<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" ><tr><td valign="top" style="font: inherit;"><DIV><BR>Dear Nicolas and Dmitri,</DIV>
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<DIV>yes, indeed, there are philosophical problems with prolongation.</DIV>
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<DIV>"What is given is Y, at first a mere abstraction of a chord, a mere image of the series of harmonic partials. In order to become a musical chord, Y must be inscribed it time, "prolonged", which may be done by a mere arpeggiation – producing no subordinate chord. "</DIV>
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<DIV>This statement is problematic, as well. So, Schenker perceived a chord as something outside time and, of course, in order to be present in time, the chord had to be "prolonged," that is, to be inserted into a preexistent physical timeline. This understanding of time is so naive that it renders all the following system irrelevant. It is unforgivable for a person who lived in Europe in the first third of the 20th century and could read literature in German to have such a skewed and anachronistic understanding of time.</DIV>
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<DIV>Musical time does not exist outside the chord. The chord is an entity which constitutes musical time. If one keeps banging on a tonic triad, musical time does not occur. The quality of the chord may initiate the temporal process. However, simple arpeggiation is too weak of an impulse to create a large-scale temporal process. That is why rock musicians grow old and still cannot produce anything larger than a tunelet.</DIV>
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<DIV>As for Y-X-Y as a model for prolongation, the first Y is never the same as the last Y. It has been described by Hegel and supported by a consellation of philosophers. So, truly, prolongation should be taken back to the old drawing board. It is not ready for posting at Wikipedia.</DIV>
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<DIV>Best,</DIV>
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<DIV>Ildar Khannanov</DIV>
<DIV>Peabody Conservatory</DIV>
<DIV><A href="mailto:solfeggio7@yahoo.com">solfeggio7@yahoo.com</A></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
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<DIV><BR>--- On <B>Fri, 7/15/11, Nicolas Meeùs <I><nicolas.meeus@paris-sorbonne.fr></I></B> wrote:<BR></DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE style="BORDER-LEFT: rgb(16,16,255) 2px solid; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px"><BR>From: Nicolas Meeùs <nicolas.meeus@paris-sorbonne.fr><BR>Subject: Re: [Smt-talk] Music theory on Wikipedia<BR>To: "Dmitri Tymoczko" <dmitri@princeton.edu><BR>Cc: "SMT Talk" <smt-talk@societymusictheory.org><BR>Date: Friday, July 15, 2011, 4:46 PM<BR><BR>
<DIV id=yiv773869424>Le 15/07/2011 19:26, Dmitri Tymoczko a écrit :
<BLOCKQUOTE type="cite">I've always thought that the notion of "prolongation" is freighted with really serious philosophical complications. Anyone who could remove these complications, and come up with a non-circular definition of "prolongation," would be doing the field a great service ...<BR></BLOCKQUOTE>I think that Schenker's own notion of "prolongation" is without much problem in Schenker's own terms – which must be read in the original German.<BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><PRE>I've actually been thinking about this issue off and on for years. My current best guess is that "prolongation" is an intentional, rather than a grammatical concept: to say "X prolongs Y" is (roughly speaking) to make an intentional claim about how the composer used X as a means of getting to (or doing) Y. This contrasts with the formal or grammatical or descriptive concepts (e.g. "V7 chord") familiar from other regions of musical discourse.
</PRE></BLOCKQUOTE>To say that "X prolongs Y" fully contradicts Schenker's own description, in that is presupposes, as you say, that X preexists as "a means of getting to (or doing) Y". What is given is Y, at first a mere abstraction of a chord, a mere image of the series of harmonic partials. In order to become a musical chord, Y must be inscribed it time, "prolonged", which may be done by a mere arpeggiation – producing no subordinate chord. The prolongation, however, may involve filling in the "tonal space" (the empty intervals) of the initial chord and this, is special cases, may happen to produce a subordinate chord X. This X by no means is "doing Y"; it merely is a by-product of Y itself.<BR> I think that Roland Barthes' description of the construction of discourses proposes something similar, which I didn't reread recently enough to remind his own terms. A discourse is a succession of nodes, each of which may receive an
ornamentation (I think his term is <I>catalyse</I>)<I> </I>which certainly smooths the succession and which possibly gives rise to secundary nodes. This also has to do with how a discourse can develop from a deep structure, in Shomsky's terms.<BR> Schenker's conception of the "tonal space" is developed in a text titled <I>Erläuterungen</I>, that he published twice in the last volumes of <I>Der Tonwille</I> and twice in the two first ones <I>Das Meisterwerk in der Musik –</I> this fourfold publication might suffice to stress how important this short text was for him.<BR><BR>Prolongation indeed is intentional – not in the sense that the composer used X as a means to doing Y, but that Y served as a means to produce X. This is the intentionality of the work itself, not necessarily of the composer. And, obviously, Schenkerian analysis has nothing in common with a mere descriptive labeling of chords with roman numerals. I am not
sure that this can be viewed in terms of intentionality <I>vs </I>grammaticality, as you suggest. Roman numeral analysis is lexical at best, and has little to say about grammar; I do not see how a grammar could be conceived without a level of intentionality.<BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><PRE>Interestingly, my digression couldn't be included in a Wikipedia article, since it hasn't been published anywhere. (Wikipedia has strict standards about avoiding "original" or "unpublished" research.) But nor could Wikipedia include a simple, uncontroversial summary of what "prolongation" means, because we in the field don't really agree about the issue at all. So about the best you could hope for is a survey of the various proposals that have been made, one that gets updated as the discussion proceeds.
</PRE></BLOCKQUOTE>Well, I would be tempted to consider that proposals based on Schenker's own writings should gain preeminence, at least in articles devoted to Schenkerian concepts (prolongation, as a concept, may have an existence as a non-Schenkerian, or post-Schenkerian, or neo-Schenkerian concept, but that is not my concern here).<BR><BR>Yours,<BR>Nicolas Meeùs<BR>Université Paris-Sorbonne<BR></DIV><BR>-----Inline Attachment Follows-----<BR><BR>
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