Who among us has not thought it, said it aloud, even declared it to our students: “Classical sonata form evolved from earlier binary designs”? But do we know what this really means, or how it might have occurred? Yoel Greenberg argues that music scholars have been using the right metaphor, but in the wrong way; we have relied on an outdated understanding of how evolution works, leading to histories of musical form that flatten complex and unruly processes into tidy, linear narratives. Greenberg’s brilliantly imaginative How Sonata Forms updates our understanding of evolution in order to impart better tools for appreciating how musical forms come into being—especially through “bottom-up” or self-organizing principles.
Biologists after Darwin tended toward an “essentialist” or “top-down” understanding of evolution and natural selection, in which the reified organism is the privileged whole that all parts serve. But this turned out to be a sticking point for...
University of California Press