18.
Elements of Sonata Theory by Hepokoski and
Darcy—syntactic scripts for the time-space of sonata forms, charting out the
ragtime sonata
Put aphoristically: radical
individualism seeks to undermine the norms on which its expression depends (Style and Music, Leonard B. Meyer, page
220)
Elements of Sonata Theory:
Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth Century Sonata
James Hepokoski and Warren
Darcy
Copyright (c) 2006 by Oxford
University Press
Oxford University Press
ISBN -13: 978-0-19-977391-6
.. Within the humanities norms,
generic options, and more-or-less standard procedures are not laws at all. And
since they are not, there was no need to suppose that the existence of numerous
exceptions as deviations invalidated the norm. Perhaps the many deviations were
purposeful dialogues with the background norm. But this would mean,
paradoxically, that the deviations helped to reintroduce the socially shared
norm that was being temporarily overridden. (Otherwise, how could they be
perceived as deviations at all?) Page 7
Our intention is not to lay
down binding laws or invariant rules concerning either the parts of a sonata,
or the sonata as a whole. Instead, we are trying to sketch the outlines of a
complex set of commons or generic defaults. It is not that any attempt to
recover standard patterns is a flawed enterprise; rather, it is that prior
elements have been inadequately conceived. We offer Sonata Theory as a
heuristic construct that can help the task of analysis and hermeneutics. Pages 8-9
Since it was published in 2006 Elements of Sonata Theory has been
part of a renewed scholarly interest in American musicology in formal
analysis. There have been debates as to
the accuracy of the elements of Elements
but these are debates among scholars debating the merits and demerits of
whether what Hepokoski and Darcy have come up with is a suitable toolkit for
analysts and analysis. My assessment of
Elements is based only partly on its usefulness for analyzing eighteenth
century music and a great deal more, mostly in fact, on the ways I find Elements of Sonata Theory useful for composing
music.
Where Leonard B. Meyer pointed out that eighteenth century sonatas
tended to be written on script-based patternings, what Hepokoski and Darcy have
accomplished, however sprawling their book is, is to provide schematics of five
sonata types, which can be taken as five kinds of syntactic scripts they see in
eighteenth century sonata forms. For
those who have not read the book it would be difficult to fully sum up more
than 500 pages of theorizing and I’m going to take it as given that you have
read the book. Even if you haven’t what
I can summarize for you is that by discussing sonatas in terms of “zones” for
the sonata exposition, development and recapitulation spaces, Hepokoski and
Darcy explore their five sonata scripts in terms of what George Rochberg would
have classified as the time-space of sonata forms.
One of the more crucial observations Hepokoski and Darcy make
about the evolution of what we call
sonata forms has to do with the era in which sonata forms began to be
written and the style within which sonata forms were developed:
… A sonata-form project was a
feat of engineering, like the construction of a bridge “thrown out” into space.
In the eighteenth-century style this temporal span was to be built from rather
simple materials: trim, elementary musical modules, whose brevity and
small-scale balances seemed best suited to short-winded compositions. In the
hands of most composers constructing a sonata-form movement was a task of modular assembly [italics original],the
forging of a succession of short, section-specific musical units (spaces of
action) linked together into an ongoing linear chain—pressing don and
connecting one appropriately stylized musical tile after another. One of the
challenges facing the mid- and late-eighteenth century composer was to use a
seemingly unassuming, galant
language, grounded in structural punctuation and periodicity, to produce ever
more spectacular spans for occasions of enhanced dignity, prestige, or social
importance. Pages 15-16
The first and most important observation to make about this
passage has to do with the term “galant”. Hepokoski and Darcy propose that sonata
forms emerged as a range of syntactic scripts favored by composers of galant
music. Robert Gjerdingen has written a book or two on music in the galant
style, one that is literally called Music
in the Galant Style and here’s something he had to say about musics in that
style:
Music in the Galant Style
Robert O Gjerdingen
Oxford University Press
Copyright (c) 2007 by Oxford
University Press
ISBN 978-019-531371-0
… Overly strong music
histories, constructed more by analogy with German art-historical fashions than
by intrinsically musical resemblances, created an imaginary eighteenth-century
moiety in which each composer had to belong to either the Baroque or the
Classical clan. The galant world hardly fits into that stark dichotomy, and one
sees the resulting discomfort in the endless remarks in surveys and
encyclopedias about musicians whose compositions “show characteristics of
Baroque and Classical styles.” One might conclude that all but the most
one-dimensional eighteenth-century composers were stylistically uncertain of
their true identities. Page 434
Gjerdingen has gone so far as to argue that 1). Baroque and
Classical eras are post hoc scholarly inventions that won’t tell us what music
of the figured bass and galant styles and forms sounded like within their
historical moments and 2) what we now think of as the signature “Classical”
form, sonata, was not really the lodestar of galant styles (that would have
been opera). Theories about sonata forms
were in crucial respects inventions of the nineteenth rather than eighteenth
century music theorists.
