Practical steps toward a blues-based approach to sonata forms, using single and double-themed variation form as a way to blur the boundaries between sonata form and variation technique with strategic use of V-IV chord movement

This is probably going to be the last post of 2024 and so it's going to be a relatively short and practical one and focused just on practical ways to develop an approach to sonata forms that draws upon ragtime and blues vocabularies, with an eye toward blurring the boundaries between sonata forms and continuous variation forms (single and double themes)

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.

a new appendix to Ragtime and Sonata Forms, some practical approaches to ragtime/sonata synthesis

Over the years I have written about my fondness for ragtime and my interest in synthesizing ragtime with 18^th century galant approaches to large-scale form.  I wrote Ragtime and Sonata Forms back in 2020.  Since that time I have read a fairly big pile of books discussing musical time and space; concepts of form; and scholarly reconsiderations and renegotiations of what theorists would call sonata forms.  It has become clearer among scholars over the last two centuries that the whole idea of “sonata form” and “sonata forms” was and is a post hoc description of a very flexible set of practices that were never as schematic or rigid as 19^th century theorists made them out to be. 

 

As Leonard Meyer put it, in the eighteenth century sonata movements were conceived of and written as a flexible set of scripts, but in the nineteenth century they became works written according to plans.  I was telling a friend of mine that this distinction between a sonata as a “script” and a sonata as a “plan” has profound implications.  You can go “off script” any time you want and get back on script.  If you change significant parts of your plan then you may just need a whole new plan.  I enjoy Haydn more than Mozart or Beethoven and I have a fondness for thinking of sonata forms (since the term and the heuristic is still useful and unavoidable now that we’ve had it for two centuries), so I have been thinking of ways to play with sonata forms in a way that treats sonata forms as flexible scripts.  I have also attempted to cross reference approaches to the “punctuation” of musical themes in ways that allow for establishing temporal-spatial correspondences between ragtime and sonata forms. 

 

Ironically I have been helped not just by reading music theory treatises by Jason Yust, Yoel Greenberg, James Hepokoski and L. Poundie Burstein, I have particularly benefited from reading Charles Twombly on John of Damascus; Thomas Torrance on Trinitarian dogmatics; Roger Scruton on the philosophy of music; and then Ferdia Stone-Davis and David Brown’s respective critiques of Scruton.  In other words I dove into theology and philosophy.  Torrance argued that we need to drop the Newtonian conception of time and space in light of patristic witness that time and space are not absolute but are relationally contingent and part of the created order. 

 

So when Jason Yust proposes that we think of musical time and space overlapping in multiple dimensions that just strikes me as a conceptual transposition of the kinds of distinctions that, when Thomas Aquinas reflected on the Trinity, were explicable as filiation, procession and spiration in intra-Trinitarian relationships.  In other words, Christian theology going back to the patristic era and medieval theologies from Aquinas and John of Damascus dispensed with a conception of time and space as some absolute “receptacle”.  L Poundie Burstein’s advice that we avoid getting too rigid in thinking about musical blocks of space and time as fixed “containers”.  Christian theologians agreed with that concern centuries ago and Thomas Torrance was overt in advising us to drop that conception of time and space in the last century.  

Ragtime and Sonata Forms, Part 1: Ragtime as Musical Ice Cream

1.     Ragtime as Musical Ice Cream

Ragtime and ice cream are intertwined, for better and worse, in American history.  I have found this to be the case at both a personal and a cultural level. 

I think I first heard ragtime at an ice cream parlor my dad took my brother and I to once in Portland, Oregon when I was a kid.  It was there that I remember hearing Scott Joplin’s music.   I had no words for the melodic and rhythmic vitality of Joplin’s music I heard at the age I was, but it made an immediate and positive impression on me. I asked who wrote the music.  My dad told me the music was written by Scott Joplin, one of America’s greatest musicians. 

Throughout my childhood there was another, more regular, reason I associated ragtime with ice cream.  I, like many other children in the 1980s, heard the strains of “The Entertainer” ringing out in chimes or bells when ice cream trucks would roll through the neighborhood.  To hear Scott Joplin’s music was to hear the visits of the ice cream truck on your street.

