Schenkerian Theory's Empiricist Image
Mark DeBellis · Music Theory Spectrum · 2010
Drawing on logical positivism and recent philosophy, Matthew Brown, Douglas Dempster, and Dave Headlam interpret Schenkerian theory as empirical science. They view the theory as a generative system. An empirical theory of music would have the virtue of being intersubjective and grounded in sense experience. But Brown et al. do not specify a generative system in terms explicit or rigorous enough to yield a theory that is observationally adequate. Their test of the #IV(♭V) Hypothesis, which relies on the notion of a plausible interpretation, is inconsistent with the generative-system view. Because that view does not account for what it is for an analysis to be correct or incorrect, it fails as a rational reconstruction. If Schenkerian theory is empirical, then its analytical terms should be regarded not as theoretical, but as observational. That construal is plausible, however, only if theorists' arrival at judgments about structure is best explained on the hypothesis that the works really do have that structure.