Traditional approaches to musical form have always adopted a top-down perspective whereby a work's form organizes and unifies the individual parts of the work through an overarching logic. How Sonata Forms turns this view on its head, proposing instead that it was the parts that conditioned and enabled the whole. Relying on a corpus of over a thousand works, author Yoel Greenberg illustrates how the elements of sonata form arose independently of one another, with an overarching idea of form only emerging at the tail end of its formative period during the eighteenth century.
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.
Industry Reviews
"Greenberg's inspirational book opens a window upon the genesis of sonata form and offers a tool with which to trace its further evolution. His bottom-up approach has the potential to redraw the map of this process sketched by earlier scholarship." -- Danuta Mirka, Harry N. and Ruth F. Wyatt Professor of Music Theory, Northwestern University
"With this resourceful and entertaining book, Yoel Greenberg offers a brilliantly innovative approach to the evolution of musical form. Every page of How Sonata Forms is ablaze with a rare quality of mind, both highly learned and right down to earth." -- Scott Burnham, Graduate Center, City University of New York
"Using corpus studies, statistical analyses, and an innovative evolutionary approach (with nods to Darwin and Dawkins), Greenberg's brilliant study offers entirely originalDLand thoroughly convincingDLperspectives on the transformation of 18th-century musical forms." -- William E. Caplin, Distinguished James McGill Professor of Music Theory, Schulich School of Music, McGill University
"An invitation to reflect on the many ways in which hierarchical/top-down paradigms have unconsciously shaped our thought-and a model for how we might flip the script in pursuit of fresh ideas and insights." -- Seth Monahan, Journal of the American Musicological Society
"I can't remember a book about music in which I read so many sentences that I wished I had written myself... A model for future studies of sonata form's origins." -- Rick Cohn, Music and Letters
"How Sonata Forms offers a wealth of methodologies, vocabularies, examples and interdisciplinary insights for scholars grappling with the limitations of sonata-form theories." -- Jan Miyake, Eighteenth-Century Music
"How Sonata Forms offer a robust picture of sonata-form composition in the mid-eighteenth century, introducing the reader to a great deal of new repertoire from complementary perspectives." -- Caitlin Martinkus , Theory and Practice
"Ultimately, How Sonata Forms is an essential read for members of the music theory and musicology communities, and particularly for those within the Formenlehre tradition." -- David R. W. Sears, Music Theory Spectrum
