Le 29 juin 2017
de 15h00 à 15h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
amphithéâtre 4
Séance précomposée - Quel futur pour la Formenlehre? Challenging Recapitulatory Paradigms
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Jonathan Guez
Despite differences in critical alignment, studies of sonata-like structures tend to share one feature in common: they devote the least amount of time to recapitulations. Two theoretical presuppositions may explain this neglect: (1) that the thematic layout of the recapitulation mirrors that of the exposition, and (2) that one obligatory tonal alteration is all that is needed to make a tonic-recapitulating sonata conclude in the key in which it began.
This paper uses examples from Schubert’s recapitulations to problematize the second of these presuppositions in hopes of painting a more complete, and analytically adequate, picture of the ways tonal alterations are made in practice. I use Schubert’s recapitulations as a lens through which to view the range of strategies employed by common-practice composers to enact a sonata’s obligatory tonal adjustment.
My approach to the analysis of musical form is informed by the taxonomic and narrative style of Hepokoski and Darcy. I identify six possible strategies for making tonal alterations and describe their effects on the recapitulation in musico-dramatic terms. The strategies are: alterations in silence, immediatealterations, thickalterations, multiplealterations, impotentalterations, and self-effacingalterations.
Tonal alterations may be obligatory in sonatas with on-tonic recapitulations, but they are not for that reason deployed by composers pro forma. Indeed, Schubert and others composed them in sophisticated and dramatically appropriate ways. If we have been tempted to gloss over them, this is because the range of strategies for making them has not yet been sufficiently excavated.
