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1 4 6 J a m e s H e p o k o s k i Comments on James Webster’s Essay “Formenlehre in Theory and Practice” James Hepokoski James Webster’s outline of the issues surrounding the concept of Formenlehre and its recent revivals has much to commend it, and he brings both a generous wealth of experience and a great deal of common sense to the table in his discussion. There is much in this essay—particularly his sensitive overview in its initial pages—with which I agree. What will interest the reader here, however, is not a recounting of my many areas of support for Webster’s points but rather a look at those portions of the essay for which the Sonata-Theory analytical style would offer differing views. And even here (within a limited space for reply) I shall have no opportunity to elaborate my own conviction that ‘Toveyan ’-based approaches, which in their ringing declarations were once so influential within English-language analysis, are both inadequate to the tasks at hand and, by now, outdated. Similarly, I shall not enter here into the broader question of how expositional ‘closing themes’ might properly be identified and grasped, since that matter, replete with often-overlooked nuances and multiple caveats, is dealt with and fully theorized in the Elements of Sonata Theory.1 Instead, I turn briefly to issues raised in the central portion of Webster ’s essay, namely the utility of analytical multivalence as demonstrated here—the linear charting of various domains within an individual composition, in part to note their aspects of ‘combination’ with each other, including their temporal congruence or incongruence as the piece unfolds. One obvious advantage of this approach is that it directs our attention toward textural and thematic features that some earlier styles of analysis had sidelined. This is a concern that Sonata Theory shares. So far as it goes, Webster’s multivalent procedure is unexceptionable: it produces a linear set of data, in this case inflected with such Toveyan categories as musical “paragraphs” or first and second “groups.” But in practice these charts, accurate as they might be, tell us little that was not obvious in the first place (forte here, piano there, threatening here, buffa there, module c here, module d there, and so on). In the end, without a 1 4 7 C o m m e n t s o n J a m e s W e b s t e r ’ s E s s a y conceptual or hermeneutic ‘theory’ behind them to organize their interpretation into a coherent statement (not at all a ‘reductive unity’)—or even to encourage them into a deeper, if riskier, reading—this ‘method’ falls short both in its contentment merely to map out these scattered parameters (a first step advanced, it seems, as a near-final one) and in its subsequent reluctance to harness the data into a more trenchant interpretation of the piece at hand. In the end, one is apparently to be content to say only that within this or that piece the real formal process (‘the form’) in play “often remains mysterious,” somehow “necessarily” emerging, though in a way not only beyond our ken but also beyond any strong encouragement toward further speculation, from “[T]he temporal patterns that arise in the various domains” [>129]. Thus Webster’s final claim about Op. 10, No. 3, i amounts to little more than what an initial pass-through should tell us at once: “[T]he massive medial cadence in m. 53 makes sense after all: it establishes the first half of the exposition as both harmonically and gesturally analogous to the second” [>134]. In the Jupiter symphony, what we ultimately learn is that the “movement from ‘architectonic’ construction in the first group and transition, in which all the parameters are in sync, through a second group that is demonstratively ‘out of joint,’ to an eventual return to congruence at the end, seems to me the overriding formal principle governing the exposition as a whole” [>137]. In each case, noting a shape or set of conditions within the “paragraphs” of the acoustic surface seems to be taken as a sufficient explanation of the formal idea that underpins the composition. But these are not yet compellingly formal ideas at all, much less any “overriding formal principle”: they are little more than descriptions of what one finds on the surface. They remain underinterpreted data. Bracketed out are the ‘why?’ and...

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