I'm reminded of something that Richard B said in a tutorial about making the underlying processes and structure come to the surface at some point to make it meaningful in a very corporeal way (I'm wildly paraphrasing here). I hadn't thought about that in terms of Stockhausen before but it makes a lot of sense. Perhaps he'll be along sometime to expand on my incoherent memories...

There are perhaps several different meanings of the word 'process' in the context of music which get used interchangeably, leading to confusion. One would be simply to refer to aural processes immediately apparent on the surface of a piece (such as most obviously in the case of certain minimalist works), another to underlying structural processes which may not be so obviously apparent but clearly inform the aural experience, such as long-range harmonic structure, for example. Both of those things are processes that can be identified relatively independently of knowledge of the composer's intentions. Then there are compositional processes which may or may not 'feed the surface', even those which serve a purely symbolical purpose for the composer (such as the manipulation of ciphers or symbolical numerical patterns, say). There is sometimes a rather didactic attitude towards such compositional processes which maintains that if you can't hear them directly, then they are fruitless. But there are many such processes that one might not be able to identify as such from listening alone (or only with very great difficulty), but nonetheless the work would be very different without them or with different techniques/processes. The same thing can be said of certain uses of reference/citation which cannot be heard directly, but again inform the experience. The question about the importance or otherwise of processes seems to arise primarily when there seems either little evidence or little interest in what their effect is in sonic terms, if a piece is somehow more interesting to analyse than to listen to. It is natural that composers are interested in others' processes - and numerous non-composers are as well - I suppose I'm interested to know whether people think the audible result of the processes employed in Stockhausen are at least potentially comprehensible to non-specialist listeners (I'd like to believe they are - whether or not they like the experience thus produced is a different question)?

It is not out of the question that Stockhausen may have been thinking of that Schumann piece when writing that passage, or at least been aware of the resemblance. Stockhausen tends to be less than forthcoming about many of his influences, musical and intellectual.

We trust it will not too much disappoint the Member to learn that the man on Wimbledon Common knows as much about Schenker as we, who are entirely unqualified to address the subject:

1) We have an English translation of his 1906 book "New Musical Theories and Phantasies, by an Artist" (later renamed simply "Harmony"), which we understand to be early and perhaps not representative of his "mature thought." There is a suspicious difficulty in obtaining his later works.

2) We have a book by Felix Salzer, entitled "Structural Hearing - Tonal Coherence in Music" which dates from 1952 and is said to expand and reformulate many of Schenker's ideas. Towards the end it contains a chapter entitled "The Historical Development of Tonal Coherence," which may interest certain Members.

3) We have also the "Cambridge History of Western Music Theory," containing on pages 812 to 846 an essay by William Drabkin entitled "Heinrich Schenker."

4) Schoenberg (the author, remember, of "Structural Functions of Harmony") writes in his Harmonielehre of Schenker's "many errors and vaguenesses," but praises his "poetical insights." Somewhat later though, in 1923, Schoenberg describes Schenker as a "false prophet, without creative gifts," and a "loudmouth," who, like Spengler and Hauer, "merely thrashes about with tasteful turns of phrase." (All too Germanic, is it not?)

5) To us Schenker's ideas - what we have seen of them so far - seem obvious and self-evidently true. We wonder why he found it necessary to write books about them. Perhaps this is why he is now so popular among Americans, who often we find require explanations of what lies directly in front of their long noses.

That particular form of writing in Schumann has earlier precedents in his works, such as the following from the Études Symphoniques:



And that in turn takes its cue from Schumann's study of Bach, and Bach's work represents his appropriations of the style of the French baroque, and so on.....

Although of course, what Bach chiefly meant to Schumann was an ideal of purity, which is hardly what Bach meant to Bach (as it were), nor - I think it's safe to say - what Bach-via-Schumann might have meant to Stockhausen.

Well, Etudes symphoniques is obviously a very different piece from Waldszenen, but I think the Bach-op. 13-op. 82 link is quite compelling in both its halves.  I think the Schumann/Bach link in the E.S. is quite clear, not to mention biographically justified, and I would argue in fact that the semidemiwhatever anacruses are in fact the French Ouverture style, mutatis of course mutandis.  The passage between, say, Lully and Bach and early Schumann and late Schumann is actually a really interesting case study in miniature of the reification and reappropriation of stylistic tics for increasingly unforeseeable ends.

I'm not sure I can speak to the Stockhausen, though; if you listen to the KS and the Schumann back to back they sound similar, I suppose, but there's a lot more to the grace-note-flurry-followed-by-longer-note for Stockhausen than Schumann; q.v. Messiaen and Boulez, for starters.

I simply note that the dissonance/consonance patterns are so at odds that the gesture itself (ie. the affect) is quite a differrent one. The notated rhythm seems to me all that the passages have in common.

The Stockhausen link I'm not even discussing here, though.

Also, I edited the above to say semitone appoggiatura instead of suspension/retardation