Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata

Elements of Sonata Theory is a comprehensive, richly detailed rethinking of the basic principles of sonata form in the decades around 1800. This foundational study draws upon the joint strengths of current music history and music theory to outline a new, up-to-date paradigm for understanding the compositional choices found in the instrumental works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and their contemporaries: sonatas, chamber music, symphonies, overtures, and concertos. In so doing, it also lays out the indispensable groundwork for anyone wishing to confront the later adaptations and deformations of these basic structures in the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. Combining insightful music analysis, contemporary genre theory, and provocative hermeneutic turns, the book brims over with original ideas, bold and fresh ways of awakening the potential meanings within a familiar musical repertory. Sonata Theory grasps individual compositions-and each of the individual moments within them-as creative dialogues with an implicit conceptual background of flexible, ever-changing historical norms and patterns. These norms may be recreated as constellations "compositional defaults," any of which, however, may be stretched, strained, or overridden altogether for individualized structural or expressive purposes. This book maps out the terrain of that conceptual background, against which what actually happens-or does not happen-in any given piece may be assessed and measured. The Elements guides the reader through the standard (and less-than-standard) formatting possibilities within each compositional space in sonata form, while also emphasizing the fundamental role played by processes of large-scale circularity, or "rotation," in the crucially important ordering of musical modules over an entire movement. The book also illuminates new ways of understanding codas and introductions, of confronting the generating processes of minor-mode sonatas, and of grasping the arcs of multimovement cycles as wholes. Its final chapters provide individual studies of alternative sonata types, including "binary" sonata structures, sonata-rondos, and the "first-movement form" of Mozart's concertos.

Table of Contents:
1. Contexts 2. Sonata Form as a Whole: Foundational Considerations 3. The Medial Caesura and the Two-Part Exposition 4. The Continuous Exposition 5. The Primary Theme 6. The Transition (TR) 7. The Secondary Theme (S) and Essential Expositional Closure: Initial Considerations 8. S-Complications: EEC Deferral and Apparent Double Medial Caesuras (TMB) 9. The Closing Zone (C) 10. The Development (Developmental Space) 11. The Recapitulation (Recapitulatory Space; Recapitulatory Rotation) 12. Non-Normative Openings of the Recapitulatory Rotation: Alternatives and Deformations 13. Parageneric Spaces: Coda and Introduction 14. Sonata Form in Minor Keys 15. The Three- and Four-Movement Sonata Cycle 16. Sonata Types and the Type 1 Sonata 17. The Type 2 Sonata 18. Rondos and the Type 4 Sonata 19. The Type 5 Sonata: Fundamentals 20. The Type 5 Sonata: Mozart's Concertos (R1: The Opening Ritornello) 21. The Type 5 Sonata: Mozart's Concertos (Solo and Larger Expositions: Solo 1 + Ritornello 2) 22. The Type 5 Sonata: Mozart's Concertos (Development and Recapitulation: From Solo 2 through Ritornello 4) Appendix 1. Some Grounding Principles of Sonata Theory Appendix 2. Terminology: "Rotation" and "Deformation"

About the Author :
James Hepokoski is Professor of Music at Yale University. His research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century music, musical form, hermeneutics, and historiography. Warren Darcy is Professor of Music Theory at Oberlin College Conservatory. His book Wagner's Das Rheingold (Oxford, 1993) won the Society for Music Theory's Wallace Berry Award in 1995.

Review :
"This is not only a large book but a hugely ambitious one. It reconceptualizes the sonata style of the late eighteenth century in ways consonant with the theory of the time but from the perspective of a present-day listener, one whose life experiences are shaped not by carriages and quills but by jets and computers. Its signal virtue is the way it tracks an expert listener's mental construction of a musical work as it unfolds in real time. Its terminology is deliberately idiosyncratic, but entering the world of sonata theory yields rich rewards. The theory is also syncretic in the best sense: it draws upon and opens up onto the work of thinkers from Koch to Lewin and from Schenker to Sartre."--William Rothstein, Professor of Music Theory at Queens College and The Graduate Center of The City University of New York "James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy's sonata theory has already had a striking impact on our analysis and interpretation of sonata form. With the publication of Elements of Sonata Theory we now have the real item. Sonata theory is, first and foremost, a theory of genre: Hepokoski and Darcy have immersed themselves for many years in the repertoire that they study, and they argue persuasively for the generic conventions that undergird their study. Sonata theory is also an analytic method: deep knowledge of convention and compositional practice engenders a finely-tuned tool that enables perceptive and sensitive musical analysis. Finally, sonata theory is a means of hermeneutic interpretation: expressive meaning arises out of the interaction of the individual work with generic convention. The meticulous scholarship and the analytical insight of the elements represent the best possible collaboration of musicology and music theory."--Patrick McCreless, Professor of