(Ger.).
In Schenkerian analysis (see Analysis, §II, 4), the basic contrapuntal design that underlies the structure of a piece or movement; the final result of successive harmonic-contrapuntal ‘reductions’ in a Layer analysis, and thus the representation of its musical Background. The term is often rendered in English as ‘fundamental structure’.
The upper voice of the Ursatz, called the Urlinie (‘fundamental line’), consists of a diatonic stepwise descent to the tonic from the 3rd, 5th or octave; the interval it encompasses and the register in which it appears depend on the analysis, i.e. the content of the previous layers and, ultimately, the piece itself. The lower voice, which encapsulates the harmonic motion of the piece, consists of a tonic, followed by a dominant and a return to the tonic; this is called the Arpeggiation (ii) of the bass (Ger. Bassbrechung) since it involves movement between two notes belonging to the tonic triad. Thus the upper and lower parts of the Ursatz both exhibit a ‘horizontal’ unfolding of the tonic triad. Two common Ursatz forms in C major are given in ex.1.
While the Ursatz, seen from an analytical point of view, is the reduction of a piece to its simplest harmonic and contrapuntal terms, it may also be understood compositionally as the initial elaboration of the tonic triad, and thus the starting-point for the explanation of a piece in terms of growth and development. It is for this reason that Ursatz is the first concept developed in the definitive formulation of Schenker’s theories, Der freie Satz (1935), and also the starting-point – both graphically and verbally – of all his later analyses.
Like its companion term Urlinie, the meaning of Ursatz changed in the course of Schenker’s development as a theorist. In the early to mid-1920s it denoted something a little more elaborate: ex.2 shows the Ursatz of the first movement of Mozart’s G minor Symphony in Das Meisterwerk in der Musik, ii (1926). By the time of the ‘Eroica’ analysis (1930), this level of elaboration would have been called the ‘erste Schicht’ or ‘first [middleground] layer’.
WILLIAM DRABKIN