Musical Form, Forms & Formenlehre: Three Methodological Reflections (review)

The Sixth European Music Analysis Conference (EuroMAC), held in Freiburg, Germany in 2007, may turn out to have been a watershed in American music theory. The paradox is only apparent: among the most active current research programs in the United States is the revival of Formenlehre in the writings of James Webster, William Caplin, and James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, and Formenlehre, after all, is the "most 'German' of . . . theory topics" (as Ludwig Holtmeier puts it in his introduction to the volume under review, p. 8). The EuroMAC conference featured Caplin, Hepokoski, and Webster in a plenary session organized by Pieter Bergé and moderated by Poundie Burstein. The revised position papers, together with responses and rebuttals, are now available under the collective title Musical Form, Forms & Formenlehre.

Caplin's contribution, the volume's first, addresses the most obvious open question left by his treatise Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998)—namely, "What are Formal Functions?" The notion is borrowed from Arnold Schoenberg and his student Erwin Ratz. In Caplin's formulation, "formal function" has to do with the capacity of a musical work's "constituent time-spans . . . to express their own location with in [its] musical time" (p. 23). "It is," accordingly, "the attempt to differentiate just how such spans express their temporality that is the goal of a theory of formal functions," and that theory posits "criteria involving multiple parameters, most importantly harmony, tonality, grouping, and cadence" (p. 24). Ostensively, then, as readers of Caplin's book will immediately recognize, formal functions are things like "presentations," "antecedents," "contrasting middles," "transitions," "subordinate themes," and so on, and his theory strives to give intrinsic definitions to these functions by specifying the particular musical parameters through which each is typically articulated.

What Caplin now makes more explicit is that each of the formal functions he identifies acts primarily to express the location of a given span of music in the larger whole into which it fits—its status, on various levels, as a beginning, a middle, or an ending (or an introduction—"before-the-beginning"—or epilogue—"after-the-end"). The qualification, "on various levels," is essential, since these temporal markers find themselves nested within one another, in such a way that he can describe, for instance, the initiating unit of the second subordinate theme from Beethoven's First Symphony (as it appears in the first movement exposition, mm. 77-81) as "the 'beginning,' of the 'middle,' of the 'end,' of the beginning' " (p. 25). This kind of characterization accounts, in Caplin's view, for the ability of "experienced listeners . . . to discern quickly just where a particular passage lies within the overall temporal extent of a work" (p. 25)—to situate themselves, so to speak, in its temporal unfolding.

The new, or perhaps renewed, emphasis on the "temporal" aspect of formal functions leads Caplin to draw, in the second part of his essay, a sharp distinction between formal function and formal type. Formal types are "syntactical arrangements of [formal] functions" (p. 31)—theme types, at the lowest level of formal organization, and full-movement forms at the highest. In contrast to formal functions, formal types are "atemporal":

[A] sentence . . . per se does not situate itself in any particular location in time. Only when a given sentence is identified functionally as, say a main theme, does it attain the temporal status of a beginning. But a sentence may also be used as a subordinate theme, in which case it may be realized as an expositional ending. Formal types are thus atemporal, whereas the functions making up those types are intimately associated with our experience of time in music.

(p. 32)

The fundamental advantage of the distinction, in Caplin's view, is twofold: it allows us on the one hand to recognize formal functions even when they appear outside of...