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The Spatial Representation of Musical Form
Author(s): Mark Evan Bonds

Source: The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Summer 2010), pp. 265-303
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jm.2010.27.3.265
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The Spatial Representation
of Musical Form
M ark E van B onds
M usical form, no matter how one defines

that slippery term, is an abstraction. When we listen to a work of mu-
sic or look at a score we do not hear or see its large-scale form in any
immediate way; structural conventions such as sonata form, rondo, or
variations are reductive schemas derived from the totality of any given
work in which they happen to figure. When these schemas function as a
priori ideal types to which a given work can be compared, the degree of
abstraction—a pattern derived from many structurally similar yet diffe-
rent exemplars—is even greater. 265
How we represent the abstraction of form both reflects and shapes
the way in which we think about it. In the broadest terms, musical form
can be approached from two very different perspectives, one temporal,
one spatial. The temporal perspective conceives form as a diachronic
succession of events that unfold through time, whereas the spatial per-
spective conceives it as a synchronous entity. Representations of form
as a temporal construct, like the temporal conception of form itself,
Preliminary versions of this article were read at the conference

“Zyklus und Prozess: Haydn und die Zeit,” sponsored by the Insti-
tut für Analyse, Theorie und Geschichte der Musik, Universität
für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien, Vienna, January 2009; at
the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society, Phila-
delphia, PA, November 2009; and at Oxford University, Univer-
sity of Nottingham, and King’s College, London, February 2010.
I am grateful to William Caplin, Tim Carter, Gerhard Dohrn-van
Rossum, Annegret Fauser, Thomas McAuley, Michael Morse, and
Elaine Sisman for their comments and suggestions in conversa-
tions about this topic. J. Samuel Hammond (Duke University),
Philip Vandermeer (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill),
and Andrew Bonds (Lexington, VA) generously helped track
down several of the sources cited here.
The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 27, Issue 3, pp. 265–303, ISSN 0277-9269, electronic ISSN 1533-8347.
© 2010 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests
for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s
Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/
jm.2010.27.3.265.
JM2703_01.indd 265 8/6/10 10:02:21 AM

t he jo u rn al o f m u sic o l ogy
unfold through time by describing a series of events, a sequential de-

scription of what happens first, second, third, and so on. This approach
tends to treat form as process. Representations of form as a spatial con-
struct, by contrast, tend to treat form as a structure, typically relying on
synoptic two-dimensional diagrams that make the relationship of the
individual parts to the whole apparent in a single image.
These two perspectives are interdependent and by no means mu-
tually exclusive; any written narrative of a sequence of events occupies
space, and spatial depictions take time to absorb. Indeed, virtually ev-
ery account of form—either as an a priori construct or as applied to a
specific work of music—draws on both approaches to varying degrees.
Narratives that describe a series of events often rely on spatial imagery
(“a move to the dominant,” “a return to the principal idea”), and the
formal diagrams that are a standard feature of theoretical, analytical, and
pedagogical discourse today necessarily reflect the sequential disposition
of events in a work or movement. Form is both a process and a structure,
and accounts of form routinely acknowledge this dual nature.1
Yet these two approaches are not entirely complementary. The ten-
sion between form-as-process and form-as-structure has long been rec-
266 ognized, and it figures prominently in recent studies that demonstrate
just how profoundly discourse on music has been shaped by conceptual
analogies involving time and space.2 The ways in which these contrast-
ing conceptualizations of form have been represented proves particu-
larly revealing, for the synoptic diagrams we take for granted today
were in fact slow to emerge and slow to catch on. Not until 1825, when
Antoine Reicha (1770–1836) provided diagrams to supplement his ac-
counts of binary, ternary, and rondo forms in his Traité de haute composi-
tion musicale, did any critic or theorist attempt to depict musical form in
an essentially spatial manner (fig. 1).3 Reicha’s efforts, moreover, found
1 Recent examples that combine both approaches include James Hepokoski and
Warren Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-
Century Sonata (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); William E. Caplin, James He-
pokoski, and James Webster, Musical Form, Forms & Formenlehre: Three Methodological Reflec-
tions, ed. Pieter Bergé (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009).
2 Lawrence Zbikowski, Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), especially chap. 7 (“Competing Models of
Music: Theories of Musical Form and Hierarchy”); Michael Spitzer, Metaphor and Musical
Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). See also Zbikowski, “Metaphor and
Music,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, ed. Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 502–24; and Michael Spitzer, “The Metaphor of
Musical Space,” Musicae Scientiae 7 (2003): 101–20. On the tension between concepts of
form as process and as structure as early as the Middle Ages, see Fritz Reckow, “Processus und
structura: Über Gattungstradition und Formverständnis im. Mittelalter,” Die Musiktheorie 1
(1986): 5–29; I am grateful to Leo Treitler for calling my attention to Reckow’s essay.
3 Antoine Reicha, Traité de haute composition musicale, 2 vols. (Paris: Zetter, 1824–25).
Most bibliographic sources give 1826 as the date of volume 2, which contains the diagrams
JM2703_01.indd 266 8/6/10 10:02:21 AM

Bonds
figure 1. R
eicha’s “Grande coupe binaire” from his Traité de haute compo-
sition musicale, vol. 2 (1825), 300. Image courtesy of the Rare
Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke Uni-
versity, Durham, North Carolina
Première partie, ou exposition des idées. motif ou première
idée mère./pont ou passage d’une idée à l’autre./seconde
idée mère dans la nouvelle tonique./idées accessoires et con-
culsion de la premère partie.
Première section de la seconde partie. développement princi-
pal, en modulant sans cesse./arrêt sur la dominante primitive.
Seconde section. Motif initial dans le ton primitif./Quelques
modulations passagères avec les idées du pont./Transposi-
tion de la seconde tonique dans la tonique primitive, avec
des modifications./coda.
267
little resonance among his contemporaries. Even as simple a synoptic

diagram as a series of letters—something along the lines of A B A C A,
for example—would remain a rarity for another seventy-five years or so.
The spatial representation of form did not become a standard part of
discourse about form until the early twentieth century.
discussed here; the entire work was in fact reviewed in June of the previous year: Harmoni-
con 3 (1825): 108.
JM2703_01.indd 267 8/6/10 10:02:22 AM

