Reddit reviews Musical Forces: Motion, Metaphor, and Meaning in Music (Musical Meaning and Interpretation)

No problem. Some might say that these are "modified" or "non-traditional" Schenkerian sketches, and I've met some folks who prefer the neutral "voice leading sketch" or "reduction" over "Schenkerian sketch" to avoid association with Schenker's harmonic theory and grant themselves some freedom in their application of the principles of reductive analysis.

An important thing to recognize about Schenkerian analysis is that the notes in the analysis do not really exist (or rather, they are "tones"; see Rothstein). I mean, they're there, you can play them, but the analysis is meant to be a short hand for what's going on in the music rather than a summation of the musical foreground itself. As Steve Larson puts it in Musical Forces:Motion, Metaphor, and Meaning in Music:

>A Schenkerian analysis is a diachronic event hierarchy. Each node of a Schenkerian analysis is concrete in the sense that it is a musical note of specific pitch and corresponds to a certain duration of the piece it represents. However, each node in the higher levels of a Schenkerian analysis is also more abstract than the leaves. In a Schenkerian “voice-leading graph,” one note of the analysis may stand for many notes in the passage analyzed. That note stands for other notes—it is not selected from those notes. Thus a given level may not be regarded as a literal subset of the level closer to the leaves. For instance, in a trill on a quarter note D, the D stands for the whole trill (including a possible Nachschlag); no single D in the trill is the “real D” (and, of course, none of the D’s in the trill is a quarter note). In fact, Schenkerian analyses often include “implied tones,” notes that are not literally present in the passage analyzed. Two additional examples include substitution (in which a 7 at a level closer to the foreground may “stand for” a 2) and chromatic transformation (in which a diatonic pitch at a level closer to the background is represented in the surface of the music by a chromatic pitch). William Benjamin (1984) has written on this topic and offers a nice example of a harmony that is prolonged but nowhere literally present in the musical surface. (56-57)

And William Rothstein offers a good summary of the logic of Schenkerian archetypes in On Implied Tones:

>If substitution for the 2 is so common, why, one might ask, should it be considered a deviation from the norm rather that (sic) as a norm itself? Why not allow alternative forms of the Fundamental Line, such as 3–7–8 or 5–4–3–7–8 (8 being equivalent to 1)? To answer these questions is to illustrate the Gestalt nature of Schenkerian thinking. Three principles are involved. First, there is Schenker's concept of melodic fluency— referred to earlier—which always gives precedence to stepwise motion (though leaps are not prohibited in Schenker's early formulation of the idea). Second, there is the Gestalt principle of 'good continuation', according to which a perceiver seeks to connect new stimuli with old ones in the simplest and most
predictable way possible; for musical lines, this generally means a continuation that follows whatever scale—chromatic, diatonic, chordal, etc.—was defined by the portion of the line heard previously. The third principle is the imaginary continuo.

>When these three principles are conjoined, the restriction to a stepwise Fundamental Line becomes easier to understand. The imaginary continuo makes 2 available as part of the V harmony, despite the presence of 7 in the melody. Given a line of 3–7–8 supported by I–V–I, the ear will readily conclude that 7—which forms a harmonized incomplete neighbour to 8 (or 1)—is a substitute for the harmonized passing note 2, since 2 conforms better to the principles of melodic fluency and good continuation. (With a line of 5-4-3-7-8, the principle of good continuation operates more obviously.) (305-306)

Another paper, Nobile's Counterpoint in Rock Music: Unpacking the "Melodic-Harmonic Divorce", shows just how useful it can be to recognize the symbolic language of Schenkerian analysis. In his "syntax divorce" category, the Bassbrechung and Urlinie represent different Stufen entirely, yet share the same form-functional role. He illustrates with IV–I harmonic cadences supporting 2–1 melodic descents. In this case, we're not dealing with any implied tones, but rather events on the musical foreground that represent an archetype in notably different ways. It is understood that IV–I is a conventional cadential progression in rock music, and at the same time we have this 2–1 as a closure coming from a linear melodic descent.