Musical Form

Structure and Style, first published in 1962 and expanded in 1979, fills the need for new ways of analysis that put 20th-century music in perspective. It spans forms in use before 1600 through forms and techniques in use today. Anthology of Musical Forms provides musical examples of forms treated in Structure and Style. Some examples are analyzed throughout. Most are left for the student to analyze. These books reflect Leon Stein's impressive background as student, musician, and composer. Stein studied composition with Leo Sowerby, Frederick Stock (conductor of the Chicago Symphony) and orchestration with Eric DeLamarter, his assistant. He earned M. Mus and Ph.D degrees at DePaul University and was associated with its School of Music as director of the Graduate Division and chairman of the Department of Theory and Composition until his retirement in 1976. He has composed a wide variety of works, including compositions for orchestra, chamber combinations, two operas, and a violin concerto.

Ebenezer Prout (1835-1909), was an English musical theorist, writer, teacher and composer, whose instruction, afterwards embodied in a series of standard works, underpinned the work of many British musicians of succeeding generations. 'Musical Form' was written in 1893 and is almost entirely practical, and points of theory are hardly touched upon.

The tone of the debates among Caplin, Hepokoski, and Webster (in the form of comments on each author''s essay and then responses to the comments), though tactful, is obliquely blunt and tendentious; like the best of tennis pros, each author strives to serve an ace and defends the net against a passing shot (with Caplin, the ace is for formal function; with Hepokoski for Sonata Theory and dialogic form; with Webster for multivalent analysis). But we can trust that this provocative exchange will thoroughly invigorate discussions about classical form and encourage diverse approaches to its analys.

Understanding the way music unfolds to the listener is a major key for unlocking the secrets of the composer’s art. Musical Form and Analysis, highly regarded and widely used for two decades, provides a balanced theoretical and philosophical approach that helps upper-level undergraduate music majors understand the structures and constructions of major musical forms. Spring and Hutcheson present all of the standard topics expected in such a text, but their approach offers a unique conceptual thrust that takes readers beyond mere analytical terminology and facts. Evocative rather than encyclopedic, the text is organized around three elements at work at all levels of music: time, pattern, and proportion. Well-chosen examples and direct, well-crafted assignments reinforce techniques. A 140-page anthology of music for in-depth analysis provides a wide range of carefully selected works.

Distinguished music theorist and composer David Lewin (1933-2003) applies the conceptual framework he developed in his earlier, innovative Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations to the varied repertoire of the twentieth century in this stimulating and illustrative book. Analyzing the diverse compositions of four canonical composers--Simbolo from Dallapiccola's Quaderno musicale di Annalibera ; Stockhausen's Klavierstuck III ; Webern's Op. 10, No. 4; and Debussy's Feux d'articifice --Lewin brings forth structures which he calls "transformational networks" to reveal interesting and suggestive aspects of the music. In this complementary work, Lewin stimulates thought about the general methodology of musical analysis and issues of large-scale form as they relate to transformational analytic structuring. Musical Form and Transformation , first published in 1993 by Yale University Press, was the recipient of an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award.

A. B. Marx was one of the most important German music theorists of his time. Drawing on idealist aesthetics and the ideology of Bildung, he developed a holistic pedagogical method as well as a theory of musical form that gives pride of place to Beethoven. This volume offers a generous selection of the most salient of his writings, the majority presented here in English for the first time. It features Marx's oft-cited but little understood material on sonata form, his progressive program for compositional pedagogy and his detailed critical analysis of Beethoven's 'Eroica' Symphony. These writings thus deal with issues that fall directly among the concerns of mainstream theory and analysis in the last two centuries: the relation of form and content, the analysis of instrumental music, the role of pedagogy in music theory, and the nature of musical understanding.

The first comprehensive study of musical form in operatic and concert overtures in continental Europe between 1815 and 1850.