Why did it take so long for such representations of musical form

to appear and then to gain acceptance? Theorists had certainly never
hesitated to depict other aspects of music in spatial terms, using dia-
grams and images to illustrate a variety of phenomena, from Pythago-
rean ratios to the division of the octave, from the Guidonian hand
to systems of temperament and tuning, from the system of modal
hexachords to the circle of fifths. In one particularly rich and well
known image from 1617, Robert Fludd’s “Divine monochord,” we see
the hand of the Almighty extending from a radiant cloud to tune a
monochord whose ratios project various proportions onto the con-
stituent elements of the solar system.4 Notation itself emerged out
of a certain sense of depicting melodic motion as both up-and-down
and left-to-right, as well as a system of graphically representing the dis-
tance between any two simultaneously sounding pitches. The abstrac-
tion of large-scale musical form nevertheless remained immune from
this tradition of spatial representation until the second quarter of the
nineteenth century.
This reluctance to depict large-scale form in spatial terms is all the
more striking when we consider the long-standing associations between
268 music and architecture. The Pythagorean doctrine, which made num-
ber and proportion the basis of both sound and matter, provided the
foundation for these parallels. Vitruvius, writing in the first century
BCE, repeatedly emphasized that architects must have a thorough un-
derstanding of music; and on the opening page of his Musica poetica
(1643), the composer and theorist Johann Andreas Herbst drew an
explicit parallel between composing a work of music and constructing an
edifice. A composer, Herbst maintained, goes about creating a musical
work in much the same way that “a master builder or carpenter” builds “a
house or any other kind of building,” leaving behind something to be ad-
mired by future generations.5 Almost a century later, Johann Mattheson
would use the same kind of imagery to introduce his discussion of how
a composer could create a large-scale whole: “Regarding now the dispo-
sitio, it is, first of all, a proper ordering of all the sections and elements
in the melody, or in an entire musical work, almost in the manner in
which one arranges a building and sketches out a draft or an outline,
4 These images and others like them have been reproduced many times: the ones
cited here are all available in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Thomas
Christensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 203 (Zarlino’s 1558 system
of tuning a monochord); 230 (Fludd’s divine monochord); 369 (the Guidonian hand);
390 (Glarean’s modal systems); 445 (Heinichen’s musical circle); 770 (Rameau’s division
of the octave).
5 Johann Andreas Herbst, Musica poëtica, sive, Compendium melopoëticum (Nuremberg:
Dümler, 1643), 1.
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Bonds
a ground-plan, in order to show where, for example, a hall, a room, a

chamber, etc., should be placed.”6
Similar analogies abound throughout the eighteenth century. In
the third edition of his Essay on Musical Expression (1775), Charles Avison
argued that “a musical composition, in this light, may not unaptly be
compared to the elevation of a building, where it is easy to discern what
are the proportions and ornaments suitable to each degree, or ascent,
in the elevation: and where the most common observer would laugh
at seeing their order inverted, and the heavy and plain Tuscan, crush-
ing down the light and delicate Ionic.”7 As in the case of Mattheson’s
“outline” or “ground-plan,” Avison’s “elevation” refers to a scale draw-
ing in which a three-dimensional object (a building) is rendered in
two-dimensional form. August Wilhelm Schlegel’s report of a conver-
sation with Carl Friedrich Zelter in June 1798 provides a particularly
rich example of the tendency to think of musical structure in terms of
space. Zelter, who was active as both composer and master mason, put
great emphasis on the foundational unity of music and architecture.
He is “truly a mason and musician at one and the same time,” Schlegel
observed in a letter to Goethe describing the meeting. “His discourses
are solid like walls, but his feelings are delicate and musical.” And al- 269
though Zelter conceded (according to Schlegel) that he “was not al-
ways able to build musically,” he insisted that “one must always compose
architectonically.”8 The notion of architecture as “frozen music” would
go on to become a commonplace in the nineteenth century; the image
can be traced back to the circle of the early Romantic philosophers
in Jena around 1800, which included Friedrich and August Wilhelm
Schlegel, Dorothea Schlegel, and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling,
6 Johann Mattheson, Kern melodischer Wissenschaft (Hamburg: Herold, 1737), 128:
“Was nun . . . die Disposition betrifft, so ist sie eine artige Anordnung aller Theile und Um-
stände in der Melodie, oder in einem gantzen musicalischen Wercke, fast auf die Art, wie
man ein Gebäude einrichtet, und abzeichnet, einen Entwurff oder Abriss machet, einen
Grund-Riss, um anzuzeigen, wo z. E. ein Saal, eine Stube, eine Kammer, und so weiter an-
geleget werden sollen.” Unless otherwise noted, all translations in this article are my own.
7 Charles Avison, An Essay on Musical Expression, 3rd ed. (London: Lockyer Davis,
1775), 29.
8 August Wilhelm Schlegel to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 10 June 1798, in August
Wilhelm Schlegel, Kritische Schriften und Briefe, vol. 6: Ausgewählte Briefe, ed. Edgar Lohner
(Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1974), 44: “weil er wirklich zugleich Maurer und Musiker ist.
Seine Reden sind handfest wie Mauern, aber seine Gefühle zart und musikalisch . . . und
obgleich er gestehen muß, daß er nicht immer musikalische bauen darf, so fordert er doch,
daß man durchaus architektonisch komponiere.” For further commentary on this and
other similar passages from many periods, see Anselm Gerhard, “‘A Musical Composition
May Be Compared to the Elevation of a Building’: Architekturmetaphern als Triebfedern
musikästhetischer Paradigmenwechsel,” in Musik und Raum: Dimensionen im Gespräch, ed.
Annette Landau and Claudia Emmenegger (Zurich: Chronos, 2005), 175–89.
JM2703_01.indd 269 8/6/10 10:02:22 AM

and it would be promulgated by such diverse figures as Goethe, Hegel,

and Schopenhauer.9
The conceptual parallels between musical form and space were
thus well established long before Reicha’s Traité de haute composition
musicale. Why, then, had no one seen fit to actually depict form in this
manner? The answer has to do in part with the conception of form as
a reductive abstraction, in part with the means by which such abstrac-
tions can be translated into spatial terms. More specifically, the spatial
representation of musical form rests on two basic premises. First, dif-
ferent manifestations of the same basic structure can be reduced to
and described on the basis of a set of common features that occur
in a more or less predictable sequence. In the case of rondo form,
for example, these features would include the repeated return of an
opening idea, with interjections of contrasting ideas along the way.
In the case of sonata form, these features would include a modulat-
ing exposition, a development section, and a recapitulation. Second,
this series of events can be represented synchronically. Or, to put it
another way: a sequence of temporal features can be represented in
a two-dimensional schema that reflects the relationship of the parts to
270 the whole synoptically.
The Reductive Concept of Form

The first of these premises—that large-scale conventional forms can
be identified and described on the basis of what they have in common—
was firmly in place by the end of the eighteenth century. Rousseau
(1768), Forkel (1779), and Koch (1793), for example, give accounts
of rondo form that agree in their essentials about what kind of thematic
and harmonic events will happen and in what order.10 The basic outlines
of a concerto movement in turn, with its alternation of ritornello and
solo sections, are described with a high degree of consistency by writers
such as Scheibe (1745), Quantz (1752), Kirnberger (1771), and Vogler
(1779).11 And although theorists of the eighteenth century differed
9 By far the most comprehensive survey of this topos is Khaled Saleh Pascha, “‘Ge-
frorene Musik’: Das Verhältnis von Architektur und Musik in der ästhetischen Theorie”
(Dr-Ing. Diss., Technische Universität Berlin, 2004).
10 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Dictionnaire de musique (Paris: Chez la veuve Duchesne,
1768), s.v. “Rondeau”; Johann Nikolaus Forkel, Musikalisch-Kritische Bibliothek, 3 vols.

