The Problem of Prolongation in Post-Tonal Music

Prolongation is an idea of extraordinary power.' It has afforded remarkable insights into common-practice tonal music, enabling us to hear through the musical surface to the remoter structural levels and ultimately to the tonic triad itself. When the concept of prolongation was relatively new, many theorists tried to apply it to the characteristic post-tonal music of this century? In general, however, it led them not to the post-tonal middleground, but to a dead end. With a few exceptions, theorists have virtually ceased to produce prolongational analyses of post-tonal music. They have thus tacitly acknowledged that prolongation has revealed and can reveal little of solid worth about the deeper structural levels of the post-tonal music we care most about, music by Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, Bartok, and others. In what follows, I want to suggest reasons for the unexpected failure of this potent analytical tool, then propose a less ambitious, but theoretically more defensible approach to the middleground organization of post-tonal music.