Leading music theorist.

Career Summary

Brought up in Hamburg, Oster moved to Berlin around 1930 and subsequently to Vienna. He began his career as a pianist. After the Annexation of Austria in 1938, he emigrated to the USA, where he taught privately for many years. In 1967, he began teaching at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, and shortly thereafter at the Mannes Music School in New York. He wrote several theoretical and analytical articles for American periodicals (see below).

Oster and Schenker

Oster's interest in Schenker's work was first aroused by Die letzten fünf Sonaten von Beethoven (1913-20). He studied with Oswald Jonas in Berlin around 1930, and contributed an article and reviews to the journal Der Dreiklang, edited by Jonas and Felix Salzer. At his departure for the USA, he was entrusted by Jeanette Schenker with a large collection of Schenker's papers, which were bequeathed at his death in 1977 to the New York Public Library as the Oster Collection: Papers of Heinrich Schenker.

His greatest contributions to music theory are his teaching or influencing of generations of Schenkerian scholars (including Milton Babbitt, Allen Forte, Carl Schachter, Edward Laufer, John Rothgeb, Charles Burkhart, William Rothstein, and David Beach), and his edition and translation of Schenker's Der freie Satz.

Correspondence

No correspondence between Oster and Heinrich Schenker is known to have existed. Two items of correspondence from Oster to Jeanette Schenker survive as OJ 13/14 (1938); three items from Oswald Jonas to Oster as OJ 36/45 (1948, undated) and one as OC 2/1 (1967), forty-two items from Oster to Jonas as OJ 36/199 (1935-64) and one as OC 2/2-4; one letter from Felix-Eberhard von Cube as OJ 71/7 (1948, photocopy), one letter from Oster to Franz Eibner as OJ 71/27 (1939), one letter from Felix Salzer to Oster as OJ 71/31 (1948), and one letter from an unidentified sender to Oster as OC 70/72.

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