Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:57:18am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Analysis in Romantic Music Session Chair: Michael Weinstein-Reiman, University of Wisconsin–Madison | |
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Developmental Ternary Form in Late-Romantic Character Pieces N/A Two conceptions of “poetic” instrumental music competed in early nineteenth-century aesthetics. For Ludwig Tieck, poetry inhered in thematic disquisition—music “composing and explicating its own poetry” through instrumental argument. For Hegel, it inhered in melody as a “language of the soul,” an expressive utterance prior to thematic working-out (Dahlhaus 1989, 142–144). This paper argues that certain late Romantic piano pieces reconcile these positions through what I call developmental ternary form: a form that adopts sonata-like developmental logic while retaining the lyric, single-theme conception of salon character pieces. Developmental ternary form is a variation on William Caplin's small ternary model (Caplin 1998). The exposition (A) presents a single theme that modulates to the dominant, the B section expands Caplin’s contrasting middle into a full development section, and the recapitulation (A’) resolves the exposition's open tonal plan by concluding with a perfect authentic cadence in the tonic. The result parallels sonata form's three action zones—exposition, development, recapitulation—without introducing the secondary theme essential to sonata form proper (Hepokoski and Darcy 2006, 23–24). While Caplin notes that sonata developments are "a higher-level analogue to the contrasting middle" (1998, 139), the continuum between these formal functions remains undertheorized. Through form-functional analysis of works including Amy Beach’s Op. 23, Heinrich Schenker’s Op. 4, No. 5, and Sergei Bortkiewicz’s Op. 13, No. 5, I demonstrate their commitment to formal process reflective of nineteenth-century sonata form within the scope of character pieces. This taxonomy illuminates how Romantic composers mediated between the aesthetic poles Tieck and Hegel represent. Developmental ternary form domesticates sonata's disquisitive logic within the compressed, lyric frame of the character piece, producing a hybrid genre attuned to the processual, narrativized quality of nineteenth-century formal thought. It thus reconciles the "mutually exclusive" impulses Dahlhaus identifies—the "learned" sonata style and "conversational" salon style—exemplifying a broader tendency: the absorption of large-scale formal procedures into intimate genres, yielding works whose artifice remains present but concealed beneath an expressive surface. | |