As I learned more about the history of ragtime it began to be clear that the link between ice cream and ragtime went back to the days of Scott Joplin. John Stillwell Stark was an ice cream vendor before starting up an instrument shop and, eventually, a music publishing company.  Stark’s advocacy for ragtime in general and the music of Scott Joplin in particular is the stuff of American musical history, but had Stark been a less successful ice cream vendor would he have ever had the resources get into the music business as an instrument vendor or music publisher?  Ice cream sales turned out to be the economic foundation for the publishing firm that gave us Scott Joplin’s music.  Ragtime, despite Scott Joplin’s most determined efforts, has been musical ice cream ever since.

Ragtime and Sonata Forms, Part 2: Arthur Weld's plea to combat musical "cholera"

2.     Arthur Weld’s plea to combat musical vulgarity, including rag-time and coon songs

In his book Everybody’s Doin’ It: Sex, Music and Dance in New York, 1840-1917, Dale Cockrell quotes briefly from a piece written by Arthur Weld in the The Etude. Cockrell makes reference to Weld on page 124 of his book, noting that Weld was a professor of music at Wisconsin Conservatory of Music. Cockrell only mentions Weld in passing in a chapter discussing the ways in which ragtime as a musical style and a dance style was viewed as an exemplar of racial mixing and of gay sexuality in New York in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  More significant for the purposes  of this project is Cockrell’s observation that many recognized ragtime first and foremost as dance music rather than the concert music for piano we tend to think of it as being here on the other side of the 1970s ragtime revival.

For my purposes quoting Weld’s piece in its entirety is necessary:

Ragtime and Sonata Forms, Part 3: A Case for Ragtime from Hiram Kelly Moderwell in 1915

3.     A Case for Ragtime from Hiram Kelly Moderwell in 1915

The arguments against ragtime as a genre of popular song and as instrumental music in the United States clearly failed.  Ragtime went on to become the foundational form of popular song in the United States and the rags of Scott Joplin and his associates found a place in the piano literature in formal piano instruction.  Had the opponents of ragtime in 1900 heard the directions popular song has taken in the last century, they would likely regard musical barbarism as having completely overtaken what is left of civilization. 

When the piano rags of Joplin can show up in a list of Dover scores in the second edition of John Borstlap’s The Classical Revolution the evolution of ragtime from vulgar popular song to canonized piano music might seem complete.  It now takes the work of a Dale Cockrell to remind us that ragtime was once a style of dance music that evolved in the brothels and dance halls of an underground network of sex industries. 

More than a century after the popular style swept across the United States, defenses of ragtime in its heyday can be easily forgotten, if ever known, and the defense made for ragtime by Hiram Kelley Moderwell from 1915 in The New Republic seems worth quoting in full to give readers a sense of what a defense of ragtime as the original and indisputably American contribution to then-contemporary musical life looked like.

Ragtime and Sonata Forms, Part 4: Adorno's "On Jazz" and his later polemics against popular music

4.     Adorno’s “On Jazz” and his later polemics against the popular music

It may seem impertinent to consult Adorno’s writings against jazz in a work called Ragtime and Sonata Forms.  This will, however, only seem to be the case for those who insist on a much firmer separation between ragtime and jazz then I think is historically defensible.  Yes, there are arguments that the shift from ragtime to jazz was a shift from 2/4 to 4/4 time, and there are also arguments that jazz introduced swing in a way that not everyone agrees existed in ragtime. 

Yet if we consider the scope and vitriol of Adorno’s arguments against jazz, whether its foursquare phraseology or, especially, his claim that jazz constituted a “false amalgam” of the march and salon music, we’ll find that the substance of Adorno’s polemic against jazz can be addressed as accurate or dubious by way of the music that preceded it.  Only the most pedantic scholastics would refuse to concede that ragtime is the trunk from which manifold popular American styles have grown.  It does not seem too strong a point to propose for the sake of this work that, whatever Adorno’s arguments against jazz were, can be taken back in time to address ragtime.  An argument for the compatibility of the musical vocabulary of ragtime with sonata forms can then be “brought forward” to encompass possibilities for jazz sonatas (as if no one on earth knew about, for instance, the piano sonatas of Nikolai Kapustin by now).

So, let’s get to Adorno on jazz.  As notorious as this essay is, it’s worth revisiting.

Ragtime and Sonata Forms, Part 5: Adorno's contrast between "light" and "serious" music ...

5.     Adorno’s contrast between light and serious music: organic development vs prefabricated building blocks for prefabricated feeling

Introduction to the Sociology of Music

Theodore W Adorno

Seabury Press

ISBN 0-8164-92662-2

pages 21-22

...

