ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses Lawrence Kramer's own ostensibly noncombative agenda and what it implies about the way that some practicing critics seem to be understanding analysis. Attacks on Schenkerian analysis in the name of criticism usually question the perceived epistemological priority of the background, the apparent reduction of a musical surface to what Kramer calls a "faceless deep structure”. The chapter shows that the analytical enterprise in question is not as simplistic and one-dimensional as it has often been described. Kramer exhorts both the enterprise of music analysis and that of hermeneutic criticism to work together for the common good and shows what such a collaboration might look like. The chapter suggest that both sides of struggle, as mutually threatened forms of the institutionalized discourse, share more common ground than they realize in the ways they delimit musical experience.