(Gotha: Ettinger, 1778–79), 2:281–93; Heinrich Christoph Koch, Versuch einer Anleitung
zur Composition, 3 vols. (Rudolstadt: Löwische Erben; Leipzig: A. F. Böhme, 1787–93),
3:248–62.
11 Johann Adolph Scheibe, Critischer Musikus, rev. ed. (Leipzig: B. C. Breitkopf, 1745),
631–32; Johann Joachim Quantz, Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversière zu spielen (Ber-
lin: J. F. Voss, 1752), 294–97; Johann Philipp Kirnberger, “Concert,” in Johann Georg
Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste, 4 vols. (Leipzig: Weidemann, 1771–74); Georg
JM2703_01.indd 270 8/6/10 10:02:22 AM

Bonds
in their terminology, they clearly recognized the pattern we now call

sonata form. Using different vocabularies, Portmann (1789), Koch
(1793), Galeazzi (1796), Kollmann (1799), and Gervasoni (1800) de-
scribe a movement type that follows the same basic sequence of the-
matic and harmonic events, which in modern-day terminology consists
of a modulating exposition, a harmonically unstable development, and
a recapitulation in the tonic key.12
Koch’s description of the first movement of a symphony, for ex-
ample, attends precisely to the features we would use today to define
and describe sonata form in its broadest terms, and it presents those
features in the order in which they appear within a movement.
[Exposition]
§101. The opening Allegro of a symphony . . . has two sections. . . .
The first of these, in which the outline [Anlage] of the symphony is
presented—that is, the main melodic sections in their original order . . .
consists of only a single main period. . . . After the theme has allowed
itself to be heard with another main melodic section, it is in the third
melodic section that the modulation to the dominant (in the minor
mode also toward the mediant) normally begins, and the remaining 271
melodic sections are then presented, for the second and larger half of
this first period is devoted particularly to this key.
[Development]
§102. The second section of the opening Allegro consists of two main
periods, of which the first tends to feature quite varied kinds of con-
struction.
[Recapitulation]
§ 103. The last period of our opening Allegro, which is devoted primarily
to the tonic, generally begins with the opening theme once again, in
the tonic, but also occasionally with another main melodic section; the
principal phrases are now compressed, as it were, in that the modulation
normally moves toward the dominant but without cadencing soon
returns to the tonic. At last the second half of the first period (or those
Joseph Vogler, Betrachtungen der Mannheimer Tonschule 2 (Mannheim: n.p., 1779): 36–39;
Koch, Versuch, 3:327–42. See Jane R. Stevens, “An 18th-century Description of Concerto
First-Movement Form,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 24 (1971): 85–95; idem,
“Theme, Harmony, and Texture in Classic-Romantic Descriptions of Concerto First-Move-
ment Form,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 27 (1974): 25–60.
12 Johann Gottlieb Portmann, Leichtes Lehrbuch der Harmonie, Composition und des Gen-
eralbasses (Darmstadt: J. J. Will, 1789), 50; Koch, Versuch, 3:304–11; Francesco Galeazzi,
Elementi teorico-pratici di musica, 2 vols. (Rome: Pilucchi Cracas; M. Puccinelli, 1791–96),
2:258–59; Augustus F. C. Kollmann, An Essay on Practical Musical Composition (London:
Author, 1799), 5; and Carlo Gervasoni, La scuola della musica, 2 vols. (Piacenza: Nicolò
Orcesi, 1800), 1:467–68.
JM2703_01.indd 271 8/6/10 10:02:22 AM

melodic sections of the first period that had followed the phrase in the
dominant) is repeated in the tonic, and with this the Allegro concludes.13
What is important here for present purposes is not the substance

of Koch’s account, which has been discussed many times elsewhere, but
rather his method. Koch identifies those features that constitute, in ef-
fect, the lowest common denominators of a basic musical form, and he
describes the sequence of events that together constitute a conventional
large-scale structure. The descriptions of sonata form by Galeazzi, Koll-
mann, and Gervasoni follow very much the same pattern in describing
a sequence of specific events in a specific order.
The methodology of these accounts reflects what Karol Berger has
identified as a basic shift in the relationship between musical time and
form over the course of the eighteenth century. At some point between
Bach and Mozart, Berger argues,
musical form became primarily temporal and the attention of musi-

cians—composers, performers, and listeners alike—shifted toward the
temporal disposition of events. By Mozart’s time, the form of a musical
work is temporal; that is, it consists of a number of phases or parts that
272 succeed one another in a determined order. To understand such a
form requires recognizing how the object is divided into successive
phases and how the phases are related to one another and to the
whole—that is, recognizing the function each phase has in the whole,
in the transformation of a mere succession of unrelated elements into
a configuration of intelligibly related phases.14
13 Koch, Versuch, 3:304–11: “§101. Das erste Allegro der Sinfonie . . . hat zwey
Theile. . . . Der erste derselben, in welchem die Anlage der Sinfonie, das ist, die melodi-
schen Hauptsätze in ihrer ursprünglichen Folge vorgetragen . . . bestehet nur aus einem
einzigen Hauptperioden. . . . Nachdem das Thema sich mit einem andern melodischen
Haupttheile hat hören lassen, wendet sich gemeiniglich schon mit dem dritten melodi-
schen Theile die Modulation nach der Tonart der Quinte (in der weichen Tonart auch
nach der Terz) hin, in welcher die übrigen vorgetragen werden, weil die zweyte und grö-
ßere Hälfte dieses ersten Perioden besonders dieser Tonart gewidmet ist.
“§102. Der zweyte Theil des ersten Allegro bestehet aus zwey Hauptperioden, von
denen der erste sehr mannigfaltige Bauarten zu haben pflegt. . . .
“§ 103. Der letzte Periode unsers ersten Allegro, der vorzüglich der Modulation in der
Haupttonart gewidmet ist, fängt am gewöhnlichsten wieder mit dem Thema, zuweilen aber
auch mit einem andern melodischen Haupttheile in dieser Tonart an; die vorzüglichsten
Sätze werden nun gleichsam zusammen gedrängt, wobey sich die Modulation gemeinglich
in die Tonart der Quarte hinwendet, aber, ohne darinne eine Cadenz zu machen, bald
wieder in den Hauptton zurück kehrt. Endlich wird die zweyte Hälfte des ersten Perioden,
oder diejenigen melodischen Theile des ersten Perioden, die dem Quintabsatze in der
Quinte folgten, in dieser Haupttonart wiederholt, und damit das Allegro geschlossen.”
14 Karol Berger, Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Moder-
nity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 179. A similar perspective is evident
in Charles Rosen’s assertion that in the move from Baroque to Classical styles “dra-
matic sentiment was replaced by dramatic action.” See The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart,
Beethoven, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1997), 43.
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Bonds
This new perception of form rests on a growing sense of linear time

