The Course of the Brook:

Rethinking Schenkerian and Riemannian Perspectives on Organicism in Nielsen’s Music

Abstract

This article examines how analytical traditions shape what counts as ‘organic’ in Carl Nielsen’s music. While organicism has long framed Nielsen’s reception, analysts often struggle to align his process-oriented aesthetic with the structural ideals embedded in their methods. By comparing Schenkerian and function-theoretical approaches, I show how their contrasting models of temporality and harmonic function generate different visions of musical organicism: one centred on coherence and structural unity, the other on processual logic and development. Using Nielsen’s Wind Quintet, specifically the ‘Præludium’ of the third movement, I trace how these traditions produce divergent claims about the work’s organic character. I then offer a reading that integrates Schenkerian voice-leading with function theory’s dynamic sense of process, arguing that Nielsen’s notion of ‘music as life’ is better understood through an organicism grounded in musical becoming rather than in large-scale structural closure.