Well, here we are in the twenty-first century and sonata forms
have been invented, whether Haydn would have claimed to have used sonata forms
or not. We have the flexibility as
musicians and writers to insist that whatever a sonata form is, there’s no
reason it has to be incompatible with popular, recognized styles of music. If
there’s something I’ve managed to pick up after decades of loving what has been
called Classical music or galant music, it’s that, to invoke Rosen’s old
observation about Haydn, it was during this period, whatever we call it, that
Haydn developed a deliberately popular style that sacrificed none of “the
pretensions of high art”.
The second, equally significant observation about Hepokoski and
Darcy on sonata forms is how frequently their description uses what Rochberg
called the time-space conception of music.
The construction of a bridge, the temporal span, the ongoing linear
chain, these are all ways of describing music that make sense in time-space
terms but not in space-time terms. Sure,
you could ask where the second violin in a string quartet is going to be in a
surround sound recording of a string quartet by Wagenseil but there’s nothing
about the music as a performance that stands or falls on where in the various
channels of the audio engineering process the second violinist’s performance
ends up getting patched into at the soundboard.
By contrast, if you lose the surround sound aspects of Dark Side of the Moon then Pinkfloyd’s “On
the Run” doesn’t sound like it should.
With the time-space aspect of sonata forms in mind, we can move to
Hepokoski and Darcy discussing their concept of rotation:
As with all of the
action-spaces, the exposition is assigned a double-task, one harmonic and the
other thematic-textural (“rhetorical”). Its harmonic task is to propose the initial
tonic and then, following any number of normative (and dramatized) textural
paths, to move to and cadence in a secondary key. In major-mode sonatas—the most
common in the eighteenth century—this was the key of the dominant … .
The exposition’s rhetorical task, no less important, is
to provide a referential arrangement or layout of specialized themes and
textures against which the events of the two subsequent spaces—development and
recapitulation—are to be measured and understood. We refer to this layout as rotation 1 or the expositional rotation. Page 16
Because the exposition’s
success of events serves, especially in its second half, to predict the plan
and purpose of the entire third spac—the recapitulation, which finally resolves
the work—its layout may be understood as articulating a structure of promise (indicating how it proposes that “things work
out” in the recapitulatory rotation-to-come).
Elements of Sonata Theory, Page 17
For those already familiar with the basics of sonata forms, the
development “action-space” that Hepokoski and Darcy describe is where material
from the exposition, often from the first theme and the transition, gets “developed”.
There is an avoidance of firm cadences in the original key the work started in
and there is a “drive” to the final “action-space”, the recapitulation. As textbooks so often say, the recapitulation
is where we’re supposed to get theme 1 and theme 2 back, all in the original
key within which the music started.
With respect to the prospect of a ragtime sonata there some
important observations about eighteenth century musical works worth
considering. Hepokoski and Darcy write that:
… Repeat signs are never
insignificant. Block-repetitions are an integral component of the style, and
composers can work with this defining convention in a variety of ways. … The familiar, current views—Schenkerian and
otherwise—that propose that some repeats are structurally insignificant while others
are more important (because of the unfolding of certain structural tones or
other significant events, perhaps under a first-ending sign) miss the larger
point of repeat signs as generic identifiers. … the gist of these claims seems to be based
on later-nineteenth-century premises, which came to look on all unaltered
repetitions as an aesthetic error. Such a conviction also came to affect
performance in the omission of repeats or in the insistence on an altered
interpretation in the repeat. It may be, though, that saying the same thing
twice was what the composer had in mind.
