The Point

A sonata is a linear journey of tonal realization, onto which might be mapped any number of concrete metaphors of human experience. Since a central component of the sonata genre is its built-in teleological drive--pushing forward to accomplish a generically predetermined goal--the sonata invites an interpretation as a musically narrative genre. A sonata dramatizes a purely musical plot that has a beginning (P, the place from where it sets out with a specific tonal-rhetorical aim in mind), a middle (including a set of diverse musical adventures), and a generic conclusion of resolution and confirmation (the ESC and the subsequent music). It is in the nature of the sonata to set up a quest narrative. In addition to being required to display (or at least refer to) the interior, multitextured norms of sonata practice, a sonata must realize those norms coherently, in such a way as to move toward and secure the ESC and generic closure. This is a narrative that may be understood in exclusively music terms. In interpreting it, the present-day analyst need not appeal to nonmusical motivations. Still, the music of the period was widely perceived as having a human basis, whether in the emotions, in the intellect, in other schemes of representation or implication, or in various combinations of these.

A sonata is a metaphorical representation of a perfect human action. It is a narrative "action" because it drives through a cevtored sequence of energized events toward a clearly determined, graspable goal, the ESC. It is "perfect" because (unless artificially blocked from achieving the goal) it typically accomplishes the task elegantly, proportionally, and completely. It is "human" primarily within eighteenth-century European conceptions of humanness.

Darcy, Warren and James Hepokoski. 2006. Elements of Sonata Theory. New York City, New York: Oxford University Press. pp 251-252.

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I think I can make a pretty strong argument for a sonata progression of events in the movies, particularly in the shaping provided by Morricone's score. Now all I need to do is attempt to formulate my argument ...