Conversely, as long as the objective spirit was not yet wholly planned and steered by administrative centers, the higher art would recall the extent to which its own principle involved injustices to the many. Time and again it felt the need of something else, of something that would resist the formative esthetic will and that might serve as the touchstone of that will-and so, whether unintentionally or intentionally, it would absorb elements of the lower music. Some of this shows in the old custom of parody, of setting spiritual texts to profane melodies. Bach did not shrink from borrowing from below even in his instrumental works, as in the Quodlibet of the "Goldberg Variations," and neither Haydn nor the Mozart of The Magic Flute or Beethoven would be conceivable without an interaction of what by then were separated spheres. The last instance of their reconciliation, utterly stylized and teetering as on a narrow mountain by pass, was The Magic Flute-an instant still mourned and longed for in such structures as Strauss and Hofmannsthal's Ariadne auf Naxos. There were times far into the nineteenth century when it was possible to write decent popular music. Its esthetic decay is as one with the irrevocable and irrelative dissociation of the two realms.

...

page 26

... The higher music's relation to its historical form is dialectical. It catches fire on those forms, melts them down, makes them vanish and return in vanishing. Popular music, on the other hand, uses the types as empty cans into which the material is pressed without interacting with the forms. Unrelated to the forms, the substance withers and at the same time belies the forms, which no longer serve for compositional organization. [emphasis added]

Ragtime and Sonata Forms, Part 6: Adorno on Types of Listener, popular music as mood altering drug

6.     Adorno on Types of Listeners, Popular Music as mood altering drug

We just saw in the last chapter that Adorno made reference to the “emotional listener”, the kind of person who listens to music as if it were a mood altering or mood stabilizing drug.  The emotional listener could be seen as a kind of contrast to the structural listener, someone who could discern musical qualities and also hear the structural processes in large-scale musical works.  The emotional listener was not at the lowest level in Adorno’s taxonomy of listening types but he had few kind words for the type:

Ragtime and Sonata Forms, Part 7: Adorno's legacy on aesthetics and popular music, by way of Roger Scruton

7.     Adorno’s legacy on aesthetics and popular music by way of Roger Scruton

We’re going to repeat a lot of material presented so far but there’s a reason to do so.  Adorno was catastrophically wrong in his verdict on jazz as a musical art but along the way he made arguments against popular song that, as we’ll see, have been preserved in the works of the anti-Marxist conservative philosopher Roger Scruton.  It may be a testament to the influence of Adorno in the philosophy of the aesthetics of music that Scruton took up so many of Adorno’s concepts even as he rejected Adorno’s Marxism and Adorno’s damning appraisal of jazz.

But first let’s get to a passage from Adorno we haven’t already quoted that may help establish what Adorno saw as a problem in the American concept of a “music appreciation” regime. Plus, as a mostly life-long Haydn fan I can’t resist quoting Adorno on how he was sure Haydn’s work was misunderstood and misrepresented in American contexts:

CURRENT OF MUSIC

Theodore W. Adorno

Polity Press

(c) 2009 by Polity Press

Introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4285-7

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4286-4(pb)

page 190

The allegation that Haydn "standardized" the sonata form, is a fatal blow to the life of musical forms. Standardization is a term applied to industrial mass production and not to works of art, but apparently the commentator is under the spell of the industrial age to such an extent that he does not even notice its inadequacy. Haydn crystallized the sonata form, not as a rigid standard, but as a highly dynamic framework responding to any impulse of the composer in the specific work he is writing. The standardized sonata form would cease to be a living form and would become nothing more than a schoolmaster's set of prescriptions. The real danger is such statements is that they promote the idea that it is the task of a composer to "make things easier", as if it were Haydn's merit that after him it was easier to compose; actually and fortunately, it became more difficult after Haydn to write symphonies. Musical development is not like gadgeteering. 

As long as the idea of making things easier prevails in musical education, no actual musical understanding can be expected to develop. Such understanding consists in the very spontaneity of the listener's response that is jeopardized by the feeling that everything has been settled for him by other people who have standardized the forms.

Ragtime and Sonata Forms, Part 8: Adorno's Philosophy of New Music and norms of musical cognition

8.     Philosophy of New Music and norms of musical cognition

PHILOSOPHY OF NEW MUSIC

Theodore Adorno

Copyright (c)2006 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor

ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-3666-2

ISBN-10: 0-8166-3666-4

page 31

... Music knows no natural law, and this fact accounts for the dubiousness of all psychology of music. In seeking to make the music of all ages invariably "understandable," the psychology of music presupposes an unchanging musical subject. This assumption is more closely related to that of the constancy of a natural material than the actual psychological differentiation would allow.  ...

