American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS)

Sonata Forms. by Charles Rosen

Review by: Jane Perry-Camp
Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Winter, 1983-1984), pp. 205-209
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Sponsor: American Society for Eighteenth-
Century Studies (ASECS).
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 REVIEWS 205

tool for further research on the dynamic world of journalism in the reign
of Queen Anne.
PHYLLIS J. GUSKIN

Bloomington, Indiana

CHARLES ROSEN. Sonata Forms. New York: W W Norton, 1980.

Pp. x, 344. $16.95.
For Charles Rosen, Sonata Forms is, in many ways, a potboiler. At the
same time, in just about as many ways, a Charles Rosen potboiler is the
average scholar's magnum opus. It may be relevant here that Sonata Forms
seems to have raced The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
to reach our bookshelves. The significance of this scenario lies in the fact
that, by Rosen's own admission, the editors of that famed reference work
rejected his article on "Sonata Forms" (see Rosen, "The Musicological
Marvel," New York Review of Books, 28 May 1981, p. 38), a rejection
which incited Rosen to rewrite the article, "[quadruple] its size, [add] all
the jokes and examples I had been leaving out, and [turn] it into a book
." (ibid.).
"Sonata Forms," the discarded article, seems to have had a profound
effect on Sonata Forms, the book. For one thing, Rosen's writing is directed
to an intelligent audience and an interested audience, yet an audience not
to be burdened with newly invented jargon or symbols nor to be oppressed
with an overdose of the standard technical vocabulary used by music
theorists. Indeed, the most technical language found in Sonata Forms is
that learned in the typical college freshman music theory class, language
(as Tovey so aptly points out) that could be learned and used by a ten-
year-old. What is demanded of the reader is an attentive mind and an
alert ear, for the interest of the writer is more in the hearing and sensing
of musical function than in the mere labeling of parts. Such an attitude
should not be surprising on the part of a writer with the credentials of a
Charles Rosen-concert pianist as well as scholar. In this dual role, it is
incumbent upon Rosen to understand musical language on a level greater
than that of sensate detail (whether pleasant melody, "catchy" motif, pul-
sating beat, or immediate rhythmic gesture): his understanding must pro-
ject a larger unity which acknowledges and gives a higher meaning to
musical detail and which is more far-reaching than a simple compilation
of those details.
Rosen seeks to convey this kind of understandingin both historical terms
and in musical terms. In the latter instance, he propounds the need to
hear, in the largest sense, harmonic movement in terms of long-range
structural dissonance and resolution. It is in dealing with this latter concept
(to which we shall return) that Rosen is at his strongest. For Rosen, the
musical subject in and of itself is tantamount to a coalescence of musical
cognition and musical perception.

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206 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES

Three points dominate Sonata Forms: that sonata form is to be regarded

as a living organism, as it were, a style of communication; that a sense of
harmony, harmonic movement, and harmonic function provides the key to
understanding sonata form/style; and that history belongs to living or-
ganisms, describes their interrelatedness, and yields, through the corre-
lation of individual events, principles by which we can better understand
those events' existence. None of these points.is particularly new or startling.
Much of their essence can be found in other writings by Rosen, e.g., The
Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (1972) where they may some-
times be more eloquently expressed ("... . the concept of style does not
correspond to an historical fact but answers a need: it creates a mode of
understanding" [The Classical Style, p. 19]). Yet, on a less philosophic
level, there are new data, new ideas, as well as new controversies, raised,
if for no other purpose than a heuristic one.
At the same time, Rosen's claim that a dilettante theorist can do little
harm (Preface, p. x) needs to be challenged, for a "bad theory," if that
theory is to be taken seriously, not only might but actually can have
damaging effects, for example, by providing an unsound basis of critical
thinking, by yielding careless and irresponsible treatment of evidence and
hence self-contradiction and confusion, and, worst of all, by creating a
deadening and insensitive outlook on the art of music. Of course, if the
"bad theory" is not to be taken seriously, then the only effects are comic.
Rosen, the self-proclaimed "dilettante theorist," surely does not intend to
write comedy and does intend his offerings to be responsible upon scrutiny.
By the same token, Rosen clearly does not wish random intuitive remarks,
no matter how brilliant, to be mistaken for theory.
In purporting to present a theory, Sonata Forms is not a textbook for
the music theory student, giving instructions on how to write sonata forms.
It comes closer to giving a theory of the historical evolution of sonata
forms, showing the emergence, flourishing, and demise of sonata form as
a vital force both generative of and subject to musical style. At the outset,
the question of the criterion for selection and inclusion of evidence is raised.
Rosen eschews the statistical approach (based on the frequency with which
something occurs, thereby identifying the "general practice" and setting
a standard for a given style) and the masterwork approach (based on the
best examples, the classics, as models through which to define a given
style), although he recognizes the significance of "the relative consistency"
of an individual composer's style. Instead, Rosen seeks to understand the
evolving sonata forms through a study of the functions of their component
parts. In so doing, he steps into the shoes of the composer who must
speculate, as a part of his craft, about the choices to be made on the basis
of the potential he sees in his musical ideas, and who must project possible
musical outcomes for that material, given those choices. In effect, by
seeking to identify the function of musical material, Rosen views that
material as organic. Thus it is appropriate to describe, for example, the
"duties" of the opening of a sonata form movement.