in music—that certain events happen in a certain predictable order
over the course of a movement or work. The nature of these events and
their precise order are susceptible to permutation, of course, but the
important point is the very premise that they can be described as a se-
quence of events in the first place. Indeed, it is precisely for this reason
that accounts of form as an abstract concept (independent of any text
to be set) first appear in the eighteenth century and not earlier. Johann
Mattheson’s description of an unidentified aria by Marcello in terms
of a six-part oration (exordium, narratio, propositio, etc.), first pub-
lished in his Kern melodischer Wissenschaft in 1737, represents the earli-
est attempt to describe musical form as a linear structure based on the
manipulation of an opening, central theme.15 Mattheson ignores the
text of this aria entirely and focuses solely on the music, with special at-
tention to the disposition—the ordering—of the musical ideas. Recent
scholarship has debated at length the implications of Mattheson’s anal-
ogies between rhetoric and music; once again, however, it is the struc-
ture of his argument—the reductive concept of form as a series of more
or less predictable events—that is noteworthy. For all their differences,
Mattheson’s account of the structure of an aria and Koch’s description 273
of what we would now call a sonata-form movement follow essentially
the same method. Each describes a series of moves comparable to a
set of directions one might give a traveler moving from a starting point
to a destination (“Take the first right, then the second left,” etc.). This
descriptive, directional method of representing musical form, as we will
see, would predominate throughout the nineteenth century and into
the early twentieth.
It might be argued that a musical score is itself a graphic representa-
tion of form, a set of directions, as it were, for moving through a work or
movement. Yet there is nothing reductive or synoptic about a score or
even a reduced score, for it represents not an outline of the work but the
essence of the work or movement in its temporal entirety. A score does
not highlight the directional moves that determine its larger form: the
directional moves are there, to be sure, but they are in effect “hidden”
by the totality of the whole, by the continuous nature of any score, be
it full or reduced. When Koch wanted to illustrate how to construct an
entire movement out of smaller units, he used a reduced score (the first
15 Mattheson, Kern melodischer Wissenschaft, 128. Mattheson would reiterate this idea
two years later in his Der vollkommene Capellmeister (Hamburg: Herold, 1739), 235. Al-
though Berger does not mention Mattheson’s account, it supports his broader argument
about a move toward more linear conceptions of musical form. For further commentary
on Mattheson’s imagery, see Mark Evan Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Meta-
phor of the Oration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 82–90.
JM2703_01.indd 273 8/6/10 10:02:22 AM

violin part and a figured bass) of the sonata-form Andante of Haydn’s

Symphony No. 42 in D Major.16 This approach works well within Koch’s
essentially generative approach to form, for his goal at this point is not to
discuss sonata form per se, but rather to show how a beginning composer
might expand smaller musical units into larger ones and how to alter and
repeat these units of varying size. From this perspective, form unfolds as
a series of events, not as a structure that conforms to or departs from any
established pattern. Only later, toward the very end of the treatise, does
Koch speak about movement-length form as a whole, providing what
amounts to a “top-down” account of sonata form when he describes the
typical structure of the first movement of a symphony.17
Koch recognized the potential difficulties an aspiring composer
might face in making this kind of leap from the local and the global,
from the concatenation of discrete phrases to the large-scale conven-
tional patterns so common to the music of his time, and he addressed
this challenge at the beginning of volume 2 of the Versuch in his discus-
sion of the creative process. Koch stresses the need for composers to
consider the artwork both temporally and synoptically. His basic ap-
proach toward form is temporal: the composer constructs phrases or
274 sections of melody and articulates them through cadences of varying
strengths, all of which create (to varying degrees) “resting points of the
spirit” (Ruhepunkte des Geistes). But at some moment in the creative pro-
cess, the composer must also be able to envision the work or movement
synoptically. And at this point in his account, Koch’s imagery becomes
almost entirely visual. No matter how many voices may be present in a
given work, he asserts, the “main features of these voices must arise in
the soul of the creative composer altogether as a single image.” One of
these voices, moreover, must “contain, as it were, the outline of a paint-
ing, the specific content of the ideal of the composer; this is what one
generally calls the main voice. Another voice provides him with the
basis of the harmonic weave, with which this image is completed,” or to
use Koch’s verb, ausgemalet—literally, “painted out.”18 Elsewhere, Koch
16 Koch, Versuch, 3:179–90. Koch’s reduced score breaks off after m. 63, with the
note: “From here on the second half of the first reprise, and specifically from m. 50 on-
ward, is repeated in the tonic.”
17 Koch, Versuch, 3:304–11. , The lengthy passage about the reductive structure of a
sonata-form movement (quoted in part above) appears in this later portion of the treatise.
18 Koch, Versuch, 2:3–4: “So viel Stimmen in einem Tonstücke vorhanden sind, eben
so viel verschiedene Melodien enthält hält also ein solches Tonstück. . . . Ob nun gle-
ich (wie wir in der Folge sehen werden) die Hauptzüge dieser Stimmen in der Seele
des schaffenden Tonsetzers zusammen als ein einziges Bild entstehen müssen, wenn die
eigentliche Absicht der Kunst erreicht werden soll, so sind dennoch diese Stimmen nicht
von einer und eben derselben Beschaffenheit, entstehen nicht aus einer und eben der-
selben Absicht. Eine derselben enthält gleichsam den Umriß des Gemäldes, den bestim-
mten Inhalt des Ideals des Tonsetzers, diese pflegt man die Hauptstimme zu nennen.
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speaks of the composer’s obligation to select from his inventive fantasy

only those thoughts that “cohere as a single, complete image [ein ein-
ziges vollkommenes Bild] in his soul.”19 Koch uses the same phrase once
again when he explains that the composer cannot consider the outline
(Anlage) of the work or movement complete until it has appeared to
him as “a single complete image.”20
The very concept of the Anlage—the plan or outline, what corre-
sponds more or less to the “form” of a work as the artist creates it—is
based on analogies from the visual arts. Koch acknowledges here his
indebtedness to Johann Georg Sulzer’s Allgemeine Theorie der schönen
Künste, which defines Anlage as “the representation [Darstellung] of the
essential components of a work, through which the work as a whole is
determined.” The Anlage is the disposition of a work’s central elements
or ideas; it is not the finished product, but rather the outline that pro-
vides the basis for the subsequent phases of Ausführung (elaboration)
and Ausarbeitung (refinement).21
Lest this seem overly abstract and unrelated to the spatial repre-
sentation of form, we should note that Koch’s account of the musical
Anlage is entirely consistent with extant physical and anecdotal evidence
of Joseph Haydn’s compositional process. Based on interviews with the 275
elderly composer, Georg August Griesinger reported that Haydn laid
out the most prominent points (hervorstechende Stellen) of a movement
spatially, at key points across an expanse of ruled note paper, and then
filled in the rest at a subsequent stage: “Haydn completed his compositi-
ons in one sweep. He set down the entire plan of the principal voice in
each section by indicating the most prominent points with a few notes
or ciphers; afterward he breathed spirit and life into this dry skeleton
by adding the accompaniment of other voices and adroit transitions.”22
Eine andere dient ihm zum Grunde des harmonischen Gewebes, womit dieses Bild ausge-
malet wird” (emphasis added).
19 Koch, Versuch, 2:55: “Dieser Ueberfluß an Gedanken sollte eigentlich dem Ton-
setzer nicht nachtheilig seyn, weil er die schönsten und die zu seiner Absicht schicklich-
sten wählen kann; demohngeachtet sezt ihn dieser Ueberfluß oft in Verlegenheit, weil
gemeiniglich in diesem Falle verschiedne dieser Theile die der Componist zu seiner Absi-
cht für die schönsten hält, sich nicht schicklich genug verbinden lassen wollen, sobald sie
sich zusammen als ein einziges vollkommenes Bild in der Seele des Tonsetzers vereinigen
sollen.”
20 Koch, Versuch, 2:57–58: “Man wird nun die Ursachen einsehen, warum ich
bey der Anlage eines Tonstücks verlange, daß 1) die Haupttheile desselben mit ein-
ander schon in Verbindung gebracht seyn sollen, oder daß man diese Theile nicht eher
als Anlage betrachten darf, bis sie dem Tonsetzer als ein ganzes vollkommenes Bild
erscheinen.”
21 Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie, s.v. “Anlage.”
22 Georg August Griesinger, Biographische Notizen über Joseph Haydn (1810), ed. Karl-
Heinz Köhler (Leipzig: Philipp Reclam jun., 1975), 79: “Haydn verfertigte seine Kompo-
sitionen immer in einem Guß; er legte bei jedem Teil den Plan zur Hauptstimme ganz
JM2703_01.indd 275 8/6/10 10:02:22 AM

