Review of David Damschroder, Harmony in Schubert (Cambridge University Press, 2010)

[1] David Damschroder's provocative and expansive Harmony in Schubert offers an approach to harmonic process and meaning that confronts our pedagogy, illuminates elusive details of Schubert's harmonic language, and engages a diverse body of Schubert scholarship in contexts provided by a number of the composer's best-known works.[2] In part one, Damschroder presents his methodology, taking us through chapters on harmonic and linear progressions, common prolongations and successions, and chords built on II, III, and those derived from modal mixture. Each of the next eight chapters, which comprise part two, focuses on an individual work of Schubert's that has been the subject of analytical commentary in the published literature, allowing Damschroder to hold up each analysis in turn as a foil for his alternative reading.[3] Damschroder's analytical sensibility is thoroughly Schenkerian, but he grafts onto this an approach to Schubert's harmonic language, and an analytical nomenclature, derived from the nineteenth-century Stufentheorie tradition. Jettisoned from our standard-practice Roman-numeral/figured-bass alloy are, most notably, indications of secondary or applied function and figured-bass numbers used to indicate chordal inversion. For example, an A-major triad in G major is not V/V, but II; that is, the Roman numeral invariably corresponds to the scale degree of the chord's root in the governing key. And modifications to chord members are shown with numbers and accidentals counting above the root, not above the bass tone; so, A-C-E-G in G major, with, say, G in the bass, is simply IInot II(or V/V).In addition, upper-case Roman numerals are used exclusively, and national and regional names for the augmented-sixth chords and II, are avoided.Example 1[4] An advantage of this approach is that it can often provide particular insight into harmonic process. Consider the succession of chords given in Example 1. Directly beneath the staff is a conventional harmonic description. Note that the analysis using Damschroder's approach, given beneath that, preserves the "parent" chord designation (II) through the chromatic evolution of the supertonic harmony, and in so doing illuminates a process that is obscured-or at least deemphasized-by the more usual nomenclature. Consider further that in a given context these chords may not occur adjacently, but rather may give shape to a significant musical span, with each stage in the evolution connected to the next by other chords that arise through voice-leading motions. In such a case, the process of an evolving supertonic harmony would almost surely be lost on conventional analysis, making Damschroder's method all the more penetrating.[5] In the book's preface, Damschroder calls for the general adoption of this new approach to harmony in the undergraduate classroom, appealing to our "pedagogical branch to develop the resources to align itself better with the speculative branch" (x). It is an intriguing idea, given the benefits described in the context above. Of course, benefits and shortcomings can reverse polarity with a change of context. An analytical approach, like Damschroder's, that accounts for altered tones chromatically in the home key is less sensitive to context than one that explains such tones diatonically in a secondary key if, in fact, that context involves modulation to the secondary key. Damschroder eschews the practice of labeling tonicizations with secondary-dominant chords because he feels that this creates the misleading impression of a shift of tonal center. While his objection is well-taken, still, the difference between tonicization and modulation is quantitative, not qualitative. The processes themselves, that is, are identical; differences between the two are those of emphasis, placement, and/or duration. If a given context does involve such a shift-say, a modulation to the key of the dominant-then it is important for our students to know, and to indicate analytically, that II is V/V. …