More about the GSWP

Workshop 1: SONATA THEORY

Instructors: Warren Darcy and James Hepokoski

Sonata Theory is a new genre-based approach to the study of sonata-form movements and the larger workings of multimovement sonatas, symphonies, and chamber music of the classical period. Late 18th-century sonatas are most productively heard within the context of a broad, flexible background knowledge of standard compositional options. Individual works within this genre interact with normative expectations of what is most likely to occur at each point in the form. This workshop explores this methodology as an analytical lens to examine sonata-based works from the classical era.

WARREN DARCY is Professor of Music Theory and former Director of the Division of Music Theory at the Oberlin College Conservatory. He has lectured and published widely on Wagnerian opera, and his book Wagner's “Das Rheingold” (Oxford, 1993) won the Society for Music Theory's 1995 Wallace Berry Award. He has also published on Bruckner and Mahler, and is co-author with James Hepokoski of Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata.

JAMES HEPOKOSKI, Professor of Music at Yale University, specializes in formal structure and hermeneutic issues in sonata-form-based repertories, ca. 1750-1920. He is the author of five books and numerous articles in a variety of areas, including Italian opera (Verdi), early-modernist composers (Sibelius, Strauss, Elgar), American and Germanic music-historical methodologies, and current literary-critical/cultural approaches to music. He was a co-editor of the journal 19th-Century Music from 1992 to 2006.