Schenker's Interpretive Practice is the first comprehensive study of this century's most influential music theorist, Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935). Without compromising the highly technical side of Schenker's theory that has chiefly preoccupied earlier writers, Robert Snarrenberg reveals the humanist side of Schenker's approach to understanding European music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Snarrenberg shows how metaphor and imagery are interwoven with technical analysis in Schenker's attempts to portray the richness of musical experience and the complexity of the composer's mind.