Greg Sandow on Sonata Form

. . . Sonata form—no matter how strong a fetish many classical music purists may make it into—doesn’t explain very much about any piece of music. At best, it explains what path the music follows. But what happens as the music follows that path? People who think sonata form is all-important think they can answer that question by describing the precise way a piece of music follows the prearranged sonata-form steps. Sonata form . . . has three sections, an exposition, in which the main musical ideas in the pieces are set forth; a development, in which things happen to those ideas; and a recapitulation, in which the ideas come back, more or less as they were heard in the exposition.

So the form establishes a home base, departs from it, and then returns. And so one crucial question, as we move through this established narrative, will be exactly how this return will be accomplished. Will the recapitulation begin exactly the way the exposition did? Or will something different happen, which still registers as a return? In the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the exposition begins dramatically—with that superfamous da-da-da DUM—and so maybe it’s no surprise that the recapitulation begins more or less exactly the same way, with the re-eruption of the drama announcing (unmistakably!) that we’ve come home. The first movement of the Pastoral works differently. It begins in an unassuming way, with a gentle wisp of music that’s broken off just seconds after it begins, and only later grows into something strong and definite. Beethoven, I’m sure, could have contrived a way to recapitulate his tentative beginning, but he didn’t chose to. Instead, he does it differently. He skips the tentative beginning, and jumps right into the moment in the evolution of the opening theme when it flowers into strength and certainty. It’s clearly a return—but a return without the hesitation of the opening, a return that doesn’t interrupt the forward motion of the music.

All of which is fascinating, and yet it still doesn’t tell us much about the Pastoral. What’s missing is any notion of what makes this piece of music work, as opposed to any other. The handling of the return is just a detail, and in fact it’s one that needs some explanation; it doesn’t, by itself, have much power to explain anything else that’s going on. In my listening-based analysis, I set forth some things that happen in the first movement of the Pastoral: the music starts, then stops; it gathers force, gets louder, then subsides; sometimes it subsides into repetition. These are things that really set this piece apart; Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony doesn’t typically proceed in any of those ways. So within the wide (and, to tell the truth, somewhat loose) parameters laid down by sonata form, almost anything can happen; and no understanding of sonata form can tell us what that anything might be. The first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is built from musical ideas that tend to be compressed; the ideas in the Pastoral tend to be expansive. The development section in the first movement of the Fifth takes just two notes from one of the ideas in the exposition, dwells on them, and then shrinks them further into an idea made up of just a single chord. The development in the first movement of the Pastoral takes the idea of repetition, and expands on it.

This is my favorite moment in the symphony. In the exposition, Beethoven had established what I called a walking rhythm, with which he sometimes walks in place, repeating the same little walking figure as many as ten times in succession. Now, in the development, he starts repeating something very like it, a new melodic pattern, but one that moves with the same rhythm as the walking figure. He repeats it on a single chord, then magically repeats it on a new chord, one that takes a large harmonic leap from the chord before. The music seems to brighten. But where it is going? The two chords don’t establish any clear direction. And then, just to make things even more delightful, the same thing happens again, on two new chords! The sense of forward motion has by now become almost physical, but we still don’t know where we’re going. There isn’t any moment like this in any other Beethoven piece I know. Nothing in anyone’s understanding of sonata form can prepare us for it, or help us understand it. And if a fetish for sonata form turns our attention somewhere else, then we’re missing all the music in this symphony, losing both the forest and the trees in some ossified idea of what the forest ought to be.

There’s much more I could say along these lines. Sonata form, as I suggested in passing earlier, is a narrative. And it’s a narrative that always has the same ending—a return to stability. The fetish for sonata form allows us not to think about that; instead, we focus on its formal procedures, its purely musical activities, divorced from any larger context. And that of course gives the sonata narrative more power, because now it works on us unconsciously. We get caught up in (for instance) the preparation for the recapitulation, and that stops us from noticing that there always is a recapitulation, and that sonata form has an underlying bias toward stability. We ourselves, if we buy into sonata form, are buying into an assumption of stability, at the cost of understanding that many things in the world aren’t stable at all, and that the musical procedures most appropriate today might be those that don’t return to their beginnings.

from the second draft of a book in progress as posted on the web at http://www.artsjournal.com/greg/2006/02/episode_six_wrapping_up_before.html

Greg Sandow’s website and his blog on the future of classical music, which I recommend highly.

MUS202 music appreciation website

DC Meckler

2008