Other Eighteenth-Century Approaches to Expositions

Abstract

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, some music commentators—including Francesco Galeazzi, A. C. F. Kollmann, and Franz Christoph Neubauer—reacted to recent stylistic trends in their discussion of music form. Accordingly, their writings placed greater emphasis on cadences (as opposed to resting points of various types), implied sections, and thematic character as vital elements for understanding musical form, thereby serving as harbingers for later discussions of musical form. Even so, their observations and descriptions of the section that modern terminology labels as the sonata-form exposition—as well as the works they choose as exemplars of the form—suggest a theoretic approach that differs in some telling ways from what is typical in modern accounts of sonata form.