Review of Janet Schmalfeldt: In the Process of Becoming: Analytical and Philosophical Perspectives on Form in Early Nineteenth-Century Music (Oxford University Press, 2011)

[1] This has been a banner season for the "Tempest" sonata. In 2009, Peeters published a widely read volume of essays that explored the unique analytical and performative challenges of Beethoven's op. 31, no. 2.(1) In that same year, members of the Society for Music Theory (SMT) had occasion to see several leading lights of the new Formenlehre, William Caplin, James Hepokoski, and Janet Schmalfeldt, go head-to-head with competing interpretations of the sonata's notoriously ambiguous opening movement.(2) Now, the "Tempest" provides the point of departure for Schmalfeldt's much-anticipated essay collection, In the Process of Becoming: Analytical and Philosophical Perspectives on Form in Early Nineteenth-Century Music.[2] Schmalfeldt has written about the opening of the "Tempest" before, of course. Her 1995 essay, "Form as the Process of Becoming: The Beethoven-Hegelian Tradition and the 'Tempest' Sonata," was a landmark text of both Beethoven reception and contemporary formal analysis. In addition to lending its title to the current volume, that study appears here (with key additions) as Chapter Two, where it serves as the centerpiece of the book as a whole.(3) For it is in her "Tempest" analysis that Schmalfeldt most convincingly makes her case for the "processual" conception of form that is at the heart of her project.[3] As Schmalfeldt's readers know, this process-based understanding of the "Tempest's" opening movement is an inheritance from Dahlhaus, who regarded the work as a milestone of Beethoven's development and of nineteenth-century music in general. Spurred by its ostensible lack of a clear-cut primary theme-the mercurial, caesura-riven introduction seems to elide directly into the sonata transition-Dahlhaus came to believe that the work announced a fundamentally new formal impulse, one that "thwart[ed] and negated" the customary schematic-modular conception of sonata form (Dahlhaus 1989, 14).(4) Rather than offering the listener a series of discrete, easily-identifiable functional/thematic regions, this was a music whose "form" was nothing less than the work's own unique "process of coming into being" through the continuous transformation of its materials (1991, 118).[4] In making Dahlhaus's "processual" idea her own, Schmalfeldt does much to clarify and demystify an elusive and sometimes jargon-clouded concept. Throughout her study, a "process"-based approach to form generally signifies one whose aim is to uncover and articulate the ambiguities that arise when composers knowingly manipulate familiar functional signifiers (introductions, continuations, conclusions, and so on) in order to frustrate any simplistically schematic understanding of form. Most often, this involves the strategic dissolution of sectional boundaries. In the "Tempest" and elsewhere, Schmalfeldt is especially interested in situations where the listener can claim retrospectively to have traveled from functional region x to functional region y, but without being able to determine the precise moment when one gave way to the other. Relationships of this sort are indicated throughout with the "" symbol: e.g., "MT Transition" refers to a main theme that becomes a transition at some indeterminate point.(5)[5] Schmalfeldt is quick to stress that these innovations necessarily imposed new "participatory" demands on auditors of all sorts.(6) Deprived of the usual Formenlehre roadmaps, listeners would need to assess and reassess their positions within the unfolding musical argument more or less continuously, leading to a heightened state of engagement and the experience of form as an emergent father than fixed feature of the work.(7) At the same time, performers-"the most active of all listeners," by Schmalfeldt's reckoning (116)-would be entrusted more than ever to play "a determinative role in our understanding of the formal process" through the nuances of their interpretive choices (58). …