Dr. Robert Snarrenberg

Until recently, my research has concentrated on the interpretive practice of Heinrich Schenker. This concentration is part of my broader concern with the problem of reportability and musical experience, the usefulness of metaphorical language for that reflective activity, and the contribution such activity can make to deepening and refining musical experience. I chose Schenker's writings because his work has influenced dramatically, if obliquely, the development of American music theory since the 1960s, because his reflections on musical experience are extraordinarily rich, and because his rhetoric combines highly technical and highly figurative expressions. My interest has been in the relation between these two domains of interpretive language, the so-called technical and figurative. My first published essay (1986) was an experiment in analysis that sought to use figurative language as a way of synthesizing observations expressed in technical language about an orchestral piece by Webern. In my recent book, Schenker's Interpretive Practice (Cambridge. Univ. Press, 1997), I argue that a similar relationship structures Schenker's analytical discourse. In Schenker's Interpretive Practice I attempted a comprehensive study of Schenker's writings. While American theorists and musicologists have largely focused on analytical methods distilled from graphic illustrations in Schenker's published works, I broke from that tradition by returning to the prose of Schenker's writings and to the humanist roots of his approach, situating Schenker's work in the broader context of his desire to portray the richness and particularity of musical experiences. The aims of the book are these: to present a theoretical account of musical effects encountered in European music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to represent the mindset shared among composers of that music, to convey the expressive interaction of musical effects in individual artworks, and to promote continued creative and re-creative participation in the musical tradition.

Linear and rhythmic theory of Gregorian chant
Zen mind/musical mind.

Since completing the Schenker book, I have embarked on a program of research that will use recent developments in computational neuroscience to elucidate tonal musical imagination. This book project picks up on themes that I articulated in a conference paper, ''Intrusion of the Imaginary'' (1992), which took as its point of departure this quotation from C. P. E. Bach: 'It is generally the case in music that many things occur which one must imagine, without actually hearing them. . . . Intelligent listeners make good this loss through their power of mental representation.' Recently developed theories of biologically plausible neural networks have revealed how sophisticated procedural and conceptual knowledge can be represented in the mind without necessarily being available for verbal articulation. The same theories also provide sound basis for the claim that the meaning of occurrent tonal events consists in the activation of prototypes, that musical intelligence consists in the acquisition and retention of a rich repertory of such prototypes, and that the exercise of musical imagination involves, among other things, interpreting the ways in which occurrent tonal events activate and then complete or deviate from an imagined sequence of prototypically structured events. One consequence of this approach to understanding musical intelligence is that it allows me to place technical and figurative writing on a common footing, for they can now be understood, along with gestures, bodily enactments, and even musical performance, as means that have proven useful for bringing about changes in mental representation.

I recently completed a draft of an undergraduate textbook on tonal music theory, An Introduction to Tonal Thinking co-authored with Marion A. Guck, Professor of Music at the University of Michigan.

I also plan to resume work on a set of interpretive essays on music by Brahms. My work on this project dates back to graduate school and was first aired in a conference paper (1990), an early article (1987), and in the final chapter of my dissertation (1991). I see this project as a return to pursuing my own analytical interests after a period of talking about the interpretive practice of other writers. These essays will be analytical, addressing aesthetic problems raised by individual works, problems that confront not only analysts but also listeners and performers.