Music & Letters, Vol. 89 No. 4, ß The Author (2008). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. doi:10.1093/ml/gcn043, available online at www.ml.oxfordjournals.org Review-Article SONATA PRINCIPLES BY MATTHEW RILEY* TEXTBOOKS ON SONATA FORM have long been out of fashion. The phrase ‘sonata form’ was coined by nineteenth-century pedagogues and today it is widely held that their work poorly models eighteenth-century practice and deviates from the concerns of eighteenth-century theory. Much modern scholarship on the period has been devoted to overcoming the nineteenth-century legacy. Donald Francis Tovey and Leonard Ratner led the way, 1 and in their wake there developed a pervasive scepticism towards all definite rules for late eighteenth-century sonata composition: there is always an exception to the rule, and it is often a masterpiece. So James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy’s Elements of Sonata Theory is a bold statement. 2 It is palpably a textbook, at times even resembling a technical manual (text printed in double columns,‘troubleshooting’ sections for the student). Its dimensions are monumental (661 pages), its treatment a model of rigour, its coverage of the standard repertory extensive. The book presents a novel method for the analysis of late eighteenth-century sonatas, albeit one that has been trailed in earlier journal articles. Its arguments will take years, if not decades, for scholarship to absorb and digest, and it opens countless possibilities for future research that music theorists are unlikely to ignore. It seems that nineteenth-century Formenlehre has made a surprise comeback at the start of the twenty-first century. But there is a vital difference: although the authors seek to relegitimize the use of norms, types, and rules for the analysis of late eighteenth-century sonata movements, they do so by way of twentieth-century literary theory. The sonata norms and types they propose are not conceived as transcendent ideals, and the existence of exceptions is to be expected. Norms are inferred inductively from common practice and are understood to regulate generic contracts between composer and listener; actual sonatas are in dialogue with these norms. At each stage of a sonata movement the composer can select from various default options (first-level, second-level, and so on), and the analyst must examine and interpret these choices. The deliberate breaking of a contractça more decisive step than the selection of a low-level defaultçamounts to a sonata ‘deformation’, which is all the more significant for interpretation. The authors dispute what they see as the excessively tonal orientation of mid-twentieth-century *University of Birmingham. Email: m.j.riley@bham.ac.uk. 1 For instance, Donald Francis Tovey,‘Beethoven’s Art-Forms’, in Beethoven (London, 1944), 73^95; Tovey, ‘Sonata Forms’, in The Forms of Music: Musical Articles from the Encylopaedia Britannica (London, 1957), 208^32; Leonard Ratner, ‘Harmonic Aspects of Classic Form’, Journal of the American Musicological Society , 11 (1949), 159^68. 2 James Hepokoski andWarren Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms,Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth- Century Sonata. pp. xx þ 662. (Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 2006, »45. ISBN 978-0-19-514640-0.) 590