Administrative

This blog is now closed to new content. In a post in March 2014/updated in October 2014, I wrote that in expanding work beyond my original blog,  Hearing Schubert D779n13, posts relating to dance-music designs (that is, musical forms) would be placed here and that the focus would be on William Caplin's form theory and its literature. (Link to Wikipedia article on Caplin. Link to Caplin's personal website.)

I have also published several essays on formal designs in music for dance and related music for performance and pedagogy. These are on the Texas ScholarWorks platform and include:

Cotillon after Schubert, with audio  (2015)

An episode from a cotillon as Franz Schubert might have played it in the 1820s. UT-Austin doctoral student Josh Straub is the pianist in the audio file.

Dance and Dancing in Schubert's Vienna (2015)

This file has six parts: the first concerns dancing in Vienna and dance music genres during the brief period between the Congress of Vienna and the July Revolution in France (1815-1830). The second part brings the focus ...

Dance Designs in 18th and Early 19th Century Music  (2015)

A study of harmony and formal functions in dance music of the 18th and early 19th centuries. The data and analyses are also intended to supplement the form theory presented in William E. Caplin, Classical Form: A Theory ...

Form Functions in Menuets by Beethoven and Others, 1770-1813  (2016)

This article adds further documentation for the claim that dance musics in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century were not dominated by the classical symmetrical period but were in fact written in a variety of thematic ...

Formal Functions in Menuets by Johann Sebastian Bach  (2017)

The menuet entered into upper-class social dance, ballet, and opera no later than the 1660s, thanks largely to Jean Baptiste Lully. This essay charts formal functions (after Caplin) in named menuets by Johann Sebastian ...

Formal Functions in Menuets by Mozart, Part 1: Orchestral Works and Independent Sets 

A study of formal functions (after Caplin) in named menuets by Mozart, the larger goal being to historicize more fully form-design practices in European music during the second half of the eighteenth century, especially ...

Titles of Parts 2-7:

Part 2: Sonatas and Chamber Music.
Part 3: A Comparison with Johann Christian Bach.
Part 4: His Older Contemporaries, to 1770.
Part 5: More to Theoretical Issues.
Part 6: Contemporaries, 1771-1780.
Part 7: Contemporaries and Successors, 1780-1828.