between sonata form(s) and double variation, a potential approach to creating sonatas based on American vernacular styles (a new addition to Ragtime and Sonata Forms)

This gets abstract and theoretical from the get-go.  If you haven't already read the rest of Ragtime and Sonata Forms you may get the core idea of this essay but not necessarily get how everything in this essay has been a continuation of the earlier project.  You can read it after the break.

It is practical in 2024 for a guitarist to compose a sonata form made of slide guitar riffs inspired by Pentecostal Gospel blues and camp meeting traditions rather than 18^th century European galant topics or schemas.   At this point Gospel blues is roughly a century old and slide guitar dates back to at least the innovations of Joseph Kekuku in the 1880s. As for avant garde guitar techniques in the European concert tradition Maurice Ohana and others have made technical demands moot.  So from both the blues tradition in the United States and the mid 20^th century European avant garde the technical and physical demands of writing a slide guitar sonata are purely pedestrian concerns; a good deal of discipline and study is required but there’s nothing the least bit inconceivable about writing a slide guitar blues sonata.

By contrast, music theory and analysis could give the impression that such a musical work is inconceivable on aesthetic or philosophical grounds.  The double helix of music theory and analysis has generally been retrospective in focus and post hoc in methodologies. This is not a particularly debatable point and it’s pedestrian as an axiom. When people read music theory and write about music theory there is often an after-the-fact aspect to it.  We draw upon theories to explain music we already like.  The legacy of wielding theory to write new music has had a spotty history since Schoenberg so the prospect of deploying contemporary music theory toward the goal of writing sonata forms drawn entirely from North American vernacular (pop) musical styles and vocabularies might seem risky.  It’s not and the reward of developing a renewed synergistic relationship between “pop” and “classical” is more feasible in the guitar traditions than it probably would be for, say, a cellist.

Contemporary discussions in the wake of Philip Ewell’s writings about music theory, music education and racial legacies have tended to revolve around retrospective introspection and etiological narratives.  These have their value and place in scholarship but, I submit that one of the opportunities of our day can be overlooked if we focus too much on just the past as the past.  Part of making music theory more available and useful for everyone would include demonstrating how we can use the theoretical observations and breakthroughs of our time to tackle in writing music (now) that addresses the failures of imagination from earlier epochs of theory and analysis. I suggest that we can easily conceive of a blues-based approach to sonata by drawing upon the recent work of James Hepokoski, Warren Darcy, Yoel Greenberg, L Poundie Burstein, Drew Nobile, Jason Yust and Elaine Sisman. The basic way to create a sonata based on blues or rock idioms would be to find ways to blur the conceptual and formal boundaries between some kind of sonata form and double variation form. 

Elements of Sonata Theory by James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy was published in 2006 and has a variety of elements that can be used to describe types of sonatas.  At the outset I want to say that the thing I have found most useful about the book is the flexibility Elements offers to composers who want to play with concepts of form. While each of the elements in Elements is useful in itself what is most useful about them collectively is that any of them, depending on what your analytical aims may be, are disposable. It is this flexibility applied to composition that makes Elements interesting to me when I compose music.  Every element in Elements of Sonata Theory is potentially disposable.

Theories of sonata form(s) have a history of being both top-down and restrictive.  A sonata is expected to have X, Y and Z or else it is not really a sonata. Elements does not have that restrictive view of the form, although readers may get that impression or, worse, bring that mindset to their reading of the book.

A more recent proposal that explicitly says two of three traits is enough to make for a sonata was made by Yoel Greenberg’s How Sonata Forms: A Bottom-Up Approach to Musical Form. Greenberg proposed that a sonata can have two of three of the following to be called a sonata form: 1) a medial repeat (traditional designated as a repeating exposition in many books); 2) a double return (the conventional return of Theme 1 in the tonic key in a recapitulation; and 3) end rhyme, which means that Theme 2 and associated material returns in the recapitulation zone in the tonic key. Greenberg’s proposal was that any one of these two traits could be eliminated and you could still call a movement a sonata form but if you remove any two of these three then you no longer have a sonata form.

The elements I retain or abandon from approaches to sonata forms can vary depending on what kind of musical vocabulary I want to use.  If I wanted to write a sonata form that is for a work for solo guitar and uses bottleneck technique, for instance, I might have to abandon quite a few of the “expected” or “textbook” elements of a sonata form.  The question, in that case, would not be how many textbook elements of a prescribed sonata form do I have to keep but what is the bare minimum number of elements from Elements of Sonata Theory, for instance, that I could retain and still have a sonata form.  I’m proposing that we not just build up from Yoel Greenberg’s bottom-up approach but to also take the most minimalist approach possible. In terms of Elements of Sonata Theory the two minimal elements are: 1) the five types as general outlines of potential sonata forms and 2) the concept of rotation.

