Elements of Sonata Theory

James Hepokoski is Professor of Music at Yale University. His research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century music, musical form, hermeneutics, and historiography. Warren Darcy is Professor of Music Theory at Oberlin College Conservatory. His book Wagner's Das Rheingold (Oxford, 1993) won the Society for Music Theory's Wallace Berry Award in 1995.

1. Contexts
2. Sonata Form as a Whole: Foundational Considerations
3. The Medial Caesura and the Two-Part Exposition
4. The Continuous Exposition
5. The Primary Theme
6. The Transition (TR)
7. The Secondary Theme (S) and Essential Expositional Closure: Initial Considerations
8. S-Complications: EEC Deferral and Apparent Double Medial Caesuras (TMB)
9. The Closing Zone (C)
10. The Development (Developmental Space)
11. The Recapitulation (Recapitulatory Space; Recapitulatory Rotation)
12. Non-Normative Openings of the Recapitulatory Rotation: Alternatives and Deformations
13. Parageneric Spaces: Coda and Introduction
14. Sonata Form in Minor Keys
15. The Three- and Four-Movement Sonata Cycle
16. Sonata Types and the Type 1 Sonata
17. The Type 2 Sonata
18. Rondos and the Type 4 Sonata
19. The Type 5 Sonata: Fundamentals
20. The Type 5 Sonata: Mozart's Concertos (R1: The Opening Ritornello)
21. The Type 5 Sonata: Mozart's Concertos (Solo and Larger Expositions: Solo 1 + Ritornello 2)
22. The Type 5 Sonata: Mozart's Concertos (Development and Recapitulation: From Solo 2 through Ritornello 4)
Appendix 1. Some Grounding Principles of Sonata Theory
Appendix 2. Terminology: "Rotation" and "Deformation"