E-Books →How Sonata Forms A Bottom-Up Approach to Musical Form (Oxford Studies in Music Theory)

Appreciation of the bottom-up nature of sonata form's evolution reveals it not as a stable package of features that all serve a common aesthetic or formal goal, but rather as an unstable collection of disparate and sometimes even contradictory common practices. The resolution of these contradictions presents a challenge to composers, rendering form a creative catalyst in itself, rather than as a compositional convenience. More generally, the deeply diachronic perspective of How Sonata Forms offers an alternative to the traditional synchronic outlook that pervades music theory in general and the study of form in particular. Rather than focus on definitions and taxonomies, How Sonata Forms proposes a focus on the motion of the system of form as a whole, suggesting that it is often more productive to appreciate the dynamics of a system than it is to rigorously define its parts.