Sonata Theory: An Overview

gO gne of the perennial concerns of musicology and music theory is the analysis of foundational instrumental compositions from the decades around 1800-works by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. Dealing with this music adequately presents substantial challenges. Apart from the vastness and diversity of the repertory, the bibliography of individualized approaches to it has been enormous. From the outset we are confronted with differing methodologies, entrenched interests, and conflicting analytical claims. Within English-language analytical traditions, the past three decades of the last century saw the advance of competing, sometimes complementary, modes of orthodoxy in dealing with this music. Among the most frequently embraced hermeneutic genres were: (1) the general argumentation found in Charles Rosen's two influential overviews, The Classical Style (1971-72, rev. 1997) and Sonata Forms (1980, rev. 1988); (2) the motivic quest for coherence and "unity," typically seeking to demonstrate the generative, nonformulaic unfolding of structural shapes and contrasting ideas out of a few germinal cells presented near the opening of a piece (Arnold Schoenberg; Rudolph Reti; Hans Keller); (3) the historical-rhetorical approach, grounded in the language of the late eighteenth century and promoted in such texts as Leonard G. Ratner's Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (1980); and (4) Schenkerian analysis, anchored in such studies as Heinrich Schenker's Free Composition (Der Freie Satz [1935], English translation 1979).1 Even today most 1. These were by no means the only hermeneutic genres in general application during the last third of the twentieth century. One thinks, for example, of the impact, especially before about 1980, of Jan LaRue's Guidelines for Style Analysis (New York: Norton, 1970; 2d ed., Warren, Mich: Harmonie Park Press, 1992); of William S. Newman's Sonata in the Classic Era (New York: Norton, 1963; rev. ed., 1972); or, more generally, of the impact of the writings and style earlier in the century of Donald Francis Tovey, whose voice and conclusions echoed through several later writers from the 1960s to the 1990s. The Schoenbergian tradition is conveyed in brief in Arnold Schoenberg, Fundamentals of Musical Composition, ed.

Eighteenth-Century Music, 2024

In his book How Sonata Forms: A Bottom-Up Approach to Musical Form Yoel Greenberg makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of the evolution of sonata form. His analysis of the binary and concerto forms of mid-eighteenth-century composers sheds light on the emergence of a musical structure that has intrigued musicologists and listeners for centuries. Greenberg grounds his research in the writings of past and present sonata-form thinkers, engaging with a 'who's who' list of musicians and scholars from Scheibe to recent twenty-first-century writers. He complements this grounding in the field with an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on concepts from diverse areas such as linguistics, evolutionary biology, sociology, statistics and philosophy. This approach provides the framework for a bottom-up investigation into the development of sonata form. Greenberg supports his arguments with evidence from historical treatises, data on thematic quotations in a corpus of almost one thousand works and statistical analysis. Acutely musical and skilfully written, Greenberg's book presents analyses and arguments with clarity and accessibility. His prose is not only insightful but also infused with humour and grace, making it a compelling read for both scholars and enthusiasts alike. Greenberg leans heavily on the distinction between synchrony and diachrony throughout this work. Synchrony represents a snapshot of a specific moment or period of time, allowing us to ask the question 'what is sonata form?'. On the other hand, diachrony resembles a timeline and corresponds to the question 'when and how did sonata form come into existence?' (13). However, attempts to address these questions reveal counterexamples to neat narratives or categorizations, termed 'fuzziness' by Greenberg. When addressing the synchronic question, numerous sonata forms fit the definition perfectly, while many others fit it awkwardly. Similarly, answering the diachronic question complicates explaining the existence of sonata-form movements that occurred 'too early' in the timeline. None the less, Greenberg successfully makes valuable insights into the nature and evolution of sonata form. Greenberg's arguments frequently invoke the distinction between bottom-up and top-down approaches. A bottom-up approach focuses on individual features, such as genotypes or musical elements, and explores how they combine to form more complex systems, like phenotypes or musical forms. It is reductionist. A top-down approach starts with a complete whole and then deconstructs it into smaller segments. It is holistic. In music, top-down approaches dominate, often addressing the diachronic question through the lens of 'great men' who altered the paradigm or forged new paths for a particular form. Bottom-up approaches in musicology are relatively uncommon, even rare. They offer a new perspective that top-down approaches cannot. In the case of sonata form, a bottom-up approach allows us to understand it as 'a problem, a collection of disparate common practices inherited from other works and expected by listeners, which must

