The Sonatas of Henry Purcell: Rhetoric and Reversal by Alon Schab (review)

The Sonatas of Henry Purcell: Rhetoric and Reversal is the product of a lifetime of work by Alon Schab. Like many scholarly endeavors, Schab's research has evolved over the years. Though he has always centered on Purcell, Schab focuses on symmetry and reversal in the trio sonatas in this book, which is the first to explore these devices as they relate to the listener's perception of them. Many think of Purcell as a composer of vocal music, yet he was one of the most prolific English composers of instrumental music during his time. But even within the scope of his instrumental works, the sonatas have received relatively little attention. Purcell's trio sonatas are a lesser-known component of his body of work; though other publications discuss the sonatas, according to Schab they have historically been omitted from studies on counterpoint and generally excluded from historical anthologies. According to his introduction, it was this lack of research—and more specifically the lack of research on symmetry and reversal—that provided the inspiration for this study. With all this in mind, Schab will likely give some readers their first opportunity to explore this music.

Schab's book is neither a purely musicological text nor a theoretical analysis of Purcell's music, though he admits that it leans a little more towards theory. The book, however, does not inundate the reader with harmonic analysis of numerous music excerpts. Rather, Schab more often examines aspects of Purcell's compositional techniques while either addressing the aural perception of these devices or demonstrating the difficulty in their recognition by the listener. He uses notation and charts to illustrate the devices in Purcell's compositions that are difficult to hear. In order to separate the audibly perceptible and imperceptible aspects of the sonatas, Schab has organized this book in a way that divides by chapters the audible (chaps. 3–6) and inaudible (chaps. 2 and 7) compositional structures.

Schab begins the book with a discussion of the sources of Purcell's twenty-two sonatas. He shows that the first twelve, published in 1683, were carefully planned regarding key. Purcell arranged them in order beginning with minor keys, followed by their respective parallel major keys, and then separated in pairs by perfect fifths. The remaining ten sonatas, printed posthumously by Purcell's widow, were consequently organized more haphazardly.

Following his discussion of the sources, Schab outlines Purcell's general sonata structure, which he compares to sonatas of other composers such as John Blow and Giovanni Battista Draghi, contemporaries of Purcell in England. Given the relationship between Purcell and Blow, it is natural to expect a great deal of similarity between the two. Schab points out, however, that Purcell's sonatas are almost entirely different from the model presented in his mentor's one sonata.

As one of the two chapters that addresses audible structures, chapter 2 begins with the discussion of rhetoric, which Schab defines as "the way in which music, and certain patterns in the music, is received by the listener" (p. 45). He includes a discussion of Purcell's harmonic and contrapuntal tendencies, and he ties counterpoint and harmony into their relationship with the listener's experience. Schab points out that not only does rhetoric involve perception by the listener but also for seventeenth-century composers the listener was an integral part of the rhetorical process. In the last chapter, which also deals with audible devices, Schab discusses Purcell's use of ground bass in the Trio Sonata, Z. 807, which shares a subject with Z. 790, the "frontispiece" (a movement type cited on p. 26) of the first twelve sonatas from 1683.

Although this book focuses on Purcell's trio sonatas, Schab begins to address other instrumental genres—particularly the fantasias—in chapter 3. This joint discussion is natural in that "Purcell himself bound...