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Janet Schmalfeldt, In the Process of Becoming: Analytic and Philosophical Perspectives on Form in Early Nineteenth-Century Music, Oxford Studies in Music Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). xi + 333 pp. $49.95.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 June 2015
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References
1 This book joins contemporary core literature on form in music, including: Caplin, William, Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Caplin, William, Hepokoski, James and Webster, James, Musical Form, Forms, and Formenlehre: Three Methodological Reflections (Studies in Musical Form), ed. Pieter Bergé (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006; Charles Rosen: Sonata Forms (New York: Norton, 1988).
2 Previously published articles (many from conference presentations) incorporated in this book in revised form, include: ‘Form as the Process of Becoming: The Beethoven-Hegelian Tradition and the “Tempest” Sonata’, Beethoven Forum 4 (1995): 37–71; ‘On Performance, Analysis, and Schubert’, Per Musi: Revista Acadêmica de Música 5–6 (2002): 38–54; ‘Music That Turns Inward: New Roles for Interior Movements and Secondary Themes in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Tijdschrift voor Muziektheorie 9/3 (2004): 171–95; ‘Coming Home’, in Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology 5, ed. Maciej Jabłoński and Michael L. Klein (Poznań: Rhytmos, 2005), 139–84; colloquial version of the preceding published in Music Theory Online 10.1 (2004); ‘Chopin's Dialogue: The Cello Sonata, Op. 65’, in Chopin's Musical Worlds: The 1840's, ed. Artur Szklener (Warsaw: Narodowy Instytut Fryderyka Chopina, 2007): 265–91; ‘Beethoven's “Bridgetower” Sonata, Op. 47’, in New Paths: Aspects of Music Theory and Aesthetics in the Age of Romanticism, Collected Writings of the Orpheus Institute 7 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009), 37–67.
3 For instance, see: Brown, Julie Hedges, ‘Study, Copy, and Conquer’, The Journal of Musicology 30/3 (2013): 369–423CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lee, Mike Cheng-Yu, ‘A Response to Schmalfeldt's “Form as Process of Becoming”: Once More on the Performance and Analysis of Schubert's Sonata in A minor, Op. 42’, Music Theory Online 16/2 (2010)Google Scholar; Richards, Mark, ‘Viennese Classicism and the Sentential Idea: Broadening the Sentence Paradigm’, Theory and Practice 36 (2011): 179–224Google Scholar; Spitzer, Michael, ‘Of Telescopes and Lenses, Blindness and Insight’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 138/2 (2013): 415–429CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Moortele, Steven Vande, ‘In Search of Romantic Form’, Music Analysis 32/3 (2013): 404–431Google Scholar. Vande Moortele's article is an especially thorough and interesting critique of Schmalfeldt's study.
4 Quoting Adorno, Theodor W., Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar, 13.
5 This sonata is more commonly known as the ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata. Since Schmalfeldt focuses on the multifaceted relationship between Beethoven and Bridgetower as the subject of Chapter 4, that Schmalfeldt keeps Bridgetower's name at the fore of the chapter and in reference to the sonata makes sense. Further, she is perhaps righting the error she finds in musicology's later omission of Bridgetower from history. Please see footnote 10 for more information.
6 Dahlhaus, Carl, Ludwig van Beethoven: Approaches to His Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 116–117Google Scholar.
7 Schmalfeldt explains further that, Hegel's term ‘aufheben’ ‘describes the result of the process of becoming. At the moment when one grasps that becoming has united a concept and its opposite, or negative, then all three elements – the one-sided concept, its opposite, and becoming itself – vanish. And what has become is a new moment – a stage, a synthesis – in which the original concept and its opposite are no longer fixed and separate, but rather identical, determinations, in the sense that the one cannot be thought, or posited, outside the context of the other. The original concept has thus been aufgehoben (p. 10)’.
8 Schmalfeldt uses this discussion to introduce her overall approach to creating musical examples for this book; by combining terminology and notation from Schenker and Schoenberg with those of her own creation, Schmalfeldt creates an effective analytic – both prose and notational – system to describe the processual nature of form in this repertoire.
9 Schmalfeldt affirms that works that include formal cyclicism – ‘a passage from one movement within a multimovement work overtly recurs in a later movement, thus affecting its large-scale form’ (p. 144) – present another interpretation of interiority in early Romantic music.
10 Beethoven and George Bridgetower met for the first time in Vienna in the spring of 1803. Bridgetower, a virtuoso violinist based in England, performed Beethoven's Violin Sonata No. 9, Op. 47, which the composer had hastened to complete upon hearing Bridgetower perform on 24 May 1803. In one of his manuscripts of the work, Beethoven pencilled in a dedication to the violinist; after an argument between the two musicians, Beethoven officially dedicated the work to French violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer.
11 Very little has been published on Bridgetower in musicological scholarship. For further information, see the entry on Bridgetower in Grove Music Online (originally by George Grove, rev. Simon McVeigh), and Josephine R. B. Wright's ‘George Polgreen Bridgetower: An African Prodigy in England 1789–99’ The Musical Quarterly 66/1 (1980): 65–82.
12 Su Yin Mak, review of Schmalfeldt, Janet, In the Process of Becoming: Analytic and Philosophical Perspectives on Form in Early Nineteenth-Century Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar, Journal of Music Theory 57/1 (2013): 156.
13 Seth Monahan, review of Schmalfeldt, Janet, In the Process of Becoming: Analytic and Philosophical Perspectives on Form in Early Nineteenth-Century Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar, Music Theory Online 17/3 (2011): 2–3.
14 Mak, review, 153.
15 Mak, 153, Monahan, 2.
16 At the end of her Introduction, Schmalfeldt carefully outlines her approach to each chapter, including ‘the performer as doer’ (p. 20) in Chapters 4 and 5, the application of Adorno's belief about the potential of musical form to reflect and affect contemporary social norms in Chapter 6 with her discussion of ‘inwardness’ in Schubert's music, and her biographical approach to Mendelssohn in Chapter 7, among others (pp. 20–21).
17 Mak, 153.
18 Mak, 157.
19 In this chapter, Schmalfeldt discusses the first movement of Haydn's String Quartet in C Major, Op. 33, No. 3 (pp. 62–8), the Finale to Haydn's Piano Trio in C Major (pp. 68–73), the first movement of Clementi's Piano Sonata in F Minor, Op. 13, no. 6 (pp. 73–80), and the Trio in B-flat in the first Act of Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro (pp. 80–86).