Abstract
AbstractThis chapter imagines what a musical form that emerged bottom-up would look like. It proposes a process of self-organization rather than design, a “combinatory evolution” of sonata form, driven by the chance meeting of formal elements, rather than their deliberate combination to realize a governing formal ideal. Using an abstract model, it demonstrates how independent local formal elements may converge to create the right conditions for musical form, provided they appear commonly enough. It then discusses the aversion to reductionism in the study of creativity, and seeks to justify it nonetheless when studying musical grammar and form. The chapter concludes by considering the concept of independence between formal elements, and the way we might expect sonata forms to behave if they were independent.
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