How Sonata Forms and Journeys Through Galant Expositions, two very fun books I finished recently and a ramble on the alleged tension between confessionialism and aesthetic pluralism

Back on April 24, 2020 when I published Ragtime and Sonata Forms I could not have anticipated that there would be two different books published by Oxford University Press that would play with the core idea that to understand 18th century music better we would have to shed 19th and 20th century pre-conceptions about musical time and space and the accepted modular plans of past eras of formal analysis but especially those developed in the "long 19th century".

So I'm happy to have finally gotten around to reading through two books.  The first is Yoel Greenberg's How Sonata Forms: A Bottom-Up Approach to Musical Form.. The second is L Poundie Burstein's Journeys Through Galant Expositions.  I may have to write in more detail about these books later but both of them were a blast to read.  

Greenberg's title gives away the core methodological proposal and he makes a case that Elements of Sonata Theory is partly helpful because not all the "elements" in Elements have to be present.  His polemic is that there are three core patterns that "may" appear in sonata forms: 1. the medial repeat 2. the double return and 3. the end rhyme.  The medial repeat can be thought of, in contemporary colloquial terms, as the fully repeating exposition. The double return refers to the convention in sonata jargon that Theme 1 must return in an identifiable form, in the key it first appeared in and that this double return constitutes the syntactic climax of the sonata form.  If you don't have this double return then some theorists say you don't even have a recapitulation but not all theorists agree this is the case.  That's where the end rhyme comes in, which is roughly saying that provided your Theme 2 and Theme 3 or coda materials come back in the correct closing key (the tonic, but not always, per Schubert's "Wanderer Fantasy") then you can abandon the double return.  

Yoel Greenberg's case is that if you look at a thousand pieces that display some or all of the three ingredients then whether or not a musical movement is a sonata exists on a sliding scale.  He also points out that in this bottom-up analytical process it becomes clear that no one person "invented" sonata forms because sonata forms are post hoc theoretical explanations of musical practices that were not necessarily understood as "sonata forms" in the 18th century on the one hand.  On the other hand, hundreds of composers writing thousands of pieces of music led to the evolution of what was retroactively defined as sonata form or sonata forms.  In other words, Ted Gioia's conspiratorial thesis that music historians buried the truth about who invented the first sonata is abject nonsense in light of Yoel Greenberg's work, showing that no one "invented" a "sonata form" so much as a legion of composers playing around with three elements collectively arrived at what was eventually designated sonata form(s).  Crucially for Greenberg, the three elements of the medial repeat, the double return and the end rhyme do not necessarily work together and not all of them need to be present to identify a musical movement as a sonata form.  

An upshot for me as I've been playing with what I call neo-galant is that these three elements can potentially (or actually) exist in any kind of musical style that has any kind of pitch hierarchy to it.  In other words, I was excited to read Greenberg's book because it retroactively elucidated some thinking I was doing about how ragtime strains have the same core range of potentially complementary or conflicting structural repetitions that could be found in 18th century music, although not based on rigid schematic plans as much as flexible scripts (per Leonard B Meyer).

This thematically flows into L Poundie Burstein's Journeys Through Galant Expositions.  Burstein conspicuously draws upon James Webster's work on Haydn and other composers; William Caplin's work; and Hepokoski and Darcy's Elements of Sonata Theory. What he has also done, however, is draw on theoretical treatises from the 18th century, particularly Koch, to explain sonatas as journeys, such as a trip from Houston, Texas to Paris in France.  There may be layovers on the trans-Atlantic flight and you may have to double back if there's a problem that comes up in the overall itinerary but you eventually get to where you want to go.  

What is most intriguing for me is Burstein highlights that one of the biggest conceptual shifts that has happened in the last twenty to forty years in music theory dealing with formal analysis is abandoning popular metaphors for musical time and space that developed in 19th century discourse, specifically the container concept of musical space as the foundation for formal analysis.  Now I'm going to try really hard not to rabbit trail into how in Christian theological work in the last sixty years Thomas Torrance explained the bad effects of the receptacle concepts of time and space on kenoticism in Lutheran theology in Space, Time and Incarnation.  I will also try to not rabbit trail into Charles Twombly's Perichoresis and Personhood: God, Christ, and Salvation in John of Damascus. I've only touched on this here and there but I've been slowly incubating what I hope can be a continuation of/sequel to Ragtime and Sonata Forms called Perichoresis in Musical Time and Space. But I'm not just reading books on music theory and formal analysis.  I've been reading Jeremy Begbie and Thomas F Torrance and John of Damascus and I'll probably have to keep Maximus the Confessor in mind, too.  I'm reading Frank Burch Brown lately and finished Religious Aesthetics: A Theological Study of Making and Meaning.  