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 REVIEWS 207

Meanwhile, the argument about the basis for inclusion or exclusion of

historical evidence remains unresolved. Rosen's many examples and ref-
erences center on the greatest composers (e.g., Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven)
although considerably lesser composers like Christian Ignatius Latrobe
(1758-1836, a Moravian minister, an amateur and apparently self-taught
musician, and friend of Haydn, so Nicholas Temperley tells us) are not
ignored-except by a commonly held historical perspective. Not until the
last chapter of the book does Rosen's own view of history emerge, and
then in the language one might expect of a Vedic hymn.

When sonataformdid not yet exist, it had a history-the historyof eighteenth-

centurymusicalstyle. Once it had been called into existenceby earlynineteenth-
centurytheory,historywas no longer possiblefor it; it was defined,fixed, and
unalterable.Exceptfor a few small and unimportantdetails,sonataformwill be
for all eternitywhat Czerny[in the School of PracticalComposition,1848] said
it was. (p. 292)

It is thus seen that, for Rosen, history is the story of living organisms, of
sonata forms-not of mechanical structures, of sonata formats. Hence, the
functioning of those organisms provides the stuff with which history is
made. This appears to be the reason that, while stepping into the shoes
of the composer and discussing the internal workings of music, the author
side-steps the apparently less critical issue of criteria for selection of evi-
dence. The reader is left wondering why Rosen bothered to raise the issue
in the first place, except perhaps to express his dissatisfaction with the
"new method" of history which seeks to identify a norm, "unmediated and
uninterpreted." (See pp. 4-7.)
To trace the story of sonata forms, Rosen pays dutiful homage to the
social environment leading to, centering on, and resulting from the last
decades of the eighteenth century, those decades marking the "triumph"
of sonata forms. Before engaging in a review of the aria and the concerto
as they affect the emerging sonata forms, Rosen provides a quick synopsis
of ternary and binary forms by way of defining them as they are used in
Sonata Forms. The central section of the book is devoted to a closer
examination of the late eighteenth century sonata forms themselves, in
many ways like a separate text on sonata forms-their specific evolution,
their use of motif, and detailed accounts of exposition, development, and
recapitulation. The last two chapters turn once more to the history of the
sonata, remarking on sonatas of Beethoven and thereafter. The attempt
at all-inclusiveness, the sectionalization of the subject matter, and the
vacillation between historical (however the evidence be selected) and an-
alytical approaches-approaches at times thus not clearly integrated-
may well be another result of Sonata Forms's origin as a miscarried article
for The New Grove. As such, the segregated presentation of material
(sometimes even reflected in subtle shifts in writing style) tends to weaken
the presentation of a general theory about the evolution of sonata forms.

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208 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES

