Blurring the boundaries: Toward a multivalent reading of three first-movement sonata forms in Haydn's Op. 50 String Quartets
Date
2011
Authors
Duncan, Stuart Paul
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Musicological Explorations
Abstract
Haydn’s opus 50 quartets have long been overlooked in favor of their “progressive” neighbours, opuses 33, 42 and 64. Grave and Grave suggest that this is due to their “absorption in structural and textural complexity,” which seems to go beyond generic norms. Rather than attempting to understand this complexity, authors have tended to dismiss it, in part because Haydn’s approach in these quartets has seemed incompatible with existing methodologies. In particular, unusual approaches to opening movement sonatatype rhetoric have posed a problem for analysts, resulting in an incomplete analytical picture of individual works. Multivalent analysis, which foregrounds the individual characteristics of a movement in lieu of normative a priori-forms, offers an approach that is sensitive to the quartets’ complexity. Considering the notion of multivalence put forth by James Webster—in light of recent criticism by William Caplin and James Hepokoski—this paper examines three opening movements from the opus 50 collection through the lens of multivalent analysis.
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Citation
Duncan, S. P. (2011). Blurring the boundaries: Toward a multivalent reading of three first-movement sonata forms in Haydn's Op. 50 String Quartets. Musicological Explorations, 12, 5-40. https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/me/article/view/9207