A couple of years ago I decided that I was spending too much time online reading very ephemeral stuff like newspapers and blogs (heh!), so I decided to put a little more fiber in my diet. I started with Shakespeare plays and read a few. Then I read the Odyssey, which went surprisingly quickly--one book a day. Oh, and I do my serious reading first thing in the morning, with a cup of coffee. Next I took on a really big challenge: re-reading the Oxford History of Western Music by Richard Taruskin. I just finished volume four, Music in the Early Twentieth Century. Then I decided to take a pause before finishing with volume five, Music in the Late Twentieth Century. I'm about to rebuild my stock portfolio so I read a real investing classic, Stocks for the Long Run by Jeremy Siegel, one of the clearest distillations of decades of investing wisdom, supported by a lot of data. I had put the Michael Kurtz monograph on Sofia Gubaidulina on the shelf so I took a few days to finish it. That will lead to a summation post on her fairly soon.
Another book that I never finished is Getting Started in Technical Analysis by Jack Schwager, so I am finishing that one now. Technical analysis of what, you ask: the movement of stock prices. I used to think that technical analysis was voodoo, but it does have its uses though I suspect the discipline is still in its infancy. The major work in the field is Technical Analysis of Stock Trends by Robert Edwards and John Magee, originally published in 1948. I guess that will get back on my reading list in the near future though it is a dauntingly hefty volume. Once I finish the Schwager I will go back to Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations which I have tried to finish before on a couple of occasions.
Speaking of long-term reading projects, the big one I had planned when I moved to Mexico was Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust, well over three thousand pages, making Tolstoy's War and Peace seem like a short story. I only got around to it last year and after slogging through half of it, I decided it wasn't quite worth the effort. Your mileage may vary.
So what's on the agenda for this year? I might re-read A Guide to Musical Analysis by Nicholas Cook and perhaps the Iliad. Maybe something by Aristotle, either the Nichomachean Ethics or the Politics. I downloaded the first volume of The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler, so I may give it a shot. Plus there are some books on Stravinsky and Bartók by van den Toorn and Antokoletz that have been sitting on my shelf for a while that I should really get to. Plus, for variety, The Oxford Book of English Verse, the new edition from 1939 of the original first published in 1900. I got a well-preserved second-hand copy through Amazon. 1141 pages of wonderful poetry and the very first one is a famous song: "Sumer is icumen in."
So let's have a listen.
I recently finished Yoel Greenberg's new book How Sonata Forms: A Bottom-Up Approach to Musical Form from OUP and will have to blog about it at some point. The quick summary is he argues that post hoc top down synchronic definitions of sonata forms in the last two centuries of theory have been too fuzzy to be useful when studying the actual literature.
ReplyDeleteInstead of a "top down" set of taxonomies he proposes a "bottom up" heuristic of intra-formal parameters. It's not meant to be comprehensive and he picks three ideas--the medial repeat, the double return, and the "end rhyme". These correspond respectively to the long-abandoned structural repeat of the entire exposition; the classic "double return" of the recapitulation bringing back the theme in the tonic key; and what Rosen described as a recapitulation of the secondary thematic materials in the tonic key. Greenberg's proposal is these three methods of controlling and varying repetition can be at odds as well as used in synchrnonization (i.e. in the "textbook" sonata or what Hepokoski & Darcy call Type 3).
This is reflected in actual literature. For instance, the double return isn't obligatory. Mozart started recaps with subdominant material and Matiegka in his Op. 31 No. 1 sonata starts his recapitulation of the C major sonata in A major and modally mutates Theme 1 from A major to A minor before bringing back only the 2nd half of Theme 1 in C major like he is "supposed to". For Type 2 sonatas (Chopin's B flat minor) Theme 1 doesn't even come back at all and yet the medial repeat and end rhyme occur.
What I find compelling about the admittedly polemical thesis is Greenberg did statistical studies of formal elements (the three outlined above) and he pointed out that 18th century sonatas skewed binary while 19th century sonatas skewed ternary but top down synchronic attempts to define sonata form(s) skip that trajectory. Not everyone skipped it, though, and Leonard Meyer pointed out that the 18th century had a flexible script-based approach to sonatas whereas the 19th century solidified plans. Greenberg's work is an excellent supplement/expansion of Meyer's observation by highlighting that there IS a shift from binary to ternary conceptions of sonata forms and that this is one of the biggest reasons theoretical and analytical writing about sonata forms are so diffuse and hard even for specialists.
But at another level Greenberg's big polemical point is that nobody "invented' sonata, rather, hundreds of composers wrote thousands of pieces across two centuries using a variety of smaller scale structuring norms that were retroactively labeled "sonata". In other words, for longtime readers of my blog or my comments here Greenberg put seventy nails in the coffin of Ted Gioia's idea that the music history doesn't account for whoever invented the sonata because it evolved the way species evolved rather than being the singular invention of some "great mind".
There are some really fun books on formal analysis and galant practice coming out the last few years and i'll have to blog about them eventually but Yoel Greenberg's new book is one of the more exciting and openly polemical books on sonata forms and theorizing about them. It's not necessarily in Ethan's wheelhouse directly but I think he might find it interesting. Greenberg has done the best job of anyone I've read so far explaining how and why so many theories of sonata form seem simultaneously arbitary/opaque and to fail to account for the immense diversity in the actual literature. And, of course, Greenberg can't help but note that Haydn has defiantly failed to fit into any of the taxonomies theorists have retroactively tried to put him in. But he doesn't focus on the big three that much, which is also a plus.
Thanks Wenatchee for a really interesting summary of some books I have not had a look at. Yep, Haydn never has fit too well into the theorists' models. Have you ever looked at Bill Caplin's book on Classical Form?
ReplyDeleteDisagreeing with Ted Gioia in this area is a bit like stealing ice cream from a six year old.
The Caplin book is really helpful. I referenced it only a few times in Ragtime and Sonata Forms but it's a helpful book. I'm not the only reader who made a point of using Caplin's ideas as a way to work with pop/jazz/folk based material rather than galant material. I got more mileage out of Hepokoski & Darcy's Elements of Sonata Form because of the work they did to differentiate their five types and Type 2 sonatas turn out to be pervasive in early 19th century guitar sonata literature, particularly in a few cases by Diabelli (F major), Molitor (meh, personally) and Matiegka.
ReplyDeleteYeah, Gioia's neo-shamanist conspiracy theory version of music history is frequently ridiculously wrong but sometimes taking ice cream from the six year old has to be done and I think Yoel Greenberg's book did that. :) If Gioia is, say, writing about what a wonderful man Dave Brubeck was I don't contest his perspective or research. If Gioia is writing about anything else outside jazz and blues I question everything he says. :D
But I get what Terry Teachout saw in him and I"m reminded that Terry Teachout once wrote that great critics could often be wildly wrong but if they spark further critical discussion their wrongness is better than someone always being "right" but never having anything interesting to say that sparks other critics to agree or disagree.
Adorno once claimed that many of the theories that have informed great works of art were disastrously wrong but we're not going to hold it against Renaissance painters that their cosmology was dubious or they didn't understand how the brain or eye worked together, kind of an opaque and almost tossed off line in Aesthetic Theory I read years ago.
Yes, you're right, Ted Gioia is often interesting even when he is wrong. And he is really good writing about music economics.
ReplyDelete