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)

Drawing on Jason Yust and Drew Nobile to explore rock and ragtime sonata possibilities

Ethan Hein has a new post up about hypermeter and though I’m not foremost among Beatles’ fans I liked his explication of hypermeter in their songs.  In the post he mentions Jason Yust’s Organized Time.  Something Yust mentions early in his book is that though he drew up Schenkerian categories one of his chief criticisms of the Schenkerian tradition is its failure to deal with rhythm and if a theory fails to develop an adequate account of rhythm then, to put it very sharply indeed, how is it really ultimately very useful for an art that is about organizing time and space?  It is here that I interject that there’s good reason Augustine of Hippo decided to start De Musica with the books on rhythm before he ever got around to discussing melody or harmony.  In fact he never moved beyond the treatment of rhythm and never finished De Musica.

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.  

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.  

a brief observation about Ferdinand Rebay's handling of sonata form, ending on a dominant pedal point isn't your only option

At the risk of writing a merely axiomatic observation, going through sonata forms composed by Ferdinand Rebay (an Austrian composer whose music for guitar has been getting scholarly attention in the last decade), I am noticing that he ended his development sections in submediant keys.

The take-away from that is that while you might have been taught that the way to end a development section is to get to the dominant of your tonic key and set up a half-cadence effect that drives firmly to the arrival of the tonic chord in the tonic key, there have been other options.  In a minor key sonata you could have a firm cadence in some key that isn't the tonic (like the mediant, for instance) that still lets you shift to the tonic key--ending a development on a gentle D major chord before switching to B minor for the start of the recapitulation is possible.  To invoke Leonard Meyer on sonata forms there are syntactic as well as statistical ways of formulating a structural climax for a sonata form. 

The "perfection" of how Mozart and Beethoven handled what scholars have called sonata forms can be over-rated (I've been on record as being far more a fan of Haydn than I am of Beethoven and I'm more a fan of Beethoven than Mozart, but find I enjoy music by Clementi and Hummel more than Mozart, which I find is a semi-heretical stance to take that Kyle Gann's already noted). But it's worth pointing out that there's nothing "wrong" with the textbook approach to sonata forms, the issue is that, particularly since Hepokoski and Darcy laid out the five types of sonata forms as flexible scripts, there are way more options for composing sonata forms than you might ever run into in an undergraduate music survey course.