The tone of the debates among Caplin, Hepokoski, and Webster (in the form of comments on each author''s essay and then responses to the comments), though tactful, is obliquely blunt and tendentious; like the best of tennis pros, each author strives to serve an ace and defends the net against a passing shot (with Caplin, the ace is for formal function; with Hepokoski for Sonata Theory and dialogic form; with Webster for multivalent analysis). But we can trust that this provocative exchange will thoroughly invigorate discussions about classical form and encourage diverse approaches to its analys.

There is a strong tradition of literary analyses of the musical artwork. Simply put, all musicology - any writing about music - is an attempt at making analogies between what happens within the world of sound and language itself. This study considers this analogy from the opposite perspective: authors attempting to structure words using musical forms and techniques. It's a viewpoint much more rarely explored, and none of the extant studies of novelists' musical techniques have been done by musicians. Can a novel follow the form of a symphony and still succeed as a novel? Can musical counterpoint be mimicked by words on a page? Alan Shockley begins looking for answers by examining music's appeal for novelists, and then explores two brief works, a prose fugue by Douglas Hofstadter, and a short story by Anthony Burgess modeled after a Mozart symphony. Analyses of three large, emblematic attempts at musical writing follow. The much debated 'Sirens' episode of James Joyce's Ulysses, which the author famously likened to a fugue, Burgess' largely ignored Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements, patterned on Beethoven's Eroica, and Joyce's Finnegans Wake, which Shockley examines as an attempt at composing a fully musicalized language. After these three larger analyses, Shockley discusses two quite recent brief novels, William Gaddis' novella Agap?gape and David Markson's This is not a novel, proposing that each of these confounding texts coheres elegantly when viewed as a musically-structured work. From the perspective of a composer, Shockley offers the reader fresh tools for approaching these dense and often daunting texts.

Cadence explores the many ways in which the component parts of a classical composition achieve a sense of ending. The book examines cadential practice in a wide variety of musical styles in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including works by well-known composers such as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, and Brahms.

The first comprehensive study of musical form in operatic and concert overtures in continental Europe between 1815 and 1850.

Cadence is a comprehensive examination of how formal units in European art music of the tonal era achieve closure. The book brings together the author's decades-long investigations into cadence, a compositional device that is readily experienced both by musicians and non-musicians, but one that has proven intractable to clear and precise theoretical formulation. Rooted in Caplin's broader theory of formal functions, the book first develops concepts of cadence for music of the high classical style and then extends these ideas to gauge cadential practice in earlier and later style periods. Throughout the study, various manifestations of cadence are defined in terms of their morphology (their harmonic and melodic profiles) as well as their function (the specific formal contexts in which they are deployed). Cadence introduces a host of theoretical concepts illustrated by copious musical examples, all of which contain extensive analytical annotations of harmony, melody and form. Though the book is addressed primarily to music theorists, the many issues of compositional practice raised in this study will resonate with the interests of composers, historians, and performers alike.

Building on ideas first advanced by Arnold Schoenberg and later developed by Erwin Ratz, this book introduces a new theory of form for instrumental music in the classical style. The theory provides a broad set of principles and a comprehensive methodology for the analysis of classical form, from individual ideas, phrases, and themes to the large-scale organization of complete movements. It emphasizes the notion of formal function, that is, the specific role a given formal unit plays in the structural organization of a classical work.