The short version is that as I've been reading I notice that while in musicology I tend to keep seeing repeats of battles dealing with race and class and ideologies such as capitalism and socialism, I'm finding that among ecumenical religious discussion on aesthetics there has been a concerted effort in post Vatican II Catholicism and among Protestants, too, to define and defend aesthetic pluralism in liturgical terms as a positive goal to pursue.  To put this a bit starkly, back when John Borstlap claimed in a comment at a review of one of his books (he's got one pending) that there's a tension between hierarchy and pluralism this tension may just exist in the imaginations of people who have not bothered to keep up with theological aesthetics among Christian scholarship in the last half century.  

Whether I cite Frank Burch Brown or Nicholas Wolterstorff or Jeremy Begbie or Maeve Louise Heaney Christians who have theological and musical training don't see any tension at all between Christian confessionalism and aesthetic pluralism.  It's among partisans of specific forms of art-religions that the boundaries between highbrow and lowbrow seem so impermeable.  To pick some non-random writers, maybe for the Ted Gioias and the Roger Scrutons of music publishing never shall highbrow and lowbrow meet, never shall the music of black Baptists and Pentecostals be reconciled with highbrow Anglicanism or French Catholicism ... but these tensions simply don't seem that serious to people who are, dare I say it, actually competent on the relevant theological and musicological scholarship of the last fifty years or so.  

Aesthetic pluralism is not only not the domain of relativistic commies (if you lean that way) or of people who don't believe in aesthetic standards (if you lean that way) or of secular progressives (if you lean that way).  If anything the history of the reception or rejection of jazz on either side of the Iron Curtain strongly suggests that neither communists nor capitalists nor democratic socialists managed to figured out what to make of jazz as popular song and dance.  Art for the sake of art dogmas hinge a lot on what counts as art, whereas among practicing and practical church musicians Thomas Andrew Dorsey was one of the people who helped "solve" the problem of whether Gospel blues could "work" in specific church contexts.  

I'm hoping to get to Jason Yust's book Organized Time: Rhythm, Tonality, and Form; James Hepokoski's A Sonata Theory Handbook; and Drew Nobile's Form as Harmony in Rock Music.  Long ago Leonard B Meyer proposed that integral serialism and related styles of music would not ultimately stick around and one of the reasons why was because:

MUSIC, THE ARTS, AND IDEAS

Leonard B. Meyer

Copyright (c) 1967. 1994 by The University of Chicago

ISBN 0-226-52143-5

 

The theories of statistical mechanics, from which some contemporary music theorists borrow their vocabulary and in terms of which they have sought to "explain" their music, were designed to deal with the realm of microscopic particles in which individual behavior is unpredictable. But this indeterminate world of subatomic phenomena is only part of the physical universe and of the universe of physics. The macroscopic world--the world of molecules and planets, of paramecia and people--is highly predictable. ... To fabricate a theory and a practice for an art addressed to macroscopically organized human beings--whose receptors and neurophysiological organization are designed to deal with a macroscopic world--by suggesting analogies to and using terms derived from a theory which was invented to account for the behavior of a subatomic part of the physical universe seems, to say the least, implausible.

 

The attempt to rationalize the use of chance--whether produced by total serialization or by aleatoric compositional procedures--is mistaken, not only because the universe of macrostates is not random, but because even the assertion that microstates are in principle indeterminate is inaccurate. (pages 255-256)

 

... 

It is, as we have seen a serious mistake to assume that the principles or "laws" governing the organization of one hierarchic level are necessarily the same as those of some other level. As a rule, the forces creating structure and organization do not remain the same--are not uniform, from one level to another. "The fallacy of reductionism" writes on biologist, "lies in assuming a one-one relationship between different levels of organization."  ... Similarly in the theory and analysis of music it is doubtful that the several different hierarchic levels are governed by the same syntactical and grammatical principles of organization. 

... 

Just as the forces governing the ways in which chemicals unite to form molecules are different from the forces involved in the organization of molecules into cells, so the ways in which tones combine to form motives are different from the ways in which motives are organized to create larger, more complex musical events. (page 258)

 

page 259 

...

The world is understandable, not because it is uniform and homogenous but because its rich variety can be organized into complex but functionally related structures.