... an ontological law is on no account to be attributed to the tonal material in itself, or to what has been filtered through the system of temperament. However, this is precisely what occurs in arguments that want to conclude, for instance--whether on the basis of the physiology of the ear or the relation of overtones--that the triad is the necessary and universal condition for any possible musical understanding and therefore that all music must be committed to it.  ...

Now what springs to mind for me, reading this passage again, is something Richard Taruskin pointed out in the work of the late Leonard B. Meyer in Cursed Questions.  Being an admirer of Meyer’s work myself it’s not hard to find the passage Taruskin quoted:

Ragtime and Sonata Forms, Part 9: Between forms of non-choice--Adorno's criticism of serialism and aleatory in his later writings, while still rejecting jazz (and rock) in his final work

9.     Between forms of non-choice: Adorno’s criticism of serialism and aleatory as techniques that obliterated the decision-making subject

When I read The Classical Revolution a few years ago I ended up moving from that book to what ended up being about half a dozen books by Adorno.  I eventually got to reading a few books by Roger Scruton, so I have made a point of reading a few books by Future Symphony Institute authors in the last few years.  One of the ironies of my reading has been discovering that Scruton and Borstlap have leveled charges against serialism and aleatory as musical styles that lack musical substance and expressive humanity that were, in sum, made half a century ago by none other than Theodore Adorno.

The irony of all of this, which I hope to demonstrate, is that the legacy of Adorno on aesthetics as a philosophical enterprise may live on a bit more in the work of Roger Scruton than in those who have appropriated ideas from the Frankfurt school in order to praise popular music as a new art music.  Now I think that, ultimately, Adorno was spectacularly wrong in a number of his assertions about the exhaustion of tonality and the non-art status of jazz but I don't want to get into all of that.  

But another irony is that the criticisms Borstlap and Scruton made about the work of Stockhausen and Boulez were put in an even more vitriolic form half a century ago by ... Adorno.

Ragtime and Sonata Forms, Part 10: Finding a 21st century future for ragtime in 18th century composition manuals with the help of Elaine Sisman

10.     Finding a 21^st century future for ragtime in 18^th century composition manuals

In her monograph Haydn and the Classical Variation, Elaine R Sisman opened with observations about how variation technique and variation as a form fell into disrepute in the nineteenth century.  Virtuoso ornamental variation came to be seen as trivial for a variety of reasons Sisman enumerated in the first few pages of her book: 1) eighteenth century variations were seen as borrowing a theme and keeping that theme more or less in full view; 2) variation form at the time consisted of a sequence of repeated episodic ornamental variations that were seen as trivial according to the ideologies of organicism and character, contrapuntal or transformational variation; 3) the sheer number of virtuoso variation forms produced between 1790 and 1840 led to a glut that, here in 2020 might be likened to a musical equivalent of too many shallow, obvious superhero movies.

Sisman’s summary is literally on pages 1 and 2 of her book, which is a fantastic account of Haydn’s handling of variation technique and variation form.  I believe that a future for ragtime can be found in studying Haydn rather than attempting to find the dance genre wanting in light of Romantic era aesthetics and ideologies.  This is not “just” because I personally admire and enjoy the works of Haydn more than Beethoven but also because I believe that the formal, aesthetic and even technical challenges Haydn dealt with in his time are more germane to the potential fusion of ragtime as a style with the formal possibilities of sonata forms.

Ragtime and Sonata Forms, Part 11: Ragging the Classics ... with the music of Giuliani and Sor

11.     Ragging the Classics, with some help from the music of Mauro Giuliani and Fernando Sor

Ragtime: A Musical and Cultural History

Edward A Berlin

University of California Press

Copyright 1980, 2002 by Edward A Berlin

ISBN: 978-1-5040-30649-9

At Location 1521 and Location 1573, Edward Berlin noted that the musical game of “ragging the classics” dated back to the beginnings of the ragtime era.  The basic game was to translate an older established classical work into the new popular style.  Particularly popular for this musical game were works by Mendelssohn, although works by Chopin, Liszt and Rachmaninoff were also given a “ragging the classics” treatment. 