As Hollace Schafer demonstrated, the surviving continuity drafts in

Haydn’s hand confirm the essence of this account.23 The available sources
show that Haydn tended to notate significant passages or moments (the
hervorstechende Stellen) at physically separate points across the whole of a fo-
lio opening before connecting them musically. In the longest extant draft
for an instrumental movement, the finale of Symphony No. 99, for exam-
ple, Haydn notated the first theme (unremarkably enough) in the upper
left of a bifolio opening; before filling in the rest of the thematic and har-
monic material in the tonic and in the transition, however, he wrote down
the first theme in the secondary key area in the top left corner of the fac-
ing page. The upper left corner of the second folio opening in turn marks
the beginning of the second reprise—in modern parlance, the beginning
of the development section. Crucial formal junctures in the remainder
of the movement, including the retransition and the recapitulation, were
also set down in advance as hervorstechende Stellen.
A similar pattern is evident in the break between the unfinished
exposition and the beginning of the development section in the sketch
of the slow movement of the String Quartet in G Minor, op. 20 no. 3.24
This sequence of events in the notation of compositional ideas suggests
276 at least some notion of a spatial concept of form, even if the outline was
eventually eradicated, as it were, by the filling-in of material connecting
these structural points in the finished score. (The surviving sketches
and drafts from Mozart and Beethoven are respectively too fragmentary
or—paradoxically—too extensive to allow for similar deductions, but
this evidence probably tells us more about their working methods than
it does about their concepts of large-scale form.) Haydn’s sketches are
at the very least consistent with what Mattheson had described as an
architectural “outline” or “ground-plan,” with its disposition of various
rooms, and with what Avison had likened to the proportions in the “el-
evation” of a structure.
The spatial sense of form is particularly strong in A. F. C. Koll-
mann’s Essay on Practical Musical Composition (1799), which opens with
an overview of considerations the composer must take into account in
constructing the “plan” of the “piece to be composed.” Unlike Koch or
an, indem er die hervorstechenden Stellen mit wenigen Noten oder Ziffern bezeichnete;
nachher hauchte er dem trockenen Skelett durch Begleitung der Nebenstimmen und
geschickte Übergänge Geist und Leben ein.”
23 Hollace Ann Schafer, “‘A Wisely Ordered Phantasie’: Joseph Haydn’s Creative
Process from the Sketches and Drafts for Instrumental Music” (PhD diss., Brandeis Uni-
versity, 1987), 145–62.
24 See László Somfai, “‘Ich war nie ein Geschwindschreiber . . .’: Joseph Haydns
Skizzen zum langsamen Satz des Streichquartetts Hoboken III:33,” in Festskrift Jens Peter
Larsen, ed. Nils Schiørring, Henrik Glahn, Carsten E. Hatting (Copenhagen: Wilhelm
Hansen, 1972), 281.
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Galeazzi (or later, Reicha), Kollmann does not begin with an extended
discussion on the construction of melody; instead he launches straight
away into a description of large-scale structures. The resulting account
is unusually hierarchical in tone, creating a sense of form that one re-
cent scholar has aptly characterized as “static, almost spatial.”25
A similarly static and spatial representation of form is also evident
in the musical dice games that proliferated in the second half of the
eighteenth century. These enabled amateurs to write simple dance
forms, such as minuets, by drawing on a lengthy table of brief musical
motives (usually one measure long) keyed to a second table aligning
successive measures with all possible results of a throw of two dice (that
is, the numbers 2–12).26 These algorithms were invariably presented in
tabular form, and the resulting works can scarcely be said to represent
compositions of notable quality; still, the uppermost horizontal row of
any dice-game table, marking off the individual measures within the
course of a binary-form reprise, tacitly acknowledges the underlying
premise of a linear progression based on events that can and should
happen only at the beginning, middle, or end of a binary reprise.
By the end of the eighteenth century, then, theorists recognized
and accepted the basic premise of a linear, reductionist approach to 277
form, relying frequently on spatial imagery to describe the general out-
line or shape of a movement or work. Their basic approach to describ-
ing formal conventions amounted to a set of directions, a series of step-
by-step moves the composer could make to arrive at a large-scale whole.
Why, then, were there no diagrams—“maps”—of musical form to help
the aspiring composer at a time when directional accounts abounded?
Directions, after all, can also be conveyed through the medium of a
diagram or a map, which have the advantage of showing not only the
starting point, route, landmarks, and destination of a journey but the
proportional relationship of these points as well. The answer is that the
temporal (directional) conceptualization of form was necessary but not
sufficient to accommodate any sort of spatial representation of form
at this point. What was still lacking for the most part, even at the be-
ginning of the nineteenth century, was the second of the two prem-
ises identified earlier: the means by which to present diachronic events
synoptically.
25 Scott Balthazar, “Intellectual History and Concepts of the Concerto: Some Paral-
lels from 1750 to 1850,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 36 (1983): 63.
26 For an overview of these musical dice games, see Stephen A. Hedges, “Dice Music
in the Eighteenth Century,” Music & Letters 59 (1978): 180–87. For an extended discus-
sion of the Musikalisches Würfelspiel, K. Anh. C30.01, published under Mozart’s name by
J. J. Hummel in Amsterdam and Berlin in 1793, see Zbikowski, Conceptualizing Music,
140–54. I am grateful to Daniel R. Melamed for suggesting these dice games as a quasi-
spatial representation of musical form.
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The Spatial Representation of Events in Linear Time

