(Ger.: ‘fundamental line’).
In Schenkerian analysis (see Analysis, §II, 4), the conceptual upper voice of a piece in its simplest terms, represented by the diatonic conjunct descent to the tonic from the 3rd, 5th or octave. The interval encompassed by the Urlinie and the register in which it appears are determined by the piece itself, together with the criteria the analyst uses to fix its starting point. Because Urlinie was the first term Schenker coined in connection with his new analytical method, it became the word most closely identified with his method, as well as the one whose meaning changed most radically in the course of his later theoretical writings.
Schenker used Urlinie for the first time in the foreword to his critical edition with commentary (the Erläuterungsausgabe) of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in A op.101, published in 1920 (see Analysis, §II, 4 fig.18). Yet it is clear from his analysis of op.101, and in the essays in his next series of publications (Der Tonwille, 1921–4), that the term was at first understood not as an archetypal melodic line, but rather as a reduction of the surface of a piece that left its phrase structure and broad harmonic-contrapuntal outline intact. The Urlinie of these earlier analyses is not only polyphonic in texture, but often preserves the bar-lines of the piece in question. Thus the original meaning of Urlinie corresponds rather more closely to what Schenker was eventually to call the musical ‘foreground’ of a piece (see Layer), and explains why he continued to use the expression Urlinie-Tafel for the musical representation of the foreground layer in his analyses.
The term is often rendered into English as ‘fundamental line’, but some writers believe that it is so specialized, so quintessentially Schenkerian, that it is better left untranslated.
WILLIAM DRABKIN