Ragtime and Sonata Forms, Part 12: Adorno's modes of cognition, George Rochberg on time-space and space-time

12.     Adorno's modes of cognition, George Rochberg on time-space and space-time

Adorno categories of the dynamic-expressive and rhythmical-spatial listener are, obviously, not the only ways we can think about how people think about music.  The American composer George Rochberg approximated Adorno’s categories in an essay published in 1963. Since it’s easier to let Rochberg explain Rochberg:

THE AESTHETICS OF SURVIVAL: A COMPOSER'S VIEW OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY MUSIC

GEORGE ROCHBERG

Copyright (c) by The University of Michigan 1984

ISBN 0-472-10037-8

The Concepts of Musical Time and Space  (1963)

pages 97-98

... For it must follow from the two terms which comprise the conjunction that only two orders are possible: time-space and space-time. This type of verbal logic is no idle exercise, for it is completely corroborated, as we shall see, by the evolution of music, particularly twentieth-century music. The two conjunctions, time-space and space-time, may be viewed as prototypes of fundamental significance. As prototypes, they will serve as the basis for penetrating structural relationships which resist traditional approaches. These prototypes will permit us to comprehend structural relationships which define totally different types of music and, at the same time, provide us with insights into the reasons for the crisis which has driven the audience of our own time from the music composed contemporaneously with it--a problem which cannot be taken lightly.

Until the twentieth-century, Western music was rooted in one prototype--time-space.  ...

page 100

To appreciate fully the essential difference between time-space and space-time it becomes necessary to discuss first "direction in music." Essentially, direction in music is the creation of an integral order which is perceived or sensed as structural goal or purpose. This is to say that when a composer creates an order in his music which defines its own form as it emerges in concrete sound, one can sense its direction, or, as we say, "we know where it is going." Direction in music derives from a clear perception of, and therefore corresponds to, the clear presentation of temporal and spatial points of departure and movement or passage en route to points of arrival or destination. The sense of direction coincides with, or runs parallel to, the actual growth process of the music and the order in which the growth process occurs. The classical music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven offers us a prime example of the growth process of such an integral order in which structural direction is dependent on two essential conditions: periodicity of rhythmic motion and tonality.  By their very nature, both are essentially directional ...

I’ll pause in quoting Rochberg to note that for those familiar with his story, 1963 as still before the composer’s repudiation of twelve-tone and serial techniques, not after.  Rochberg was, so to speak, still on Adorno’s side of the atonality/tonality divide in twentieth century aesthetics of music, but not for long.  

Ragtime and Sonata Forms, Part 13: George Rochberg on pluralism and questions of style

13.     Rochberg on pluralism and questions of style

The story of how Rochberg rejected serialism in the aftermath of his son’s death is just well known enough that I don’t wish to recite in detail.  That Rochberg’s ars combinatoria approach is one of a number of potential pathways to a synthesis of ragtime and sonata form is simply a proposal at the level of theory.  Joplin did not need a Rochberg to write the long since lost piano concerto.  Thanks to the influence of thinkers like Adorno, however, Rochberg’s formal rejection of serialism and move toward a polystylistic juxtaposition of tonal and atonal musical idioms fortuitously overlapped with the ragtime revival. 

Rochberg was rejecting the American academic standard for serious composition during the period in which the most influential popular style in the history of American music was being revived not within the realms of pop music but by classical musicians. If as Edward Berlin and others have noted, the ragtime revival coming at the behest of classical musicians may have skewed our understanding of ragtime toward the solo piano literature of the Joplin school, a fringe benefit, noted with acid humor by Tom Wolfe in the introduction, was that in the 1970s there were American compositions that had actual tunes that could be included in academic concert life at a time when serialism still held sway. 

Ragtime and Sonata Forms, Part 14: Leonard Meyer on pluralism, styles, and the ideologies of Romanticism in the late 20th century

14.     Leonard B. Meyer on pluralism, styles, and the ideologies of Romanticism in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries

“Pluralism” can be a cause for celebration or lament depending on who is using the term, how they’re defining the term, and what they believe it means for “us”.  For those who regard pluralism in any form as an attack on Western values it is a threat. Those who regard pluralism as an outworking of the best ideals of Western thought pluralism can see it as a goal to strive for.  Leonard B. Meyer, observing the mid-twentieth century musical world around him, concluded that we collectively found ourselves in a polystylistic steady state, one in which no one style of art would be THE style:

