The recent death of Heinrich Schenker has brought renewed attention to the name and achievement of one of the remarkable figures of the contemporary musical world. It furnishes the occasion for a consideration of his contributions to musical theory, both in their intrinsic aspect, and their significance as symptoms of the musical temper of the present time. For although Schenker remained bitterly hostile to all that is contemporary in music, his work and his ideas nevertheless embody very clearly certain aspects of contemporary musicality which here surely find one of their most striking expressions. The very fact that this work takes the form of musical theory is in itself symptomatic, as Schenker would have been the first to admit. For at its cornerstone lies the thesis that, owing to the hopeless desuetude into which the art and technic of composition have fallen, nothing but a body of fresh and sound theory, based on the actual practice of the masters, can save it or, indeed, since it is apparently beyond salvation, permit hopes of its renewal. It is this fresh and sound theory which Schenker has attempted to furnish, both as a writer and as a teacher; and however much one may dispute certain implications in his thesis as stated above, there is no question that to a very real extent he has succeeded in contributing to it, even if one must reject some of his doctrines, and precisely some of the most important and striking among them, as forced, untenable, and essentially sterile in tendency. It is of course impossible, in the space of a short article, adequately to treat such a vast and complex mass of theoretical material in the detail