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Sonata Theory and Dialogic Form
- Leuven University Press
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7 1 S o n a t a T h e o r y a n d D i a l o g i c F o r m Sonata Theory and Dialogic Form James Hepokoski The analytical procedure that we call Sonata Theory rethinks several postulates of traditional music analysis.1 While it adopts the precision-language of current music theory, its reprocessing of core analytical issues is also informed by broader work in literary criticism and philosophy: genre theory, phenomenological and reader-response theory, hermeneutics, and others. The result blends close analytical description with the larger perspectives of continental criticism. While I cannot lay out the system or even a sufficient number of its essential concepts in any brief essay, I can at least illustrate a few of its central modes of thinking. The most basic question at stake when we deal with our own concretizations of musical structure or when we seek to build systems of formal classification is: what is ‘form’ itself? What might we mean, on a small scale, when we say that a certain phrase of music is a period or a sentence or (in William E. Caplin’s terms) is a hybrid between the two? On a larger scale, what do we mean when we say that a work is in a certain form (like sonata form, rondo form, and so on)? How one constructs an answer to such issues determines how one approaches formally any piece of music. It is at this fundamental level that Sonata Theory proposes a new orientation. InwhatfollowsIsingleouttwoofitsbasicprinciples.First,Inotethat perceptions of form are as much a collaborative enterprise of the listener or analyst as they are of the composer. And second, I suggest that grasping the full range of an implicit musical form is most essentially a task of reconstructing a processual dialogue between any individual work (or section thereof) and the charged network of generic norms, guidelines, possibilities, expectations, and limits provided by the implied genre at hand. This is ‘dialogic form:’ form in dialogue with historically condi- 7 2 J a m e s H e p o k o s k i tioned compositional options. From today’s standpoint these are earlier periods’ now-eclipsed horizons of expectations that we are obliged to recover through sensitive and patient reconstruction. Dialogic form stands in sharp distinction to two other, more traditional categories of formal description. One of these (to use Mark Evan Bonds’s terminology) is ‘conformational form:’ form understood as conforming to a model. (That is emphatically not the approach of Sonata Theory, which, with its interest in formal deformations, does not insist on any necessity to ‘conform .’) The other is ‘generative form:’ the conviction that form is generated primarily from the developing motivic processes or contrapuntal work inlaid uniquely into the piece.2 Of the two categories, generative form has been far more in the ascendancy in the past half-century, but even while aspects of its method are appealing and relevant, that category , too, especially when embraced as an analytical dogma to the exclusion of other factors, differs from the way that we construe form.3 The Sonata-Theory method proposes that the form of any individual composition is neither wholly contained nor self-defined by the acoustic happenings within that piece alone. Even while agreeing that our historically informed recognition of varied recurrences of culturally sanctioned, flexible patterns within single musical works is crucially important as a first step in analysis (one should not mistake a straightforward minuet -and-trioforatheme-and-variations,adevelopmentforarecapitulation, a sentence for a period), this concept insists that our understanding of form must not be limited to that. Form is not exclusively a property of the individual piece, an attribute to be uncovered once and for all by the analyst as a substantive thing, nor it is only an abstract shape or ad hoc design to be charted or culled from the work’s audible surface—a mere set of descriptive data (however accurate), a linear massing of statistics, a graph. Instead, the deeper sense of form with which we are concerned here is somethingtobeproduced—anengagedactofunderstanding—througha dialogue with an intricate and subtle network of piece-appropriate norms and guidelines (rules of the game) both for constructing compositions (the concern of the composer) and then for grasping how the composer was likely to have wished us to construe what he or she accomplished in the individual piece under consideration. Listeners also create dialogic form in their own...