Julian Alfred Horton

Durham University | DU · Department of Music

This article counterpoints James Hepokoski’s notion of sonata failure (Hepokoski 2002; Hepokoski and Darcy 2006) and the concept of “becoming” advocated by Janet Schmalfeldt (2011) as analytical tools in the developing field of Romantic Formenlehre. Taking Mendelssohn’s overture Zum Märchen von der schönen Melusine as a case study, it develops a ta...

Assessing musical analysis’s prospects in 2004, Kofi Agawu struck a tone of cautious optimism.¹ Noting that the new musicology’s critical “bid for power” had subsided into an uneasy truce, Agawu diagnosed “a sharply delineated pluralism,” in which the increasingly aged new musicology coexisted with a theoretical renaissance he called the “New Ameri...

This chapter develops the claim that Felix Mendelssohn’s pivotal innovation in the realm of instrumental form lies in his strikingly post-classical response to the relationship between form and syntax. The C minor Piano Trio, Op. 66, reveals a rich array of syntactic habits that depart fundamentally from high-classical precedent. Expositional main-...

One of the most welcome consequences of the new Formenlehre is the recent surge of interest in Romantic form. Motivated by the twin achievements of sonata theory and form-functional theory, analysts have extended Formenlehre’s purview well beyond its classical core repertoire, embracing canonical and non-canonical music from Berlioz to Mahler.¹ Wit...

This article investigates questions of form in the Finale of Bruckner's Seventh Symphony, paying special attention to the reversed recapitulation as a problematic category in contemporary Formenlehre. Counterpointing Timothy Jackson's reading of the movement as a ‘tragic’ reversed sonata against James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy's critique of the co...

British Musical Criticism and Intellectual Thought, 1850–1950 - edited by Jeremy Dibble June 2018

British Musical Criticism and Intellectual Thought, 1850–1950 - edited by Jeremy Dibble June 2018

- Cohn Richard , Audacious Euphony: Chromaticism and the Triad’s Second Nature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). $35.00. - Julian Horton

Among the more striking developments in contemporary North American music theory is the centrality that questions of musical form ( Formenlehre ) have enjoyed in recent decades. Formal Functions in Perspective presents thirteen studies that engage with musical form in a variety of ways. The essays, written by established and emerging scholars from...

Despite the prominent status John Field’s seven piano concerti enjoyed during his lifetime, lingering complaints of formal incompetence have combined with the critique of virtuosity and collusion between Formenlehre and Austrocentric conceptions of canon to guarantee their subsequent marginality. This essay re-evaluates these works as a platform fo...

Few genres of the last 250 years have proved so crucial to the course of music history, or so vital to public musical experience, as the symphony. This Companion offers an accessible guide to the historical, analytical and interpretative issues surrounding this major genre of Western music, discussing an extensive variety of works from the eighteen...

Contexts for the later symphonies: One of the most striking aspects of Vaughan Williams’s long career is his late flowering as a symphonist. When the composer turned sixty in 1932, he had three symphonic works to his name: A Sea Symphony, completed in 1909; A London Symphony, which dates from 1910–14; and A Pastoral Symphony, composed during and af...

Writing in 1849, Richard Wagner famously announced the symphony’s death at Beethoven’s hands and its transformation into music drama. Chiding contemporaries for misunderstanding Beethoven’s symphonic achievement, Wagner dismissed subsequent efforts as mere form and style without historical significance: The forms in which the Master [Beethoven] bro...

In addition to its vital importance for the social and aesthetic development of art music after the Enlightenment, the symphony is also pivotal for the evolution of tonality. As the most prestigious instrumental genre of the nineteenth century, it embodies on the largest scale changes in the way tonal relations underpin instrumental forms. To trace...

Michael Spitzer’s Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven’s Late Style (Indiana University Press, 2006, ISBN 0-253-34724-6) pursues multiple lines of scholarly enquiry. As a musicological study, the book advances an historicist agenda, which grounds the understanding of Beethoven’s music in an extension of its contemporaneous philosophical contex...

Sonata deformation theory constitutes possibly the most substantial recent contribution to the analytical literature dealing with the sonata-type repertoire of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This notion, developed by James Hepokoski in relation to the music of Sibelius and Strauss and subsequently elaborated both collaborativel...

Two views on the nature and derivation of Bruckner’s orchestral practices have predominated. In the early part of the twentieth century, the prevailing attitude styled Bruckner as a Wagnerian symphonist, and thus characterized his orchestration as a (more or less successful) imitation of Wagner’s instrumental textures. With the publication in the 1...

Despite significant advances in Bruckner scholarship, many problems persist. Although the relationship between Bruckner's music, post-Wagnerian ideology and, ultimately, Nazism has been carefully reconstructed, questions of how such matters should condition our responses to the music remain unaddressed. This important study isolates problematic iss...