Schenker was born in Wisniowczyki in Galicia in Poland. He moved to Vienna where he studied music under Anton Bruckner and became known as a pianist, accompanying lieder singers and playing chamber music. He taught piano and music theory privately, and Wilhelm Furtwängler, Anthony van Hoboken and Felix Salzer were among his pupils.
Schenker's ideas on analysis were first explored in his Harmony (1906) and Counterpoint (1910-12), and were developed in the two journals he published, Der Tonwille (1921-24) and Das Meisterwerk in der Musik (1925-30), both of which included content exclusively by Schenker. That Schenker regarded his analyses as tools to be used by performers for a deeper understanding of the works they were performing is shown by the fact that his edition of Ludwig van Beethoven's late piano sonatas also include analyses of the works.
In 1932, Schenker published Five Graphic Music Analyses (Fünf Urlinie-Tafeln), analyses of five works using the analytical technique of showing layers of greater and lesser musical detail that now bears his name. Following Schenker's death, his incomplete theoretical work Free Composition (Der freie Satz, 1935) was published (first translated into English by T. H. Kreuger in 1960 as a dissertation at the University of Iowa; a second, more accurate translation, by Ernst Oster, was published in 1979). Other music theorists, for example Felix Salzer and Carl Schachter, both added to and disseminated Schenker's ideas: by the 1960s Schenkerian analysis had begun to attract renewed interest, and by the 1980s it had become one of the central analytical methods used by music theorists in Europe and the United States. While his theories have been increasingly challenged since mid-century for their rigidity and organicist ideology, the wider analytical tradition that they inspired has remained central to the study of tonal music.