ABSTRACT
Traditional analysis - and this embraces the methods of Schenker and Reti - approached music as though it were a unified phenomenon. It is not pertinent to Schenkerian analysis to ask, where is the Ur sat z situated? Is it in the consciousness of the composer or the listener, or in the score, or in the performance? The Ursatz is considered to be in the music per se. In a certain sense,
it is to be found in all these locations; it is as though music were a transcendent fact 'discovered' by the composer and transmitted to an ideal listener. The accidents of contingency - how aware the composer was of his own devices, how experienced or sophisticated the listener, what were the composer's intentions or the listener's sympathies - have no relevance for the traditional analyst. He was indeed a pure theorist, but he was also vulnerable to criticism from the point of view of psychology or sociology, because he made no theoretical declaration of immanence. We still see music theory criticized from a psychological angle, as though theory were meant to give a psychological account of music, as well as a musical one (see especially Cook 1990).