The idea of projecting the passage of time onto the dimension of
space is at least as old as the sundial, the earliest exemplars of which are
believed to date from about 1500 BCE. Subsequent innovations in the
measurement of time, however—hourglasses, clocks, and calendars—
continued to operate within the concept of cyclical time, that is, time as
measured in discrete, recurring units. The rise and fall of the sun, the
grains of sand passing from one glass vessel to another, the hours in a
day, the months in a year: all of these could be repeated indefinitely.27
The spatial representation of events in linear time remained virtu-
ally unknown until the middle of the eighteenth century. The notion of
a simple timeline did not emerge until the 1750s, and even then only
tentatively.28 Until the early decades of the nineteenth century, the idea
of representing linear time in terms of space was by no means self-ev-
ident, as either a general principle or a means of conveying the syn-
chronic relationships of parts within a diachronic whole. Whereas a map
projects the dimension of space onto the dimension of space, a diagram
of musical form must project—or “map,” as the word signifies—the di-
mension of time onto space. This latter kind of projection, particularly
278
as it applies to the concept of linear time, required a conceptual leap
taken for granted nowadays.
What is generally recognized as the first timeline appeared in 1753
with the Carte chronographique of Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg (1709–79),
professor of pharmacy at the University of Paris, philosophe, and friend
of Benjamin Franklin. Barbeu-Dubourg’s “chronographical map” con-
sists of thirty-five engraved sheets that could be purchased either sepa-
rately or bound as a single scroll extending to a length of some fifty-
four feet. To facilitate viewing of the scroll, Barbeu-Dubourg had it
mounted between two large cylindrical cases made of papier-mâché on
a wooden frame, with handles that allowed the user to scroll back and
forth through the document, rolling it off one wooden dowel in a cas-
ing onto the other.29 The chart covers 6,480 years, from the moment of
27 See Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal
Orders, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

28 A few isolated precursors can be identified, but they either made no effort to match
linear time to space (e.g., the Bayeux Tapestry, family trees) or remained unknown for all
practical purposes before 1750. On these early and largely isolated attempts to map linear
time onto space, see Howard Gray Funkhouser, “Historical Development of the Graphi-
cal Representation of Statistical Data,” Osiris 3 (1937): 269–404. For a broader history of
graphic representations of time, see Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, Cartographies
of Time: A History of the Timeline (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010).
29 See Stephen Ferguson, “The 1753 Carte chronographique of Jacques Barbeu-
Dubourg,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 52 (1991): 190–230. In addition to Fer-

guson’s essay, selections from the carte chronographique have been reproduced elsewhere
many times, including Rosenberg and Grafton, Cartographies of Time, 112–13.
JM2703_01.indd 278 8/6/10 10:02:23 AM

Bonds
creation to 1753. The data include the reigns of monarchs, prominent

persons, and “memorable events,” all displayed synoptically, allowing
a viewer to see at once a cross-section of history at any given moment.
Diderot considered Barbeu-Dubourg’s invention important enough to
warrant its own entry in the Encyclopédie.30
More practical (and far less expensive) were the timelines in the
Chart of Biography issued in 1765 by the English polymath Joseph Priest-
ley (1733–1804). Priestley acknowledged the work of Barbeu-Dubourg
(at least obliquely) but reached a much wider audience. The Chart was
approximately three feet long and two feet wide, with more than 2,000
names entered across a span of time between 1200 BCE and the mid-
eighteenth century (fig. 2). Priestley’s spatial reduction of historical time
was well received: the Chart was re-engraved in 1770 and again in 1805,
and by 1840 had gone through no fewer than nineteen editions, includ-
ing four American, one Dutch, and one Italian.31
Priestley’s goals were chiefly pedagogical: he was serving at the time
as a tutor of modern languages and rhetoric at the Warrington Acad-
emy, in Cheshire. Yet even in this context, his explanation of how to
read these timelines is remarkable for its thoroughness:
279
As an example of the use of the chart, let any person but attend to the
black line which represents the life of Sir ISAAC NEWTON. He will see,
by the length, and situation of it, that that great man was born before
the middle of the seventeenth century, and lived till near the middle of
the eighteenth. He was born a few years after the death of LORD BACON,
and about as many before that of DESCARTES. He was a younger man
than BOYLE, whom he outlived many years; and Sir HANS SLOAN,
MONTFAUCON, ROLLIN, BENTLEY, and LeCLERC lived to about his
age, and were his contemporaries the greatest part of his life. Almost
any number of lives may be compared with the same ease, to the same
perfection, and in the same short space of time.32
This explanation may seem overly detailed if not altogether unneces-

sary. But that is precisely the point: the notion of representing time in lin-
ear fashion and superimposing various discrete events onto that line was a
new idea in the middle of the eighteenth century, and Priestley could not
30 Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. Denis Di-
derot et al., vol. 3 (Paris: Briasson, 1753), s.v. “Chronologique (machine).”

31 Joseph Priestley, “A Short Account of a Chart of Biography,” in his An Essay on
a Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life (London: C. Henderson, 1765). See
also Robert E. Schofield, The Enlightenment of Joseph Priestley: A Study of His Life and Work
from 1733 to 1773 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 128–34;
Arthur Sheps, “Joseph Priestley’s Time Charts: The Use and Teaching of History by Rational
Dissent in Late Eighteenth-Century England,” Lumen 18 (1999): 135–54; Daniel Rosen-
berg, “Joseph Priestley and the Graphic Invention of Modern Time,” Studies in Eighteenth-
Century Culture 36 (2007): 55–103.
32 Priestley, “A Short Account of a Chart of Biography,” second of three unpagi-
nated pages.
JM2703_01.indd 279 8/6/10 10:02:23 AM

figure 2. Priestley’s “Specimen of a Chart of Biography” from his “A

Short Account of a Chart of Biography” (1765)
280
assume that his readers would intuitively grasp the principle of mapping
time onto space. What we take for granted today was novel and more than
a little strange at the time. Priestley recognized not only the fundamental
nature of the problem but also the metaphorical link between the words
used to describe the domains of physical size and temporal duration.
As no image can be formed of abstract ideas, they are, of necessity,

represented in our minds by particular, but variable ideas; if an idea
be capable of quantity of any kind, that is, and if it admit of the modifi-
cation of greater and less, though the Archetype, as it is called, of that
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idea be nothing that is the object of our senses, it is nevertheless uni-

versally represented in our minds by the idea of some sensible thing.
Thus the abstract idea of TIME, though it be not the object of any of
our senses, and no image can properly be made of it, yet because it has
a relation to quantity, and we can say a greater or less space of time, it ad-
mits of a natural and easy representation in our minds by the idea of a
measurable space, and particularly that of a LINE; which, like time, may
be extended in length, without giving any idea of breadth or thickness.
And thus a longer or a shorter space of time may be most commodi-
ously and advantageously represented by a longer or a shorter line.
So natural and complete is the representation of different spaces of
time by lines of different lengths . . . that it is probable that all persons
whatever, without attending to it, actually have recourse to this method
whenever they compare two or more intervals of time in their minds. The
very epithets which, in all languages, are given to quantities of time do
both imply this method, and suggest the use of it. Long and short are so
universally applied to time, that, without particular reflection, it never
occurs to us that . . . they are borrowed from any other subject.33
The success of the Chart of Biography encouraged Priestley to apply

the same basic methods to his even larger New Chart of History and its
accompanying Description of a New Chart of History, both issued in 1769.
281
His applications of Barbeu-Dubourg’s principles found many imita-
tors in the ensuing decades.34 The most prominent of these was Adam
Ferguson (1723–1816), professor of natural philosophy at the Univer-
sity of Edinburgh and an associate of David Hume, Adam Smith, and
Henry Home, Lord Kames. In the second edition of the Encyclopedia
Britannica (1780), Ferguson presented an elaborate hand-colored cop-
per-plate engraving that he called a “Historical Chart Representing at
one view the rise and progress of the principal states & empires of the
known World.”35 Thomas Jefferson picked up the idea of representing
time in a linear fashion in his own private notes when he traced the
availability of a variety of vegetables in Washington markets in 1802.36
Curiously, the idea of representing the unfolding of temporal events
through the image of a line received an almost immediate send-up in the
first volume of Laurence Sterne’s novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram
Shandy, Gentleman, published in December 1759—that is, soon after
the appearance of Barbeu-Dubourg’s Carte chronographique and before
Priestley’s Chart of Biography. Sterne mocked the idea of any story being
told “in a straight line”:
33
Priestley, A Description of a Chart of Biography (Warrington:n.p., 1764), 5.
34
See Rosenberg, “Joseph Priestley,” 91–92, n. 30.
35 See Howard Wainer, Graphic Discovery: A Trout in the Milk and Other Visual Adven-
tures (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 50–51.

