Feindliche Übernahme

Current discourse on a “historically informed music theory” focusses on the 15th to 18th century, while the 19th and 20th centuries are rarely considered in this context. Rather, nineteenth- and twentieth-century music theory is frequently considered representative of “systematic” musictheoretical concepts. Nineteenth-century music theory effectively seems to be separated from eighteenth-century music theory by a categorical rupture that can be traced to the origins of the German tradition of “Harmonielehre”. These origins were closely connected to the breakdown of a music education system supported by aristocracy and church institutions during the ancien régime. In the young bourgeois society, the teaching of composition changed its social context: many representative German theorists of harmony, such as Gottfried Weber and Adolf Bernhard Marx, were autodidacts, musical amateurs with only a rudimentary knowledge of composition and music theory. Weber transferred a notion of “scientific scholarship” based on logical deduction and analogy (“Folgegleichheit”) that he had encountered during his study of law to music theory – a notion that he considered absent in the “vexatious figured bass manuals”. In a mechanistic and systematic manner the principles of scale degrees and inversions are expanded into vast combinatorial matrices of possible chord progressions. This highly speculative method separates music theory significantly from compositional practice, thus supporting the idea of impenetrable artistic decisions attributed to musical genius and independent of musical craftsmanship. Weber’s “mathematical” exploration of pitch space is representative of the “combinatorial space” (Catherine Nolan) characteristic of nineteenth-century music theory that finds its logical consequence in Arnold Schönberg’s “method of composing with twelve tones which are related only to one another”.