This week we continue our study of theoretical approaches to “Classical” music through the lens of musical form–and specifically sonata form. In the last fifteen years, much of the discourse surrounding sonata form has involved two theories that originate in the late 1990s–Wiliam Caplin’s theory of formal functions and James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy’s concept of dialogic form.
In our readings this week, these two theories are complemented by one other—Janet Schmalfeldt’s form as musical process.
William E. Caplin, Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 9– 21
James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, “The Medial Caesura and Its Role in the Eighteenth-Century Sonata Exposition,” Music Theory Spectrum 19, no. 2 (October 1, 1997): 115–54.
William E. Caplin, James Hepokoski, and James Webster, Musical Form, Forms & Formenlehre: Three Methodological Reflections, ed. Pieter Bergé (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009), 21–40, 71–89
Janet Schmalfeldt, In the Process of Becoming: Analytical and Philosophical Perspectives on Form in Early Nineteenth-Century Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3-53