"Nobody writes better about music .... again and again, unerring insight into just the features that make the music special and fine."--The New York Review of B

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 t

Sonata form is fundamentally a dramatic structure that creates, manipulates, and ultimately satisfies expectation. It engages its audience by inviting predictio

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Elements of Sonata Theory is a comprehensive rethinking of the basic principles of sonata form in the decades around 1800. This foundational study outlines a ne