Hepokoski and Darcy described five basic types of sonata forms as follows:

Type 1 used to be called a sonatina or it can be thought of as a sonata that has an exposition and a recapitulation but little-to-no development section

Type 2 features the return of Theme 2 (and often Theme 3 where present) but with no return of Theme 1 in the recapitulation.  Chopin’s B flat minor piano sonata is probably the most famous example of such a sonata form but the Type 2 sonata form was fairly common in early 19^th century guitar sonatas composed by Simon Molitor, Wenzel Thomas Matiegka and others

Type 3 is the textbook sonata most people were taught.  There are two themes in two keys in the exposition; they get subjected to development in the development section; and then everything returns more or less in the same order in the recapitulation and all in the tonic key

Type 4 refers to all and any varieties of sonata rondo fusions

Type 5 refers to concerti formatted sonatas

Now across all five types there is a concept called “rotation” (henceforth without quotes).  In a rotation Theme 1 will appear and then Theme 2 appears and, where applicable Theme 3.  As defined by Hepokoski and Darcy what makes a rotation a rotation is the order in which the themes are presented and the re-presented across each subsequent rotation.  An exposition will have a rotation, a development will have a rotation (or a half rotation but we’ll avoid getting into that for the moment); and the recapitulation will generally have a rotation (although in the Type 2 the omission of Theme 1 is held to be compensated for by the fact that Theme 1’s are often developed in the development section, the main reason Type 2 sonatas are described as “double rotation” sonata forms.

Type 1 and Type 2 are considered double rotational forms because the themes appear twice in the order in which they are initially presented.  Types 3 through 5 are more likely to be triple rotational because Theme 1 and 2 will appear in the exposition, development and recapitulation sections of those sonata forms, or types.  This is most typical of Type 3 sonata forms.

I have been thinking lately about how much work the concept of rotation actually does in defining sonata forms on the one hand, and of how it may be possible to strip an approach to sonata form down to just the concept of rotation on the other. I am not going to try to get into the details of full rotational or half rotational development sections.  It’s enough to establish that in Hepokoski and Darcy’s approach the exposition and recapitulation normally present Theme 1 and Theme 2 (and sometimes Theme 3) in the order in which they initially appear.  If they appear in XYZ order in the exposition then the expectation is that they will appear in XYZ order in the recapitulation even if they don’t appear in that order in the development; that said Hepokoski and Darcy pointed out that XYZ would normally also be the order in which themes appear in the development section, too.

Now it as at this point I’m going to interrupt my discussion of Hepokoski and Darcy’s work to introduce some ideas from Drew Nobile’s Form as Harmony in Rock Music. Nobile differentiated between a wide variety of song forms in his book and he used the concept of a “functional circuit” to describe what a verse-chorus module does in a song; what a verse prechorus chorus module does, and what other kinds of modules do in terms of a nexus of harmony and rhythm. I would suggest that the key insight from Nobile’s work is to establish that each song has run its course after two functional circuits have been traversed, give or take any interruptions by way of bridges or solo breaks.  If rock can be defined as having recursive functional circuits then a practical application of this insight would be to delineate a Theme 1 and a Theme 2 in a potential rock/blues sonata form by way of making themes with contrasting functional circuits.  The contrast doesn’t have to be particularly great, the contrast just has to be there.

More practically, the possibilities of a rock or blues sonata form may depend on dispensing elements in sonata forms that simply aren’t necessary.  First and foremost among dispensable elements about be modulating transitions.  After all, if we’re working with a blues-derived approach to harmony then any potential transitional passages we might want to write are best written into alternate ending passages within Theme 1 or Theme 2.  Let’s say we begin with a G blues Theme 1.  All that’s needed to create a transition to a B flat major or B flat blues pitch zone would be to do the simple, obvious thing and sit on an F major chord for at least one measure.  That’s it.  When the time comes around in a recapitulation zone to have a Theme 2 come back in the tonic key then all that is required is to have Theme 1 end with a conventional half-cadence gesture, any kind of V chord or, really, a deceptive cadence from F back up to G could get the job done, too.