36 Wainer, Graphic Discovery, 44–46.
JM2703_01.indd 281 8/6/10 10:02:23 AM

Could a historiographer drive on his history, as a muleteer drives on

his mule,—straight forward;—for instance, from Rome all the way to
Loretto, without ever once turning his head aside either to the right
hand or to the left,—he might venture to foretell you an hour when
he should get to his journey’s end;—but the thing is, morally speak-
ing, impossible: For, if he is a man of the least spirit, he will have fifty
deviations from a straight line to make with this or that party as he
goes along, which he can no ways avoid. He will have views and pros-
pects to himself perpetually solliciting his eye, which he can no more
help standing still to look at than he can fly.37
figure 3. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy,

Gentleman, vol. 6 (1762), 152–53
282
37 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, vol. 1
(1759), chap. 14; the passage here follows the edition by Melvyn New and Joan New
(London: Penguin, 2003), 34.
JM2703_01.indd 282 8/6/10 10:02:24 AM

Bonds
figure 3. (continued)
283
Sterne would return to the absurdity of representing a narrative in a

straight line with graphic representations of his own at the end of vol-
ume 6, published in January 1762. Here, Sterne depicts—literally—the
lines of his narrative in the previous four volumes (fig. 3, above).
Sterne goes on two paragraphs later to add one more graphic: a
perfectly straight line, “which is a line drawn as straight as I could draw
it, by a writing-master’s ruler, (borrowed for that purpose) turning nei-
ther to the right hand or to the left.” Like all effective jests, Sterne’s hits
home because of an underlying truth: his own narrative, as reflected
in his irregular lines, is highly digressive; yet a narrative without digres-
sion of any kind—a straight line—cannot be much of a narrative. Even
before Priestley had popularized the timeline, then, Sterne had raised
the question of just how much could be conveyed by a simple straight
JM2703_01.indd 283 8/6/10 10:02:24 AM

line. It was one thing to show the birth and death dates of a historical
figure, or the reign of a particular king or queen, but quite another to
say something about that individual’s character or accomplishments in
graphic form.
Eighteenth-century scientists were no more amenable to represen-
tation of linear time in graphic form. The Cartesian coordinate system,
even though it had been available since the mid-seventeenth century,
remained largely in the realm of abstract mathematics, without practi-
cal applications.38 Even in the natural sciences, writers almost invariably
presented their data in tabular rather than in graphical form. One of
the rare exceptions to this rule was the German physicist Johann Hein-
rich Lambert (1728–77), who, while working at the court of Frederick
II, produced some of the earliest applications of the system of Carte-
sian coordinates.39 Like Priestley, Lambert took nothing for granted in
anticipating what his readers would make of this manner of displaying
data, and he, too, felt compelled to give what strike us today as tedious
explanations of what now seem like perfectly straightforward graphs.
Not until the 1830s, as one recent historian of science has observed,
could data “be displayed in graphical form without straining the under-
284 standing of the reader.”40
The most notable developments in the graphical representation of
data in the late eighteenth century came not in any field of the natural
sciences, but in economics. The Scottish engineer and political econo-
mist William Playfair (1759–1823) is today generally regarded as the
founder of modern graphical display. He is credited with having in-
vented the bar graph and the pie chart, both of which he used to great
effect in his Commercial and Political Atlas, a work that traced the eco-
nomic fortunes of the British Empire in a series of graphs (fig. 4). The
Atlas went through three editions (1786, 1787, and 1801) and thus
seems to have enjoyed at least some degree of commercial success.41
38 The few and isolated exceptions are surveyed in Wainer, Graphic Discovery, 9–16.
Albert Biderman (“The Playfair Enigma: The Development of the Schematic Representa-
tion of Statistics,” Information Design Journal 6 [1990]: 3–25) proposes some possible ex-
planations about why the Cartesian system resisted practical applications as long as it did.
39 See Laura Tilling, “Early Experimental Graphs,” British Journal for the History of Sci-
ence 8 (1975): 193–213.

40 Tilling, “Early Experimental Graphs,” 207. For a general overview of the use of
graphs in the nineteenth century, see Thomas L. Hankins, “Blood, Dirt, and Nomograms:
A Particular History of Graphs,” Isis 90 (1999): 50–80.
41 On Playfair, see Michael Twyman, “Articulating Graphic Language: A Historical
Perspective,” in Toward a New Understanding of Literacy, ed. Merald E. Wrolstad and Dennis
F. Fisher (New York: Praeger, 1986), 188–251; Patricia Costigan-Eaves and Michael Mac-
donald-Ross, “William Playfair (1759–1823),” Statistical Science 5 (1990): 318–26; Harro
Maas and Mary S. Morgan, “Timing History: The Introduction of Graphical Analysis in
19th Century British Economics,” Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines 7 (2002): 97–127;
Daniel R. Headrick, When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of
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Bonds
figure 4. “Chart of the National Debt of England,” from Playfair’s The Commercial and Political Atlas, 3rd ed. (1801),
285
opposite p. 83
JM2703_01.indd 285 8/6/10 10:02:28 AM

Yet even as late as 1801, Playfair still felt compelled to defend and
explain his method at the most basic level:
As the eye is the best judge of proportion, being able to estimate it

with more quickness and accuracy than any other of our organs, it fol-
lows, that wherever relative quantities are in question, a gradual increase
or decrease of any revenue, receipt or expenditure of money, or other
value, is to be stated, this mode of representing it [i.e., Playfair’s
graphs] is peculiarly applicable; it gives a simple, accurate, and perma-
nent idea, by giving form and shape to a number of separate ideas,
which are otherwise abstract and unconnected.
This method has struck several persons as being fallacious, because
geometrical measurement has not any relation to money or to time;
yet here it is made to represent both. The most familiar and simple
answer to this objection is by giving an example. Suppose the money
received by a man in trade were all in guineas, and that every evening
he made a single pile of all the guineas received during the day, each
pile would represent a day, and its height would be proportioned to
the receipts of that day; so that by this plain operation, time, proportion,
and amount, would all be physically combined.
Lineal arithmetic then . . . is nothing more than those piles of
286 guineas represented on paper, and on a small scale, in which an
inch (perhaps) represents the thickness of five millions of guineas,
as in geography it does the breadth of a river, or any other extent
of country.42
As it turns out, Playfair’s work was better received in France than