Elements of Sonata Theory, Page 21
In a 661-page book there is, of course, a lot more material like
that for consideration.
Bringing this discussion of sonata forms (however much “sonata
form” turns out to be a post hoc interpretation of music that may not have
actually been consciously written as
sonata form in its era) back to George Rochberg’s concept of time-space,
ignoring the repeats that are expressly written in the score would disrespect
the composer’s intentions.
Now, ironically, that would mean that Romantic era musicians who
began to advocate for the integrity of the “work” who blithely ignored any and
all repeat signs they considered “unimportant” may have revealed that the integrity
of the work they were really concerned about was their work as performers and
interpreters rather than of the work the composer wrote. Of course sometimes an audience gets bored with
a movement and there’s always a Rachmaninoff standard of ending a long set of
variations after you hear the first cough.
Back to my actual point, in time-space terms, to ignore repeats
would be to ignore the composer’s intentions for the time-space as a live
performance. As abstract as my point is,
we can understand more clearly what the modular nature of a musical work’s
construction is if we take repeat signs seriously.
Now let me back up and talk about pop song forms. Decades ago, when I was in college, I
remember the idea bandied about by peers that a pop song could be like a sonata
form. After all, couldn’t a verse and a
chorus be like a theme 1 and a theme 2 in a sonata exposition? Couldn’t the bridge be like some kind of
development? Couldn’t, then, the return
of the chorus or the verse be a kind of recapitulation? I liked the idea but even back then, as I was
writing songs in popular styles and working on a sonata, I realized there was
no real correspondence.
The problem is that in terms of function a verse-chorus module is
a single unit and often gets designed to be endlessly recursive. If there was anything in a pop song that
might correspond to the functional differentiations between a Theme 1 and a
Theme 2 in a sonata form it wouldn’t be a chorus, it would be a bridge. So if you wanted to try writing a sonata that
made use of a pop song set of structures you could treat a verse-chorus module
as a single, self-contained theme. The
bridge could be your Theme 2 and depending on how you liked the connection or
disconnection between the verse-chorus and the bridge, as long as they’re in
different keys in the first part of the song, you could have a transition. If you were to have a recapitulation then
your verse-chorus would have to lead to a bridge that would be, now, in the
same key as your verse-chorus where previously said bridge was in some other key. That’s the kind of structural business you’d
have to have going on for a pop song to take on aspects of a sonata form.
It can be done, in fact it’s not hugely difficult to imagine
making a rock song like sonata. It’s just that you’d have a structure that
might map out roughly like this:
Exposition Development Recapitulation
Verse-chorus Transition Bridge ideas from exposition Verse-chorus Bridge in C
Theme 1 Theme 2 get played with optional transition
Key of C modulate Not-C various in C in C
But by the listening norms of a pop song when have you ever felt
like it made sense for a song to end on its bridge material? I can instantly think of one, Stevie Wonder’s
“Living for the City”. That bridge
between chorus and verse is one of the most glorious moments in all of American
popular song and I can imagine … somebody ... using those chord changes as the
basis for 10-minute long solo guitar sonata.
Let it be noted that Stevie Wonder is the kind of musical genius
very few of us will ever hope to be. Most
of us who have aspired to writing songs don’t just sit down and start off a
song with a blues-driven circle-of-fifths I-IV-V verse-chorus dyad that gets
interrupted by a chain of chromatic mediants bridge with what George Rochberg
called m3 progressions soaring over a descending octatonic bass line. That’s the kind of thing Stevie Wonder has
done because he’s a musical genius.
There, I’ve made a point of saying it again. In my musical world Haydn
and Stevie Wonder and J. S. Bach and Thelonious Monk and Scott Joplin
peacefully coexist. I trust many
musicians share this sentiment but many writers of music theory and music history
books may not have caught up to this sentiment.
So … if you have a verse-chorus bridge development verse-chorus bridge approach to a
pop song sonata what you could do is sonata rondo things and go AB (dev)
ABA. You could bring back a verse or
chorus as a coda. That kind of thing
happens in eighteenth century sonatas all the time, some coda pops up that
evokes the initial gestures that started the piece.
