Austrian-born American pianist and teacher, pupil of Moriz Violin and Oswald Jonas.

Career Summary

Irene Schreier was born in Vienna on July 1, 1929, the daughter of mathematician Otto Schreier (1901‒29) and his wife Edith (née Jacoby, 1891‒1974). From the age of six she took piano lessons with Moriz Violin in Vienna, 1935‒39. Her father had studied with Violin in Vienna prior to 1920 and again between 1923 and 1929 in Hamburg, where he worked at the Mathematical Seminar of the University; and her mother had studied with Violin in Hamburg between 1921 and 1929. Her parents' married in 1928 but Otto died on June 2, 1929 and Edith immediately returned to Vienna for Irene's birth a month later.

In January 1939, Irene and Edith emigrated to the USA following Germany's annexation of Austria, as they were of Jewish origin. Likewise, the Violin family emigrated, the two families meeting in San Francisco. Irene resumed lessons with Violin, who presented her in public for the first time when she was 11, in a fund-raising event for new refugees at the city's Temple Emanuel, of which Violin wrote to Schoenberg: "It was an extraordinary success for the child" (LC ASC 27/45, [22], October 23, 1940).

Having been taught in Violin's Schenker-oriented approach to the piano, it was a natural step for Irene eventually to be introduced to Schenker's theory: in 1942 Edith married Oswald Jonas and moved to Chicago. In due course, Jonas became Irene's teacher, along with pianist Leonard Shure. After finishing school, Irene was awarded a fellowship which enabled her to travel to Europe. She participated in the Edwin Fischer Master Classes in Switzerland ‒ another source of inspiration ‒ and an award at the First Munich International Piano Competition brought radio and concert engagements throughout Germany and Austria as well as in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and England. After returning to the USA, she performed repeatedly in New York's Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill Hall), in Chicago, San Francisco, and many smaller venues.

Her career continued after her marriage to mathematician Dana Scott in 1959. During the years he occupied the chair of Mathematical Logic in Oxford she toured in Israel as well as Mexico, where she also gave lecture recitals. This became a new part of her work after the family returned to the USA in 1981, Dana having been invited to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he occupied the chair of Computer Science, Philosophy, and Mathematical Logic 1981‒2003. After introductory concerts there, Irene was offered the position of Artist Lecturer in the School of Music and also taught Schenker's theory, using Jonas's Introduction to the Theory of Heinrich Schenker (Eng. transl. John Rothgeb, 1982) as her text. It was during this time that she translated Heribert Esser's edition of Schenker's Die Kunst des Vortrags. Jonas, who owned the materials for this oft-announced but ultimately unfinished work, had planned to publish it, but died before the complicated task could be completed. Esser's edition in Irene's translation, with Esser's introductory history of the project and source materials, was published by Oxford University Press in 2000 as The Art of Performance .

At Oswald Jonas's death in 1978, Irene inherited the large body of Schenker's posthumous papers that he had taken to the USA after World War II, together with his own substantial library. These (which included Schenker's diaries and much correspondence) she entrusted to the Special Collections Library of the University of California, Riverside as the Oswald Memorial Collection.

Schreier Scot and Moriz Violin

As already stated, Irene was one of Moriz Violin's pupils in Vienna from the age of 6, 1935 to 1939, and in San Francisco from 1939 to 1942. She comments in The Art of Performance (2000, p. vii): Violin was Heinrich Schenker's younger colleague and closest friend, in whom Schenker confided and with whom he shared his musical ideas. Having intuitively assimilated these concepts, Violin imparted them in his own teaching along with a special, unforgettable approach to the piano. From the age of six, therefore, I was shown a natural way of playing entirely at one with the music and, perhaps because Violin had never taught a child before, I was spared any of the "piano methods" most beginners are taught.

When she later came to teach piano herself, Irene naturally incorporated the teachings of Violin, hence to some extent those that Schenker himself taught to his pupils, into her approach to teaching.

Schreier Scott and Oswald Jonas

As a pupil of Oswald Jonas in Chicago from 1942 for some years, Irene became acquainted with Schenker's theories through the original edition of his introduction, Das Wesen des musikalischen Kunstwerks (Vienna, Saturn Verlag, 1934). As outlined above, she later used this in English translation as the basis of her teaching at Carnegie Mellon University.

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