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How Sonata Forms: A Bottom-Up Approach to Musical Form, by Yoel Greenberg

How Sonata Forms: A Bottom-Up Approach to Musical Form, by Yoel Greenberg Reviews How Sonata Forms: A Bottom-Up Approach to Musical Form, by Yoel Greenberg. Oxford Studies in Music Theory. New York: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 2022. x, 249 pp. Who among us has not thought it, said it aloud, even declared it to our students: “Classical sonata form evolved from earlier binary designs”? But do we know what this really means, or how it might have occurred? Yoel Greenberg argues that music scholars have been using the right metaphor, but in the wrong way; we have relied on an outdated understanding of how evolution works, leading to histories of musical form that flatten complex and unruly processes into tidy, linear narratives. Greenberg’s brilliantly imaginative How Sonata Forms updates our understanding of evolution in order to impart better tools for appreciating how musical forms come into being—especially through “bottom-up” or self-organizing principles. Biologists after Darwin tended toward an “essentialist” or “top-down” understanding of evolution and natural selection, in which the reified or- ganism is the privileged whole that all parts serve. But this turned out to be a sticking point for any theory centered on change and flux—as exposed by more recent understandings, which have turned this thinking on its head. Under http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of the American Musicological Society University of California Press

How Sonata Forms: A Bottom-Up Approach to Musical Form, by Yoel Greenberg

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Publisher
University of California Press
Copyright
© 2023 by the American Musicological Society. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.
ISSN
0003-0139
eISSN
1547-3848
DOI
10.1525/jams.2023.76.3.873
Publisher site
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Abstract

Reviews How Sonata Forms: A Bottom-Up Approach to Musical Form, by Yoel Greenberg. Oxford Studies in Music Theory. New York: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 2022. x, 249 pp. Who among us has not thought it, said it aloud, even declared it to our students: “Classical sonata form evolved from earlier binary designs”? But do we know what this really means, or how it might have occurred? Yoel Greenberg argues that music scholars have been using the right metaphor, but in the wrong way; we have relied on an outdated understanding of how evolution works, leading to histories of musical form that flatten complex and unruly processes into tidy, linear narratives. Greenberg’s brilliantly imaginative How Sonata Forms updates our understanding of evolution in order to impart better tools for appreciating how musical forms come into being—especially through “bottom-up” or self-organizing principles. Biologists after Darwin tended toward an “essentialist” or “top-down” understanding of evolution and natural selection, in which the reified or- ganism is the privileged whole that all parts serve. But this turned out to be a sticking point for any theory centered on change and flux—as exposed by more recent understandings, which have turned this thinking on its head. Under

Journal

Journal of the American Musicological Society – University of California Press

Published: Dec 1, 2023

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