I’ve been spending so much time discussing how to write a sonata in
pop song terms because, for those who didn’t know this, ragtime scholars have
clarified that ragtime was primarily a genre of popular song. In spite of the broadly classical/classicist
revival of ragtime in the 1960s and 1970s that brought the piano rags of the
Joplin school back, ragtime was chiefly a form of popular song. No serious practical and theoretical attempt
to make ragtime themes material for a sonata form can ignore popular song since
ragtime was popular song.
So what could the temporal-spatial correspondence of time-spaces
between a rag and sonata look like?
Now if we wanted to chart out what a ragtime sonata written as a
duet for piano and guitar might look like (and in my fantasy world where this
happens it’s a Duke Ellington/Lonnie Johnson duo), it might look something
like:
Hepokoski’s and Darcy’s observation that repeats are structural is
where Rochberg’s concept of space-time becomes particularly relevant. It is in the space-time of the entire B
strain section of a piano rag that we’ll find space enough for a modulating
transition and a single presentation of the B material. Should that seem like a significant breach
from ragtime tradition that would be because it is a significant break from ragtime traditions. But in a sonata form we can imagine that the
B strain that is only played once will get its classic ragtime turn to be
played twice in the recapitulation time-space or the recapitulation
zone/rotation as Hepokoski and Darcy call it.
In the time-space in a ragtime where the A strain would normally
return that space, dear reader, is where the development section of a ragtime
sonata can go. Why? Because where the C
or CC time-space would be in an AABBACCDD Joplin rag, that time-space has
become the space where A comes back as Theme 1 in a recapitulation. There can be a non-modulating transition, or
we could move straight from the A strain to the returning B strain that’s now
in the tonic key rather than the dominant, subdominant or submediant key or
whatever key that isn’t-the-tonic-key the B strain was in during the
expositional time-space.
A good deal of ink has been spilled on whether or not Hepokoski’s
and Darcy’s concept of rotation is really accurate in describing what happens
in eighteenth century sonata forms, and whether it accounts for, say, the
sonata forms of Anton Bruckner. That’s
the kind of academic turf war contest I frankly don’t care about because
1) I can’t say I’m a huge Bruckner fan
and 2) I am clearly staking out a position in which Elements of Sonata Theory
is to be used by contemporary composers as part of a proposal to melt down the
historically hardened barriers erected by advocates of concert music and pop
music to keep each other out of consideration from the purity codes of their
respective music fandom coteries.
As I have charted things above the A material and B material could
be strains from “The Entertainer” or they could be Monk’s tunes “`Round
Midnight” and “Pannonica” taking the roles of Theme 1 and Theme 2 in a sonata
form. That’s the thing about Rochberg’s
time-space and the “action-space” concept of Hepokoski and Darcy. With help from Ben Johnston’s concept of
proportionality as proportional correspondence, The AA and BB zones of the
traditional Joplin rag can be reconceived to fit into the possibilities of a
sonata exposition. The CC and DD zones
can become the basis for any kind of recapitulation of the A and B materials. That A material in the middle of AABBACCDD
becomes, of course, the development section.
If at this point people are wondering if the development section
isn’t supposed to be big, if it seems weird to have a development section only
about sixteen to twenty measures long, go back and study Haydn and other eighteenth
century composers. Or go look at
Fernando Sor’s little E flat sonata from his Op. 29 etude. That’s a sonata but that development section
is short. Writing as a guitarist who was
once in a would-be progressive rock band, the development section of your rock
song sonata form doesn’t really need to be any longer than a rock and roll
guitar solo that happens to quote from material in your verse and chorus.
So, it took some time, but I have sketched out what I think could
potentially be a helpful way for musicians and composers who want to write
ragtime sonatas to go about doing that.
Ragtime fans will notice that the most drastic change I’ve
introduced is getting rid of C and D strains, on paper. In reality I think a Theme 1 that is an ABA
composite of strains in a Joplin style makes for a perfectly good theme 1 and a
C strain could make for a nice Theme 2.
