International Conference on Musical Form Durham University, 21–23 June 2021

Abstract

The 2021 International Conference on Musical Form, originally planned to take place in Newcastle in 2020 but eventually held online a year later, presented a rich array of topics related primarily to smallto large-scale aspects of musical forms and structures. The conference, supported by the Society for Music Analysis Formal Theory Study Group, included ten sessions, two keynote talks, a poster session and a roundtable. The historical range of works under consideration was likewise amply varied, with talks and sessions dedicated to the music of leading nineteenth-century figures such as Liszt, Wagner and Bruckner and their cultural milieu, to the music of fin-de-siècle Vienna, to post-1900 music by Elgar and Debussy, and to a few later twentieth-century composers. Some of the talks, and especially the posters, went beyond the typical purview of formal analysis to consider other repertories, such as pop music, R&B, Brazilian music and more. This variety notwithstanding, many of the papers presented at the conference were directed at the music of the so-called ‘long eighteenth century’. Readers of this journal would have presumably found special interest in talks related to this latter group, most of which were included in the sessions ‘Classical Form’, ‘History of Formenlehre’ and ‘Beethoven and the Romantic Generation’, discussed below. In her paper ‘Do Musical Forms Migrate? – Aspects of the Popularization and Distribution of the Small Rounded Two/Three-Part Form in Europe of the 18th Century’ – which is a part of a larger corpus study dedicated to Viennese music – Beate Kutschke (Universität Salzburg) offered a possible musical link between the cultural centres of London and Vienna. Specifically, Kutschke argued that SRTTF (small rounded two/three-part forms), which were immensely popular in collections of folksong, popular song, dance and ballad opera published in 1710s–1760s London (especially those featuring numbers from The Beggar’s Opera), later inspired similar formal conventions in instrumental works of the so-called Viennese classical style. In ‘Reinforcing Weak Expositional Midpoints Using Extra-Formal Insertions’ Rebecca Long (University of Louisville) examined two peculiar slow movements from Luigi Boccherini’s early string quartets Op. 2 (published in 1767), found in the quartets G163 and G159. In both, the separation between the primary theme and the transition is obscured. The prevalence of similar expositional procedures in Boccherini’s later works is worth further examination. In his eloquent paper ‘The Sonata-Fugue Hybrid in Haydn’s Early Symphonies’ Carl Burdick (University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music) put forward a fresh reading of Haydn’s use of fugal strategies in his early symphonies, focusing on No. 3 (c1760–1762) and No. 40 (1763). As Burdick convincingly demonstrated, in his ‘sonata-fugue hybrid’ Haydn fuses principles of fugal continuity with rotational patterns, which not only went hand in hand with his penchant for monothematicism but also contributed to his experiments with continuous expositions and altered recapitulations. The short title of the paper given by Matthew Arndt (University of Iowa), ‘Was ist Satz?’, stood in stark contrast to its ambitious scale. Arndt re-examined the elusive meanings of the term ‘Satz’, and, drawing on linguistic and grammatical definitions, as well as on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s