The writings of Nicholas Cook, and especially the present volume, are characterized by an always-maintained balance of grace, elegance, intellectual rigour, thorough and meticulous scholarship, clearly laid out argumentation, and a wry humour just under the surface. His writing is a distinct pleasure to read and, far from being mere flattery, this is a unique strength of The Schenker Project: it appeals across disciplines and can be read with great profit students of the humanities, who will enjoy the multidisciplinary bent informed by music, architecture, politics, and culture; by music historians, who will find in it a fascinating portrait of fin-de-siècle Vienna as engaging as Carl Schorske's, but with a greater emphasis on music; by cultural historians examining the effects of cultural conservatism on the emergence of modernism, and by music theorists seeking to gain a more complete picture of the man who discerned and promulgated the single-most sophisticated conception of tonal music that we have.
It is no overstatement to say that this volume is among the most significant contribution to Schenker Studies in the last ten years. Other recent works have, like this one, sought to contextualize Heinrich Schenker's music-theoretical approach broadly within disparate fields of human endeavor such as linguistics, philosophy, religion, politics, legality, and cultural history. Such contextualization is suggested by Schenker's copious writings themselves, in which the fabric of his ideas is woven from these various strands into a single thread and a single, comprehensive worldview. These writings are duly acknowledged by Cook, whose aim in his Project one might describe as answering two questions: (1) what was the problem to which Schenker's musical theory was the answer (Cook poses this very question in the book's first sentence); and (2) 'how is one meant to find one's bearings in [Schenker's] welter of cultural, philosophical, and religious references?' (p. 32). Schenker himself acknowledges the interdisciplinary nature of his work when, in a letter of 1914 to Emik Hertzka (the editor at Universal Edition, Schenker's principal publisher), he writes 'the works of mine that you have published will, for all time to come, remain undisputedly the unique foundation of all disciplines. . . . I still have in mind publications of the greatest importance such as no one before me and no one after me, endowed with such eternal truth, has ever revealed to the world, nor ever will' (p. 31, emphasis mine). Schenker's music theory, Cook argues, is part of a worldview that saw music and society as linked and that, inasmuch as music is a product of culture, musical criticism is implicit cultural criticism. Hence, Schenker's disdain for modern music can be seen as a critique of cultural modernism. Nicholas Cook's work seeks to penetrate Schenker's polemics in order to learn the motivation for 'the deep-seated beliefs–or prejudices–about music and society that fuelled not only his polemics but also . . . his theoretical development' (p. 3).
Nicholas Cook's contribution to cultural history in general, and Schenker studies in particular, is laudable in every respect and, as I wrote in my introductory paragraph, I can envision the work being profitably used in various academic settings. It is much less about musical analysis itself than it is about contextualizing the development of one man's ideas. As with any great work, we come away from it having several important questions answered, but just as many new ones raised. This is a book to be studied and debated for years to come.