The scholarly literature making use of William Caplin's form theory is growing, if slowly. Some recent examples include Nathan Martin's "Schumann's Fragment," in Indiana Theory Review 28 (2010); Steven Vande Moortele's "Sentences, Sentence Chains, and Sentence Replication: Intra- and Interthematic Formal Functions in Liszt's Weimar Symphonic Poems," in Intégral 25 (2011); and Matthew Riley's "Haydn's Missing Middles," in Music Analysis 30 (2011).
Almost all of the work, so far as I can tell, has focused on extending the reach of the method deeper into the nineteenth century--even into the early twentieth. This tendency includes a rumored forthcoming book by Caplin himself. My interest, on the other hand, was originally in expanding the available style knowledge for the Vienna School composers by looking at their social dance repertoires. Obviously, their published work on its own is inadequate to describe the actual practice of music played for social dancing, but it is what we have. I worked out pages with analyses of menuets, German dances, and Laendler by Beethoven: WoO7, WoO8, WoO11, WoO14, and WoO15; and contredanses by Mozart and Beethoven (all of these were accessible from a website, but the server has been decommissioned). This work was extended to a few contemporaries, notably Czerny, Hummel, Marschner, and Weber.
The principal results to date are that the historical narrative charting a turn from the period theme to the sentence over the course of the Vienna School heyday, or roughly 1770-1830, is incorrect. The period does become much more prevalent at one historical moment -- about 1770, when the French style of contredanse became popular in Vienna. (This was due to the fact that French contredanse music was heavily oriented to the gavotte, whose dance figures effectively required an antecedent-consequent design in the music.) But even after 1770, the period co-existed with other theme types, including the sentence and the hybrid antecedent-continuation. The latter, in fact, was far more congenial to the menuet than was the period, for the reason that the dance emphasized variety of detail, and a theme with antecedent-continuation offers more variety than any other theme type. Indeed, if the composer chooses, every 2-bar unit of this theme can be different: basic idea followed by a contrasting idea, followed by another idea (or fragmentation of a new model), followed by the generic cadence. (Its antipode is the hybrid presentation-consequent, a type so rare in the Vienna School repertoire that Caplin deletes it. It does, however, have a role to play in the Laendler repertoire, which tends to emphasize sameness within strains but contrast between strains.)
As the preceding suggests, once the influence of the French contredanse was established, I wanted to look into earlier dance repertoires. To date, this work has extended as far back as the English country dances in the Playford collections, which confirm the variety of theme types (sentences are surprisingly common, for example) but also highlight the extent to which French court dance practices tended to reduce the number of available theme types.
In the course of all this work, I have also realized that Caplin's catalogue of theme types does not work as well as one would like for some of the subtler idea and phrase length figures common in the social dance repertoire, and my goal over the next few months is to revise (or expand) his taxonomy to account for these, the goal continuing to be to acquire useful style information.
