7 - Formal dynamic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
BINARY-FORM BLUES
It is doubtful if the Scarlatti literature has been so consistently unilluminating as on the matter of form. Many writers have been mesmerized by the consistent use of balanced binary form in most of the sonatas, which has in various ways been seen as a problematic feature. (In balanced binary the material that closes each half matches and so creates a structural rhyme.) The musicological malaise about mid-eighteenth-century music has rarely been so apparent as in many of these discussions; they are underpinned by the sense of the composer as a transitional figure, with his use of binary form resting comfortably neither with the Baroque conception nor with the Classical sonata style that acts as the promised land. Indeed, a number of writers have explicitly characterized this issue as ‘the problem of form’, so conflating our problems of historical comprehension with a composer's-eye view of the formal means at his disposal.
A related perception concerns the ‘limitations’ of the binary form within which the composer is held to work. Thus the sonatas are ‘circumscribed formally’ and create a ‘mechanical impression’; the composer himself is ‘unadventurous in formal structures’, with even Pasquini and Alessandro Scarlatti showing ‘far greater variety of musical form’. This binary shaping has been seen as problematic or limited mainly because of the influence of one of the master narratives of eighteenth-century music historiography, the inexorable development towards sonata form.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003