Formal Functions in Perspective: Essays on Musical Form from Haydn to Adorno by Steven Vande Moortele, Julie Pedneault-Deslauriers, and Nathan John Martin (review)

In her afterword to Formal Functions in Perspective: Essays on Musical Form from Haydn to Adorno, Janet Schmalfeldt asks: 'Will a treatise on nineteenth-century form, or perhaps on ''Romantic form'', that is comparable to [William E.] Caplin's work emerge one day?' If and when such a study appears, it will surely benefit from the groundwork laid in the volume under review. To set the stage: the recent North American Formenlehre revival has focused inordinately on eighteenth-century Viennese music. Predictably, Caplin's insights, along with those of James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, have been expanded to other repertory, but little consensus has been formed about how this process of expansion should proceed. This book offers a sustained consideration of the aspects of eighteenth-century Formenlehre that remain relevant far beyond the eighteenth century. Each contributor applies Caplin's notion of formal function to music outside its normal purview, ranging from L. Poundie Burstein's discussion of formal anomalies in Haydn to Christoph Neidhöfer and Peter Schubert's analysis of René Leibowitz's dodecaphonic music.

Formal Functions in Perspective is divided into six parts, one each on: Haydn and Mozart, 'Nineteenth-Century Taxonomies', Schubert, 'Text, Texture, and Form', 'Analysis and Hermeneutics', and finally, 'Schoenberg and Beyond'. The book maintains remarkable focus throughout. Every chapter offers its own indepth readings of musical form, most with several examples. Those interested in historical context will probably want to look elsewhere, with exceptions for Andrew Deruchie's discussion of 'Saint-Saens's Cyclic Forms', and Julie Pedneault-Deslauriers's chapter to be discussed below. Still, the volume represents a welcome step towards codifying standards for how analysts can combine eighteenth-century theory with nineteenth-century repertory. If the essays in this book do indeed anticipate a grand theory of nineteenth-century form, some of its relevant issues will be: (1) tension between Caplin's intrinsic and contextual functions, (2) syntactical changes across the nineteenth century, and (3) the relationship between form and interpretation.

The essays on Haydn and Mozart offer only a modest expansion of Caplin's theory. Burstein's chapter on 'twisted formal functions' in Haydn's symphonies, in fact, remains entirely within Caplin's repertory, but examines certain passages that behave differently than Caplin's theory might suggest. Burstein focuses on 'form-functional conflict', i.e. when usual or conventional formal functions are somehow undermined or deviated from. Although he does not use these Caplinian terms, Burstein's examples play on the distinction between contextual and intrinsic function. Contextual function describes the temporal position of the passage under consideration; the transition must be a transition because it comes after the primary theme but before the subordinate theme. Intrinsic function describes the functional identity of a span of music based entirely on certain features within the unit. The editors summarize intrinsic functions succinctly in their introduction: 'This is a presentation because it is four measures long, features a basic idea and its immediate repetition, and prolongs root-position tonic harmony' (p. 3).

Tension between contextual and intrinsic function plays a role throughout the volume. For example, in their introduction, the editors question the distinction on the grounds that intrinsic functions are, in some measure, contextually defined. After Burstein's chapter, the distinction reappears in François de Médicis's formal explanation of Schubert's 'heavenly length', and Steven Vande Moortele's chapter on Theodor Adorno's 'materiale Formenlehre'. Each of these authors identifies non-congruence between intrinsic and contextual function as a defining feature of nineteenth-century music. Yet Burstein's observations fit awkwardly with this position; for Burstein such formal 'dissonances' have been available all along. I cannot help but wonder if every case of formal dissonance should be considered equally noteworthy...