Project Aims

Schenker Documents Online aims:-

  • to increase insight into the life and mind of Heinrich Schenker, and by so doing to foster a fuller understanding of his career, works, and the intellectual development that they represent;
  • to stimulate biographical, historical, and socio-cultural study of Schenker, his circle of pupils, friends, and associates.

SDO's objectives in carrying out these aims are:

  1. to provide a scholarly, critical edition of all Schenker's known surviving correspondence (two-way), diaries, and lessonbooks, a task that entails the production of a diplomatic transcription, English translation, physical description, and supporting commentary for each document;
  2. to identify the intellectual rights holders of documents and to obtain permission from them to publish, or to establish that the material in question is in the public domain, or failing that to make all reasonable efforts to locate rights holders and to provide the means by which any claim upon any material can be made;
  3. to publish this edition to the web, with free worldwide access, at no charge to the end-user;
  4. to provide supporting documentation in the form of online "profiles," i.e. encyclopedia-like entries on persons, institutions, works, and places named in the published materials;
  5. to seek out hitherto untraced caches of correspondence and other private materials relating to Schenker's circle, and bring them to publication;
  6. to provide librarians and archivists with information to help them catalog their holdings of Schenker materials; and to provide private owners with information about the materials in their possession, and where appropriate to encourage them to place those materials in a publicly accessible library or archive;
  7. to raise awareness of the correspondence, diaries, and lessonbooks as a rich repository of information concerning not only Schenker and his circle, hence the history of music theory, but also Viennese musical culture, institutions and politics, cultural conservatism in the modernist age, Jewish life in Austrian society, and other fields of endeavor;
  8. to stimulate the use of these materials for research purposes, by presenting conference papers and organizing round tables, issuing periodic progress reports, publishing articles and monographs, the latter including the paper publication of a volume of selected correspondence(published by The Boydell Press in 2014), diary and lessonbook entries;
  9. to provide a working model for other, future web-based correspondence collections, in any field.