Gamut 6/1 (2013): 45-94; Available at: http://trace.tennessee.edu/gamut/vol6/iss1/3

or many years, conventional wisdom about form in nineteenth-century music assumed that thematic organization and program took precedence over harmonic structure, and that conventional (i.e., Classical) models were limited in their influence in favor of expression. Later studies, such as those by Edward T. Cone and Charles Rosen, emphasized harmonic structure more strongly, revealing much about formal procedures (especially in sonata form); but overstatements and broad generalizations posed problems for theorists seeking a balance. 1 More recent studies of sonata form, such as those by William E. Caplin, James Hepokoski, and Warren Darcy, have offered additional insights when applied to this music; but like earlier studies they have focused primarily on thematic organization (although in a much more systematic way) and thus have underemphasized characteristics illustrative of the foundational formal/harmonic relationships that exist between many nineteenth-century pieces and those of an earlier practice. 2 * Portions of this paper were presented in an earlier form at the 2007 meeting of the Society for Music Theory (Baltimore, MD).

Music & Letters, 2008

University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, 2018

The dissertation focuses on the early piano sonatas of Russian composer Nikolai Karlovich Medtner (1880–1951). It approaches them in the context of genre history, confronts them with other composer’s works, and discusses them from various analytic perspectives. A special goal is to consider the pieces in the aesthetic environment of their time, and to regard them as peculiar instances of the ›sonata principle‹, an ageless conception of musical form. The study is subdivided in three large parts, the first of which presents a summary of sonata composition before Medtner, exploring lines of tradition in Western Europe and Russia. The second part concentrates on Medtner’s musical language and its stylistic features. The third and most comprehensive part provides detailed examinations of eight of Medtner’s piano sonatas, including aspects of their genesis and reception, and making use of recent methods of musical analysis.

Journal of Music Theory, 2013

Reviews Galand on Hepokoski and Darcy 3 I take the locution "creative deformation" from Jauss 1982, 199, n. 122, citing Victor Ehrlich (a specialist of Russian formalism). This is yet another literary-critical antecedent, to add to the several H&D offer, of the use to which Sonata Theory puts the term deformation.

Theory and Practice , 2004

Sonata form--the analytical brainchild of Antonin Reicha and Carl Czerny in the first quarter of the nineteenth century--remains today a problematic paradigm. The inadequacy of the "textbook" model to explain the musical choices of especially Haydn and Beethoven is evident whenever one examines their sonata-form compositions. Consequently, writers from Donald Francis Tovey to William S. Newman and Charles Rosen have sounded various cautionary notes concerning this model, and have inspired others in recent times to search for new, more flexible means of describing how Classical sonata form functions musically. The past few years have witnessed the appearance of two analytical approaches that can assist us in the quest. First, there is William Caplin's taxonomy of Classical instrumental music at the level of the four-measure phrase and the two-measure phrase member. It provides us with the technical means to identify thematic and transitional units and to distinguish between them on the basis of their syntactical components. Second, there is James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy's identification of breaks in musical action (i.e., medial caesuras and essential expositional closures) as analogues to punctuation in language, which they use to demarcate formal events in sonata expositions. Both approaches draw heavily on historical views of musical form: Caplin's ideas about formal function derive from Schoenberg and Ratz; Hepokoski and Darcy's interest in musical breaks as large-scale formal determinants is an extension of Heinrich Christoph Koch's concept of "melodic punctuation." Hepokoski and Darcy suggest a rather wide-but nonetheless distinct-range of possible temporal locations, within a sonata-form exposition, for each type of melodic punctuation. Their data suggests that the temporality of musical events is more integral to a listener's perception of musical succession than has been hitherto assumed. Indeed, it could be argued that the musical proportion of an exposition's formal components (i.e., main theme, transition, subordinate theme, closing section) influences subconsciously how we formally partition a sonata exposition, regardless of the literal form-functional meaning of each expositional segment, as determined by Caplin.

Music Theory and Analysis (MTA), 2017

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