Many have noted nineteenth-century composers' tendency to undermine crucial formal boundaries normally found in eighteenth-century sonata forms. This dissertation examines phenomena that undermine the demarcation between the expositional secondary theme and closing section. In this document I refer to such events as "S-C Complications." In their Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata (2006), James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy argued that this point of articulation plays a much more crucial role than that of merely forming a boundary between S- and C-space. Rather, it serves as the goal for the entire expositional trajectory, a goal whose presence is felt from the very outset of the movement. The authors refer to this moment as "essential expositional closure," or EEC. In this dissertation I attempt to show what role EEC in Hepokoski and Darcy's sense plays in nineteenth-century movements featuring S-C Complications. I conclude that nineteenth-century composers were very likely aware of the EEC's genre-defining status since they consistently and systematically undermined it. Further, whereas in the late-eighteenth-century repertoire S-C complications were rarely employed, in the nineteenth century they became more normative, and thus non-deformational. In addition to discussing the phenomena's dialogic relationship with eighteenth-century norms, I also address their effect on tonal structure and formal syntax, concluding that S-C Complications frequently have the effect of expanding closure beyond the scope of one cadence. For practical reasons I have limited the scope of this study to non-concerto movements written primarily by Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Brahms.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:arizona.edu/oai:arizona.openrepository.com:10150/333483 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Jenkins, Kyle Joseph |
| Contributors | Pomeroy, David Boyd, Pomeroy, David Boyd, Rosenblatt, Jay, Traut, Donald |
| Publisher | The University of Arizona. |
| Source Sets | University of Arizona |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text, Electronic Dissertation |
| Rights | Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. |
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