Alert readers may have picked up that I have just dispensed with another element in Elements of Sonata Theory, the idea that themes have to end with authentic cadences. My basis for making this particular decision comes from reading L Poundie Burstein’s Journeys Through Galant Expositions. Burstein pointed out that it’s fairly common in galant sonata expositions for themes to end on half cadences rather than authentic cadences. I don’t wish to get into the weeds of formal analysis of specific pieces but since Wenzel Thomas Matiegka is one of my favorite early 19^th century guitarist composers I’d like to point out that a case can be made that his central slow movement can be described as having a sonata exposition in which Theme 2 ends on a half cadence in C major and the development begins with Theme 1 appearing in C major. All that is necessary for the purpose of my experiment here is to say that the sonata exposition doesn’t need to have an expositional essential closure.  This is a point that, if memory serves, Hepokoski and Darcy grant. 

Particularly if we wanted to write a rock or blues based sonata the last thing we would want to do is provide a sense of formal, harmonic, rhythmic or tonal closure.  Instead we would want the various elements of musical time and space to keep pushing things forward.  Jason Yust’s Organized Time is a work I recommend for detailed analyses of the ways composers have experimented with subverting formal closure in one element even though they affirm formal closure in other elements within a musical work. Having said that, let me get back to my earlier point about how transitions in a sonata form are dispensable.

In slow sonata forms, for instance, we read (and hear) that Mozart often dispensed with transitions.  We can find examples of sonatinas of “Type 1” sonatas in Italian overtures where themes get exposition and recapitulation presentations without development.

But the thing I have been thinking about lately is that if we distill a sonata form down to the concept of rotation and eliminate separate transitional passages, then wouldn’t this highlight a potential conceptual problem?  What do I mean by that?  Well, to try to put it as simply as possible, if rotation is what really defines the exposition, development and recapitulation of a sonata form and we’re talking about a two-themed sonata then if we have an exposition where Theme 1 is in G minor and Theme 2 is in B flat major couldn’t a sonata form of any kind end up seeming similar to double variation form?

That seems like a simple and obvious possibility.  If we dispense with separate passages that accomplish modulations in the exposition that would, often, be needless in the recapitulation, and stick with writing themes that move one to the other, our potential sonata form could turn out to be simply a double variation form of some kind.  What would make it a sonata form?

That would probably have to be determined on the basis of what a composer chooses to do with the materials.  Variation techniques applied to variations don’t automatically imply variation form.  Elaine Sisman wrote an entire book on Haydn’s approach to variation technique and she pointed out that over the course of his career Haydn found ways to incorporate variation technique(s) into all of his forms. A monothematic sonata form could be thought of as a kind of super-variation form that draws upon a single theme, for instance. What can separate a double variation form from a sonata form could be something as simple as choosing to alter the thematic materials in a way that doesn’t involve ornamental figuration.  When Rachmaninov inverts a theme to present it as a variation that makes for a fun variation. If the inverted themes comes back after a prime/right-side up form of the theme appears then the concept of rotation has just been introduced.

Now there is another way to establish a distinction between a double variation form and a sonata form in which Themes 1 and 2 have no intervening transition, this would be in a case where across the development section neither Theme 1 or Theme 2 are allowed to fully complete their respective functional circuits. Something can be done that curtails or extends the functional circuit of Theme 1.  Something could be done to alter materials in Theme 2.  It could be anything, really, that a composer chooses to do.  The overall point is that the difference between a sonata development and a double variation form would be in the central variations where, for whatever reasons, Themes 1 and 2 are not allowed to reach the closure or arrival points that became expected in their expositional presentations. 

In a recapitulation there would be no need for a literal return of what was presented in the exposition. If Theme 1 were presented in the treble clef in the exposition it could appear in a bass register when it returns in the recapitulation. Theme 1 could have different figuration or Theme 2 could have a change of mode.  The process of variation could continue within and across the recapitulation zone.

I suggest that a potentially successful blues or rock (or Gospel) based approach to a sonata form will probably benefit from developing an approach to sonata form(s) that dispenses with every element that Is too galant in favor of only those elements that could allow for a sonata form that could be construed as a double variation form and, perhaps, not even sound like a “real” sonata form at all. But a real sonata form it would still be, replete with an exposition, a development, and a recapitulation.  The theoretical and conceptual resources have been available for years in North American musical theory, all that is seemingly wanting at this point is for composers to just go write blues and rock based sonata forms and explore possibilities.