The greatest difficulties for the reader lie in just those chapters dealing
with the development of sonata style from the practices of the early eigh-
teenth century. These difficulties are understandable for two reasons: first,
the general reader is likely to be less familiar with the material cited and
the direction of thought Rosen is pursuing; and, second, Rosen himself is
covering ground that has not been thoroughly worked over (although it is
by no means virgin territory); by its very nature, seeking roots of flora yet
to come (much less to bear fruit and be recognizable) is necessarily a
tenuous proposition. Codifying stereotypes prevalent in even a single de-
cade is difficult at best when the organisms to which those patterns apply
change constantly; Rosen demonstrates his point well that the growth of
sonata style was not comparable to a paint-by-number canvas in which
the final outcome was preordained. Both opera and concerto (despite cer-
tain discrepancies in describing their order of influence, if any can be
ascertained) enhanced that style dramatically.
The last portion of Sonata Forms moves easily and convincingly into a
discussion of the sonata after Beethoven. Historically, by this time, basic
enough changes have taken place (e.g., the loosening of harmonic definition
and the concomitant preeminence of theme and texture as structural fac-
tors, as well as the resultant sense of sonata as a three-part or ABA form)
to warrant calling into play Rosen's question at the very start of Sonata
Forms, to wit, "but if a form 'changes,' it is not clear when it would be
useful to consider it the same form, although changed, and when we must
think of it as a new form altogether [since] .. . there is no biological
continuity among sonata forms . . ." (pp. 2-3). Moreover, the nineteenth-
and twentieth-century sonata forms are classistic in that they rely on "a
standard form, largely a generalization and a misinterpretationof Mozart
by Beethoven's generation" (p. 281). Given such a model to work from,
each new attempt refers to that model, not to its coeval style. In con-
tradistinction to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there were no
comparably revered sonata forms in the eigtheenth century (nor were any
sought), only principles capable of making history.
In dealing with those principles and the internal nature of the sonata,
Rosen demonstrates the interaction of theme (and motif), texture, and
harmony (and harmonic rhythm). At the outset, he disavows the nine-
teenth-century view of the sonata as primarily a play of thematic material.
He then claims not "to dismiss the thematic structure as merely a surface
manifestation of a deeper harmonic structure" (p. 6). Nonetheless, when
the chips are down, it is Rosen's analysis of the harmonic sense of sonata
style as a macrocosmic consonance-dissonanceprocedure that distinguish-
es his writing and gives strength and persuasion to his arguments about
the style. The insight of Rosen's analyses is amply demonstrated by his
view of tonal areas other than tonic being long-range dissonance (notably
the polarity of tonic and dominant in sonata style), resolving within the
return of tonic and the final period of stability. Further, the articulation
(by texture, phrase and period structure, and thematic character) of this

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 REVIEWS 209

harmonic vigor makes music of the sonata style both approachable ("pub-
lic") and capable of expression ("dramatic").
Theorists might well be interested in certain harmonic details, not uni-
versally recognized, which Rosen espouses: the frequent ending of the
development section on vi followed by a "retransition"to I and the re-
capitulation; a "secondary development," typically turning to IV, with the
recapitulation soon after the return to I, an idea which amounts to an
elevation in importance of what is more commonly referred to as a tran-
sition or bridge; and Rosen's proposal of the three-key exposition, a phe-
nomenon appearing at the very end of the eighteenth century whereby a
secondary key would be inserted between I and V, an idea with special
significance in the Romantic sonata in which harmonic polarization was
replaced by a harmonic "sense of distance."
There are signs of haste in the preparation of Sonata Forms. There are
more typographical errors than one has come to expect in a publication
from Norton. There is an inconsistency in treatment of musical examples
in that some show instrumentation while others do not; the problem arises
in those instances in which an unidentified instrument is a transposing
instrument, leaving the reader who is without experience in standard trans-
positions at some loss in trying to use the musical scores. And from time
to time, Rosen's far-ranging mind tends to digress from the subject at
hand. Yet, like getting lost in Switzerland, one cannot complain too much
about the unexpected beauty of one's inadvertent discoveries, although
the disruptions of organization may be disturbing for those in a hurry and
confusing to those without a sense of orientation. Occasionally, one finds
both the reader and the writer saying, "Now, where was I?"when relocating
the train of thought. Small inconsistencies and mild contradictions some-
times hamper the clarity of Rosen's arguments. Of the former, one par-
ticular detail that comes to mind is the absence of a reliable pattern, such
as proposed by Tovey, for distinguishing between musical material being
on the dominant, say, rather than in the dominant. In all fairness, at the
same time, there are passages in which the obvious and the accepted are
worded in such a way that they are memorable, for instance: "The method
used by Mozart is popular, but I do not know if it occurs more often than
some others. It appears to be normal here largely because it is so well
done" (p. 223). The same can be said for the presentation of any number
of Rosen's ideas.
Rosen, the "dilettante theorist," has done no harm. Sonata Forms may
not be the best work to pour forth from his pen, but if anyone is betrayed
by its shortcomings, it is Rosen, not music. To paraphrase his own words,
Sonata Forms has all the makings of a remarkable work, "so good, in fact,
that it should be revised without delay" (Rosen, "The Musicological Mar-
vel," p. 38). The art of music is still in good hands with Charles Rosen.
JANE PERRY-CAMP
The Florida State University

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