Briefly to the background and a generative model

 The practical work of our analysis of pitch design is reduction, or finding a larger-duration figure in a passage, expanding that work outward to encompass larger and larger durations, and organizing those in relation to each other. The system, however, in its foundation is generative and the goals of the method are interpretative; the ground of interpretation is the longest-duration figure, or the background. 

For Schenker it was the priority of line, all of them diatonic and very limited in number, and the priority of tonal progression rather than the rhythmic-metric groupings and articulations we call “form.” See his Free Composition (1935/1976).

For Felix Salzer, it was largely the same but as adjusted for a much broader historical account of European music. See his Structural Hearing.

For me, in that part of my work that concerns traditional tonal music, it has been the interval that precedes the line (following from “lines traverse intervals”), a re-positioning of the background, and an expansion of the number of middleground figures. 

For some others, the background is whatever results from the process of reduction (Fred Lerdahl argues this; for a concise presentation see chapter 1 of his Tonal Pitch Space [2004]). 

For many others still, including myself in my work on music outside of—and especially later than—the major representatives of the European Bach-to-Brahms repertoire, the background is integrated into a form- and motive-driven, still largely reductive process that can produce a variety of background shapes.

With respect to the current disciplinary status of prolongational analysis, Michael Buchler has written this, as part of a tribute to the late Carl Schachter. “. . .  with the recent falling-out-of-favor of prolongational (more broad than Schenkerian) analysis, [Schachter’s] analytical and theoretical voice [may be] known by fewer and fewer young scholars. . . . Those who decry the conservatism of prolongational analysis (a course I still love teaching, if in continuously evolving ways) should know that Schachter was hardly doctrinaire. He laid the groundwork for a changing practice, one that accounts for ever more musical features and that scrutinizes how we make musical decisions. . . .  [The] generalizability of his practice informs my own work in very deep ways.”. (Facebook post, 24 May 2026)