S-C Complications in Nineteenth-Century Sonata Movements

Abstract

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.