Analyzing Classical Form

Analyzing Classical Form offers an approach to the analysis of musical form that is especially suited for classroom use at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Students will learn how to make complete harmonic and formal analyses of music drawn from the instrumental works of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.

Analyzing Classical Form offers an approach to the analysis of musical form that is especially suited for classroom use at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Students will learn how to make complete harmonic and formal analyses of music drawn from the instrumental works of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.

Building on ideas first advanced by Arnold Schoenberg and later developed by Erwin Ratz, this book introduces a new theory of form for instrumental music in the classical style. The theory provides a broad set of principles and a comprehensive methodology for the analysis of classical form, from individual ideas, phrases, and themes to the large-scale organization of complete movements. It emphasizes the notion of formal function, that is, the specific role a given formal unit plays in the structural organization of a classical work.

Introducing a new theory of musical form for the analysis of instrumental music of the classical style. The book provides a broad set of principles and a comprehensive methodology for analysing phrases and themes to complete movements. Illustrated with over 250 annotated musical examples by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.

Analysis of 18th- and 19th-Century Musical Works in the Classical Tradition is a textbook for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in music analysis. It outlines a process of analyzing works in the Classical tradition by uncovering the construction of a piece of music—the formal, harmonic, rhythmic, and voice-leading organizations—as well as its unique features. It develops an in-depth approach that is applied to works by composers including Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms. The book begins with foundational chapters in music theory, starting with basic diatonic harmony and progressing rapidly to more advanced topics, such as phrase design, phrase expansion, and chromatic harmony. The second part contains analyses of complete musical works and movements. The text features over 150 musical examples, including numerous complete annotated scores. Suggested assignments at the end of each chapter guide students in their own musical analysis.

This book studies recent music in the western classical tradition, offering a critique of current analytical/theoretical approaches and proposing alternatives. The critique addresses the present fringe status of recent music sometimes described as crossover, postmodern, post-classical, post-minimalist, etc. and demonstrates that existing descriptive languages and analytical approaches do not provide adequate tools to address this music in positive and productive terms. Existing tools and concepts were developed primarily in the mid-20th century in tandem with the high modernist compositional aesthetic, and they have changed little since then. The aesthetics of music composition, on the other hand, have been in constant transformation. Lochhead proposes new ways to conceive musical works, their structurings of musical experience and time, and the procedures and goals of analytic close reading. These tools define investigative procedures that engage the multiple perspectives of composers, performers, and listeners, and that generate conceptual modes unique to each work. In action, they rebuild a conceptual, methodological, and experiential place for recent music. These new approaches are demonstrated in analyses of four pieces: Kaija Saariaho’s Lonh (1996), Sofia Gubaidulina’s Second String Quartet (1987), Stacy Garrop’s String Quartet no.2, Demons and Angels (2004-05), and Anna Clyne’s "Choke" (2004). This book defies the prediction of classical music’s death, and will be of interest to scholars and musicians of classical music, and those interested in music theory, musicology, and aural culture.

Traditional approaches to musical form have always adopted a top-down perspective whereby a work's form organizes and unifies the individual parts of the work through an overarching logic. How Sonata Forms turns this view on its head, proposing instead that it was the parts that conditioned and enabled the whole. Relying on a corpus of over a thousand works, author Yoel Greenberg illustrates how the elements of sonata form arose independently of one another, with an overarching idea of form only emerging at the tail end of its formative period during the eighteenth century. Appreciation of the bottom-up nature of sonata form's evolution reveals it not as a stable package of features that all serve a common aesthetic or formal goal, but rather as an unstable collection of disparate and sometimes even contradictory common practices. The resolution of these contradictions presents a challenge to composers, rendering form a creative catalyst in itself, rather than as a compositional convenience. More generally, the deeply diachronic perspective of How Sonata Forms offers an alternative to the traditional synchronic outlook that pervades music theory in general and the study of form in particular. Rather than focus on definitions and taxonomies, How Sonata Forms proposes a focus on the motion of the system of form as a whole, suggesting that it is often more productive to appreciate the dynamics of a system than it is to rigorously define its parts.

More than any rock artist since The Beatles, Radiohead's music inhabits the sweet spot between two extremes: on the one hand, music that is wholly conventional and conforms to all expectations of established rock styles, and, on the other hand, music so radically experimental that it thwarts any learned notions. While averting mainstream trends but still achieving a significant level of success in both US and UK charts, Radiohead's music includes many surprises and subverted expectations, yet remains accessible within a framework of music traditions. In Everything in its Right Place: Analyzing Radiohead, Brad Osborn reveals the functioning of this reconciliation of extremes in various aspects of Radiohead's music, analyzing the unexpected shifts in song structure, the deformation of standard 4/4 backbeats, the digital manipulation of familiar rock 'n' roll instrumentation, and the expected resolutions of traditional cadence structures. Expanding on recent work in musical perception, focusing particularly on form, rhythm and meter, timbre, and harmony, Everything in its Right Place treats Radiohead's recordings as rich sonic ecosystems in which a listener participates in an individual search for meaning, bringing along expectations learned from popular music, classical music, or even Radiohead's own compositional idiolect. Radiohead's violations of these subjective expectation-realization chains prompt the listener to search more deeply for meaning within corresponding lyrics, biographical details of the band, or intertextual relationships with music, literature, or film. Synthesizing insights from a range of new methodologies in the theory of pop and rock, and specifically designed for integration into music theory courses for upper level undergraduates, Everything in its Right Place is sure to find wide readership among scholars and students, as well as avid listeners who seek a deeper understanding of Radiohead's distinctive juxtapositional style.