page_title: Schenkerian analysis
section_title: Techniques of prolongation
hierarchical_section_title: Schenkerian analysis / Techniques of prolongation
caption_attribution_description: English: Haydn, Sonata Hob. XVI:29, bars 1-4
context_page_description: Schenkerian analysis is a method of analyzing tonal music, based on the theories of Heinrich Schenker. The goal is to demonstrate the organic coherence of the work by showing how it relates to an abstracted deep structure, the Ursatz. This primal structure is roughly the same for any tonal work, but a Schenkerian analysis shows how, in an individual case, that structure develops into a unique work at the "foreground", the level of the score itself. A key theoretical concept is "tonal space". The intervals between the notes of the tonic triad in the background form a tonal space that is filled with passing and neighbour tones, producing new triads and new tonal spaces that are open for further elaborations until the "surface" of the work is reached.
  The analysis uses a specialized symbolic form of musical notation. Although Schenker himself usually presents his analyses in the generative direction, starting from the fundamental structure to reach the score and showing how the work is somehow generated from the Ursatz, the practice of Schenkerian analysis more often is reductive, starting from the score and showing how it can be reduced to its fundamental structure.
context_section_description: The meat of a Schenkerian analysis is in showing how a background structure expands until it results in the succession of musical events on the surface of the composition itself. Schenker refers to this process under the term Auskomponierung, literally "composing out", but more often translated as "elaboration". Modern Schenkerians usually prefer the term "prolongation", stressing that elaborations develop the events along the time axis.
  Schenker writes: 
  In practical art the main problem is how to realize the concept of harmony in a live content. In Chopin's Prelude, Op. 28, No 6, thus, it is the motif 
  that gives life to the abstract concept of the triad, B, D, F-sharp.
  The elaboration of the triad, here mainly in the form of an arpeggio, loads it with "live content", with meaning. Elaborations take the form of diminutions, replacing the total duration of the elaborated event by shorter events in larger number. By this, notes are displaced both in pitch and in rhythmic position. The analysis to some extent aims at restoring displaced notes to their "normal" position and explaining how and why they were displaced.
  One aspect of Schenkerian analysis is that it does not view the work as built from a succession of events, but as the growth of new events from within events of higher level, much as a tree develops twigs from its branches and branches from its trunk: it is in this sense that Schenkerian theory must be considered organicist. The example shown here may at first be considered a mere elaboration of an F major chord, an arpeggiation in three voices, with passing notes (shown here in black notes without stem) in the two higher voices: it is an exemplification of the tonal space of F major. The chord labelled (V) at first merely is a "divider at the fifth". However, the meeting of the fifth (C) in the bass arpeggiation with the passing notes may also be understood as producing a dominant chord, V, arising from within the tonic chord I. This is the situation found at the beginning of Haydn's Sonata in F major, Hob. XVI:29, where the (incomplete) dominant chord appears at the very end of bar 3, while the rest of the fragment consists of arpeggios (with neighbor notes) of the F chord:
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