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Warren Darcy, in a review of William Caplin's Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 'hoped that future research into the subject of musical form [would] be less concerned with classifying compositional choices and more concerned with explicating the expressive purposes behind them' (Music Theory Spectrum 22/1 (2000), 125). We can presume that Darcy hoped to provide such a hermeneutically sensitive theory of form in his and James Hepokoski's contribution to the subject, Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata, the volume under review here. This substantial study sets its task as 'uncovering and interpreting the dialogue of an individual piece with the background set of norms' (11), a project that first involves assessing the compositional conventionality of an extensive array of musical processes within various musical parameters - from the rhetorical emphasis on a single point of arrival to the arrangement of thematic material across an entire sonata movement. Individual compositional decisions are considered either as adopting a stylistic 'default', a formal outcome that through repeated practice or exposure informs generic expectations for sonata form, or as proposing a 'deformation', expansion or stretching of that practice, which alters the expected course of musical action to a more expressive end.
Darcy and Hepokoski clearly state at an early stage in the text that this volume is designed to form part of an ongoing dialogue and should not be understood as an ultimate formulation of sonata form characteristics. Nevertheless, a primary motivation for them in undertaking this study is to propose levels of 'defaults' for each generic process of sonata form. These, they argue, assist the analyst in understanding precisely where departures from convention occur, how they interact with expectation and - perhaps most significantly - how the resulting expressive quality of such divergences can both define and influence the musical narrative of sonata form. To work towards this laudable end they suggest which musical attributes should be considered as defining aspects of the genre. The primary emphasis of the book, rather than a discussion of expressive potential or hermeneutic understanding, becomes the painstaking identification of a...