A Schenkerian graph offers a reductionist view of a passage, or even an entire work, of music.

Here’s a picture of one:

This is a graph of J. S. Bach’s Prelude in C Major from Book I of the Well-tempered Clavier. The numbers along the top refer to measure numbers; those on the bottom refer to the deep level ‘harmonic movement’, in this case I-V-I, the canonic Tonic-Dominant-Tonic harmonic movement that defines the deep level harmonic structure of music from Bach to Chopin.

There is a story (perhaps apocryphal) that musicologist/pianist Charles Rosen, when shown a Schenkerian graph, exclaimed: “Yes, but where are my favorite passages.”

The point here is that reductionist views of any organization (whether a piece of music or a company) facilitate particular activity. The Schenkerian graph allows a musician (or any other musical observer) to view the larger musical movement as a whole. Such a view facilitates the accomplish of certain kinds of work that would not be possible otherwise.

And yet, when listening to the C Major Prelude, we are struck by the infinitesimal qualities of the performance, of the piece. The shadings in color, the precise tempi, the phrasing, the use of the pedals (if performed on a modern piano). These are the things that constitute our moment-by-moment engagement. Not that we don’t care about its deeper structure–and not that those deeper structures don’t ultimately frame our experience as well. Its just that, in our beguiled attraction to the abstract, the general (an attraction that seems to hold particularly within business and engineering worlds), our capacity to see distinctions and particularities–to see contexts–becomes dulled. We and those whom we see become dull. And the decisions and actions which emanate from such a viewpoint suffer the loss of those very distinctions.

Much can–and will–be said on this point regarding human organizations.

Posted in: Music by admin on Thursday, December 20th, 2007

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