counterpoint codified in the final volume of his Neue musikalische Theorien und Phantasien (Derfreie Satz, advertised as late as 1922 as "Kontrapunkt Fortsetzung") provoke us to engage the Phantasien that Schenker left to the hermeneutic imagination.

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