How Sonata Forms: A Bottom-up Approach to Musical Form Yoel Greenberg
Richard L. Cohn · Music and Letters · 2023
There are at least five species of readers, overlapping but in principle independent of one another, to whom I can enthusiastically recommend this book. Readers interested in the eighteenth-century instrumental music of Germany and Italy will find an exhaustive study of compositional strategies of a wide range of composers, including some unfamiliar ones. Readers interested in musical form will find a compelling chronological back-story that precedes those repertories that are most frequently engaged by this topic, a rare focus on formal endings rather than beginnings, and a destabilization of some fundamental tenets about classical form. Readers interested in processes of musical change across historical time will be introduced to a provocative, informed, and compelling new model adapted from biological evolution and dynamic systems theory. Readers drawn to large-corpus statistical studies will find that rare application whose methodological trees never occlude their rich musical forest. And finally, readers who are also writers will be inspired by the beauty of the book-making craft: compact, focused, organized at multiply embedded levels of structure, witty and engaging. I can’t remember a book about music in which I read so many sentences that I wished I had written myself.