There’s also no reason you couldn’t introduce a D strain as a coda. There is a danger in introducing too many
good ideas, which was a criticism that Haydn had of a number of his
contemporaries. Given how complex most
ragtime strains tend to be I personally recommend that you avoid going beyond
two themes, whether compound themes or “simple” ragtime strains. There are fans of classical music who want
themes to multiply without end and among rock fans there are people who listen
to Rush and Yes. I’m more of a
classicist who favors doing what you can with a handful of themes that people
have a shot at actually remembering.
Having written tens of thousands of words rejecting Adorno’s
pontificating about American popular music, I don’t wish to replicate his
mistakes by telling you what you “should” do or expounding on what is musically
“false”. My interest has been to
demonstrate Adorno was wrong even at his theoretical level arguing that
American popular songs were incapable of becoming art. We already know from the fact that basically
nobody listens to what little music Adorno wrote that Adorno’s own musical
legacy is a non-entity in composition. I
don’t see that we need to chain ourselves to what I regard as Adorno’s fatal
lack of imagination about the possibilities of popular styles. If Haydn could develop
a deliberately popular style that drew upon “learned technique” then I don’t
see why you couldn’t possibly try doing that, too.
In demonstrating why Adorno was catastrophically wrong in his
assessment of the supposed lack of possibilities for American popular music to
fit within the “serious music” paradigm of a sonata form (whether or not sonata
was “dead” once it became “standardized”), there’s a reason I drew upon the
writings of George Rochberg and Ben Johnston besides the fact that I admire
some of the music they wrote and what they wrote about music. It has been possible for the last fifty years
to draw upon theoretical writing on space and time in music from a former
serialist and a microtonal pioneer to show that Adorno’s arguments don’t hold
up. It is possible, further, to draw
upon developments in the last thirty years in formal analysis to explain that
ragtime sonatas are actually pretty easy to write.
Of course, after 120 years nobody thinks of ragtime as a popular
style in any meaningful contemporary sense of the term. Ragtime has been a rarified niche in popular
music and classical music alike. It is,
as John McWhorter put it, like juice and cookies compared to the hot sounds of
the jazz that was born from it but quickly replaced it. Ragtime, from its birth, managed to
associated with ice cream and thanks to a historic connection to John Stark,
that connection to ice cream was very literal.
But Scott Joplin lived his musical life believing that ragtime, the
style he helped pioneer and master, could become more than just some kind of
musical ice cream. I agree that the
musical style he helped pioneer can move into realms of what are normally
thought of as “classical music” and explore larger-scale forms than the often modular
“empty cans” approach that Adorno sniffed at about American popular music.
It is a tragedy of American musical history that Joplin died and
was not able to entirely move his musical language into the directions he hoped
for. Nevertheless, I think his music can
be a foundation for more than musical juice and cookies, candy, or musical ice
cream. Dormant within the syncopations
of ragtime, for instance, is the Bo Diddley beat. Within the enigmatic early strains of Louis
Chauvin’s contribution to “Heliotrope Bouquet” there is George Rochberg’s
envisioned dance of polar opposites, traditional tonal music shimmering with
whole-tone passage work and quartal harmonies on its memorable surface. The possibilities for a paradoxically new
approach to sonata forms has been lurking within the rags of Scott Joplin,
James Scott, Joseph Lamb and other ragtime pioneers for a century.
I believe Hiram Moderwell was right about ragtime, and if by now “the
clammy hand of fellowship” has been extended by composers and critics, if by
now nine of ten musicians will enjoy ragtime even after someone tells them they
shouldn’t, there is still something Joplin hoped to accomplish in his music
that he didn’t live to accomplish in his life time. Even by the standards of the German Idealist
and Romantic ideologies that could be invoked to write of Joplin as a serious
composer, Scott Joplin wanted to write serious concert music and made a point
of saying so. Even if it seems a century
too late, as American popular song has veered off into so many other
directions, writing sonatas using ragtime themes is a way to honor the legacy
of one of the most important composers of music, popular or concert, in the
history of the United States.
That Adorno could not see in any American popular music any
potential for his idea of “serious music” is another tragedy, because people
who have taken Adorno’s views to heart (and mind) have consigned themselves to
staying within the ambit of Adorno’s failures of imagination.
If you’ve read this far, and you’re so inclined, I hope you try
out writing a ragtime sonata.
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