MUSIC, THE ARTS, AND IDEAS

Leonard B. Meyer

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

ISBN 0-226-52143-5

pages 171-172

But suppose the paradigm which posits cumulative change and the discovery of a common style is no longer pertinent and viable? Perhaps none of the "revolutions" will be definitive; then astonishment would disappear. Suppose, too, that there are no "imperatives" of the sort that Boulez assumes (Whose imperatives? What is "our time" but the totality of actions, including art works, that take place in it?), and, consequently, that no style is necessarily superfluous. Suppose, in short, that the present pluralism of coexisting styles (each with its particular premises and even its attendant ideology) represents not an anomalous, transient state of affairs, but a relatively stable and enduring one.

I am suggesting not only that such a hypothesis is neither theoretically absurd no empirically impossible but that, once it is adopted, seemingly incompatible pieces of the puzzling present begins to form an intelligible pattern. If our time appears to be one of "crisis," it does so largely because we have misunderstood the present situation and its possible consequences. Because a past paradigm has led us to expect a monolithic, all-encompassing style, the cultural situation has seemed bizarre and perplexing. The "crisis" dissolves when the possibility of a continuing stylistic coexistence is recognized and the delights of diversity are admitted. The question then becomes not is this style going to be THE STYLE, but is this particular work well-made, challenging, and enjoyable.

To translate this into theological terms, if the philosophy of history that had guided European arts from the seventeenth through early twentieth centuries had been predicated on a kind of postmillennialist optimism that “civilization” would spread throughout the world, the crisis of “pluralism” was discovering that postmillennialism got us into not one but to World Wars and that the sense of European entitlement that emerged from millenarian philosophies of history had been used to justify a whole lot of imperialism.  This is, in 2020, not even a particularly scandalous observation. 

Meyer made the following prediction:

Ragtime and Sonata Forms, Part 15: Leonard B. Meyer on the shift from the 18th to 19th C from seeing sonatas as "scripts" to seeing sonatas as "plans"

15.     Leonard B. Meyer on the shift from the 18^th to 19^th centuries of seeing sonatas as patterned on scripts vs developed by plans

In addition to being somewhat humorless, and committed to a philosophy of organicism in “how things are made”, Romantic music was very committed to plans.  The difference between following a script and having a plan is not at all subtle and Meyer only touches upon those differences.  As I’ve done before, I’ll quote him at some length:

Ragtime and Sonata Forms, Part 16: Are we REALLY "done" with the Romantic era? Leonard Meyer and Raymond Knapp on a paradox of Romanticist ideology and pop music

16.     Are we actually “done” with the Romantic era?:

Meyer on the advent and replication of novelty

Raymond Knapp on the German Idealism of pop music criticism

Meyer’s contention that we are still living in the Romantic era in terms of its ideologies of art can be debated but I’m not debating those points.  If anything I think Meyer was right to point out all the ways our own era is still a continuation of the Romantic era.

Meyer articulated what Richard Taruskin has described as a “race to the patent office” form of modernism.  Meyer proposed that we have become so beholden to innovation we have overlooked other important aspects of thinking about the arts.

Ragtime and Sonata Forms, Part 17: William Caplin's Classical Forms--building blocks of themes, possible application toward Joplin's "The Entertainer"

17.       William Caplin’s Classical Forms--the building blocks of themes in the eighteenth century and possible application toward Scott Joplin’s themes in “The Entertainer”

At long last we’re ready to discuss formal analytical literature that deals with sonata forms.  In the last few decades there has been a renewed interest in formal analysis in American music theory scholarship.  William E. Caplin’s work has been useful to me for thinking through music at the nuts and bolts levels.  His work has dealt with music at the phrase level and the theme level.  If you have not read his work I strongly recommend you read it.  If your background is mainly popular music rather than classical music Caplin’s work will nevertheless be useful to you.  If we who have enjoyed pop songs and have thought in terms of verse, pre-chorus, chorus, bridge and the like feel that classical music from, say, the eighteenth century is a bit opaque, do not fear.  Caplin devotes a big chunk of his book on classical forms to what he calls “tight-knit” themes. These are themes that can be examined at the level of the sentence, with a presentation phrase and a continuation phrase; the period, with an antecedent phrase and a consequent phrase; as well as small ternary and binary forms.  Caplin deals with simple theems, hybrid themes and compound themes in the first 90 pages of his work.