So if, for instance, Jason Yust proposes that different levels of musical time operate independently of each other then Leonard Meyer proposed that as a reason integral serialism wouldn't have much popular appeal or long-term staying power beyond its small group of devotees back in the last century.  But if Yust proposes that concepts of musical time and space can somehow interpenetrate or interact with each other in a musical performance, well, there's a reason I have thrown out references to perichoresis and personhood in the ontological Trinity.  Maybe musicologists don't tend to go out of their way to read theologians talking about the implications of perichoretic discourse on the Father, Son and Spirit in Christian dogmatics but Torrance was not the only Christian theologian to highlight the reasons we could and should abandon the receptacle concept of time for confessional reasons a couple of generations before contemporary music theorists have proposed we abandon the parallel receptacle concept of musical time and space as we attempt to grapple with what was going on in 18th century music in starker and starker contrast to what 19th century theorists claimed about it.

Whether it's from "above" or "below" art-religion partisans seem to believe that there is a kind of impossible battle between the "logos" of highbrow and the "sarx" of lowbrow and that the two can never be reconciled.  The kinds of people who reflexively take those stances probably don't care about hypostatic union in Christian doctrine about the Incarnation of Christ.  They might also be the sorts of people who think Schleiermacher or Rudolf Otto are the baselines for any talk about the "spiritual" elements of Christianity--if so then, well, there's plenty of Swiss Reformed theologians from Zwingli through Emil Brunner and a few Puritans who would say those people should lay off the drugs or gain some basic literacy on dogmatics.  I could probably find a few Anglicans, Catholics and Orthodox and Pentecostals who would have similar thoughts.  Contra the late Roger Scruton as public philosopher, hundreds of millions of Christians would say that the mysteries of the faith to which rites, rituals and sacraments point are the primary thing, not the rituals within which a Scrutonian quasi-pantheistic ritualism might propound.  

... whether art-religion partisans fall into what Frank Burch Brown described as advocacy of negative transcendence, radical transcendence, proximate transcendence or immanent transcendence probably needs to wait for a whole separate blog post.  It's safe to say that for art-religion partisans there's not "usually" a radically apophatic notion of the transcendent.  Again, I'll probably have to save that for later.  By now I hope I have conveyed that among Christians who take theology, aesthetics and the arts seriously the alleged conflict between pluralism and confession can only exist for long in the minds of people who are, alas, probably too illiterate on two or more of those topics to have engaged in any study of the last sixty years or so of work.

But I do want to mention that while I am personally writing as a Christian within the Reformed and Anglican wing I don't want people to misunderstand what I mean when I talk about aesthetic pluralism and histories of efforts to synthesize, say, jazz and classical.  The late Nikolai Kapustin wrote a good set of preludes and fugues for piano but was not the least bit religious.  I'm planning to listen to Wadada Leo Smith's cycle of string quartets later this year and he's a jazz trumpeter whose religious convictions I don't actually know about yet.  

My larger point at this moment is to point out that many composers across styles and genres have been toiling away at fusions of classical and jazz and many of them may be unknown to you.  I am not sure classical guitarists can be confident that many people outside our scene know of the work of Dusan Bogdanovic.  I hope that changes because I like his music.  Roland Dyens died a few years ago and he had some interesting, and I think effective works amalgamating jazz and classical influences through his compositions for the guitar.  I admit I don't think it's coincidental that efforts to fuse jazz and classical vocabularies and formal processes have not come from pianists as much as non-pianist musicians when I think about the composers whose efforts, to my ears, have worked out. 

I don't know how long it will take to write Perichoresis in Musical Time and Space.  It may take years.  I surprised myself by blitzing through the writing of Ragtime and Sonata Forms in one week.  However it takes shape (and I grant it can be an "if", too, because life is unpredictable), I nevertheless hope that what I come up with will be of some use to people with interest in music theory, music history and efforts to successfully synthesize the vocabularies and possibilities of American vernacular musics with the syntactic scripts and developmental processes of galant music, regardless of whatever their personal metaphysical, political, economic, ethnic or other considerations may be.   To me the question is moot whether or not musicians can make sonata forms and fugues off of blues, ragtime, jazz, country and other American pop musical vocabularies.  The real question is not "if" that kind of thing can be done but "how" we can make such music in a practical way while providing a viable theoretical foundation upon which future generations of musicians can keep exploring.  That's the thing I hope I can continue to explore here at Wenatchee The Hatchet, give or take interruptions and digressions into the other various topics that have occupied my time since 2006.