in England: Playfair lived in France between 1787 and 1792, and a
French-language edition of his Atlas was published in Paris in 1789.
In any event, the French did more with his method over subsequent
decades than the English. In adopting the metric system for France, for
example, the National Committee ordered that graphs be made to help
the populace compare old and new scales of measurement, and on the
whole, French scientists and engineers generally embraced the idea of
graphs before their counterparts in England or Germany.43
Reason and Revolution, 1700–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 125–34;
Howard Wainer and Ian Spence, Introduction to their edition of William Playfair, The
Commercial and Political Atlas and Statistical Breviary (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005), 1–35.
42 William Playfair, The Commercial and Political Atlas, 3rd ed. (London: J. Wallis,
1801), x–xi. This same passage had appeared earlier in Playfair’s Lineal Arithmetic; Applied
to Shew the Progress of the Commerce and Revenue of England during the Present Century (Lon-
don: A. Paris, 1798), 6–7.
43 See Funkhouser, “Historical Development,” 286–87; Hankins, “Blood, Dirt, and
Nomograms,” 56–73. On the neglect of Playfair’s work in England, see also Maas and
Morgan, “Timing History.”
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Reicha’s Diagrams
Which brings us back to Reicha, who, after leaving Vienna in 1808,
had settled in Paris, where he would achieve renown as both a com-
poser and a teacher and eventually gain an appointment as a profes-
sor of counterpoint and fugue at the Paris Conservatoire in 1818. His
Traité de mélodie (1814) is notable for its extensive use of musical exam-
ples drawn from actual repertory, particularly the music of Mozart and
Haydn, the latter a personal acquaintance of Reicha’s in Vienna in the
early years of the century.44 The most sophisticated musical examples
in this treatise consist of a complete melodic line with extensive graphic
annotations showing the division of units and subunits of varying dimen-
sions. Reicha also introduced in this work the concepts of the grande
coupe binaire, the grande coupe ternaire, and the coupe du rondeau, and for
each of these he described the “path” (route) of themes and key areas
that aspiring composers should follow in creating a larger whole. Re-
icha espoused a system of precise reasoning and demonstrative proof,
practices too long ignored, he maintained, in discussions of melody.
“It is the same with music as with geometry,” he observed. “In the for-
mer, everything must be proved with musical examples, in the latter by
287
geometrical diagrams. In both one must go from deduction to deduc-
tion and construct so solid a theory that no argument whatsoever can
shake it.”45 The Traité de mélodie lacks the quasi-geometrical diagrams
that would figure in his later account of large-scale forms, however.
By 1825, Reicha felt it necessary to augment his discussion of the
various coupes with a synoptic representation of each. Against the his-
torical backdrop outlined here, we can now appreciate the innovative
nature of Reicha’s diagrams all the more. In introducing the first of
these diagrams, the grande coupe binaire, he asserted that this graphic
depiction would “better impress itself into the memory of students.”46
In its quasi-architectural design, the schema recalls the place system
of memory that had been so basic to the study of rhetoric since the
44
Antoine Reicha, Traité de mélodie, 2 vols. (Paris: Author, 1814), 1:46–48.
45
Reicha, Traité de mélodie, 1–2: “Il en est de la Musique comme de la Géomé-
trie: dans la première il faut tout prouver par les exemples musicaux même, comme
dans l’autre par les figures géométriques. Il faut marcher dans toutes les deux de con-
séquence en conséquence, et établir un système tellement solide, que des raisonnemens
quelconques ne puissent l’ébranler.” The translation is from Peter M. Landey’s edition,
Treatise on Melody (Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 2000), 1. For further commentary
on Reicha’s pedagogical method, see Nancy Kovaleff Baker, “An Ars poetica for Music: Re-
icha’s System of Syntax and Structure,” in Musical Humanism and Its Legacy: Essays in Honor
of Claude V. Palisca, ed. Nancy Kovaleff Baker and Barbara Russano Hanning (Stuyvesant,
N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 1992), 419–49.
46 Reicha, Traité de haute composition musicale, 2:300: “Pour que la grande coupe bi-
naire se grave mieux dans la mémoire des élèves, nous la figurerons ici sur trois lignes.”
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Middle Ages: students committed to memory the spaces and rooms in

a building and then “filled” those rooms with the objects or ideas to be
remembered. The layout of the spaces and rooms in turn would shape
the sequence in which objects and ideas could be brought to the fore-
front of the mind.47
Although the grande coupe binaire has attracted considerable atten-
tion for its discussion of sonata form (fig. 1), the coupe du rondeau, which
appears only a few pages later, reflects an even stronger concern for
proportional design: each section is an arch, and each section has one,
two, or three subarches (fig. 5). Reicha gives particularly careful at-
tention to the relative size of each unit. The initial statement of the
rondo theme is longer—and therefore takes up more space on the un-
derlying horizontal “timeline”—than its “abridged returns.” And when
the theme “returns again its entirety, without reprises,” it occupies an
amount of space about halfway between that of the initial statement
and subsequent abridged statements. Although this kind of spatial pro-
portioning may seem unremarkable today, it represents a real break-
through in the history of musical analysis.
Less obvious but no less significant in Reicha’s diagrams is a second
288 layer of analogy, for the horizontal “timeline” underneath each is in fact
broken into distinct (if not particularly prominent) subunits by marks
of punctuation. The opening statement of the rondo theme is closed
and self-contained: it ends, accordingly, with a period. But subsequent
contrasting ideas are separated by semicolons, and each return of the
theme is preceded by a colon, emphasizing the significance and syntactic
necessity of the moment. This quasi-grammatical structure reflects the
older formal analogies between the parts of an oration and the sections
of a musical work or movement and is tellingly superimposed here on
what is, fundamentally, a more architectural conception of form.48
Reicha’s Traité de haute composition musicale and its formal diagrams
enjoyed even wider distribution in Carl Czerny’s annotated bilingual
French and German edition issued within the larger Vollständiges
Lehrbuch der musikalischen Composition, an anthology consisting of Re-
icha’s Cours de composition musicale, ou Traité complet et raisonné d’harmonie
47 See Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1966). On the traditional role of diagrams in memory, see Mary Carruthers, The Book of
Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2008), 150–51, 248–57; on the role of diagrams specific to the memory of musical con-
cepts, see Anna Maria Busse Berger, Medieval Music and the Art of Memory (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 2005), 102–10.
48 See Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric, 149–53; and Felix Diergarten, “Haydn, Reicha und
zwei Pausen: Formprinzipien im 18. Jahrhundert,” paper presented at “Haydn 2009: A

Bicentenary Conference,” sponsored by the Hungarian Musicological Society, the Institute
for Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and the Hungarian Haydn Society,
Budapest, May 2009. I am grateful to Dr. Diergarten for sharing a copy of his remarks.
JM2703_01.indd 288 8/6/10 10:02:29 AM

figure 5. The “Coupe du rondeau” from Reicha’s Traité de haute composition musicale, vol. 2 (1825), 303. Image courtesy of
JM2703_01.indd 289
the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
Premère section. Motif, suffisamment long, avec ou sans reprises./Exposition d’idées, développement accessoire.
Seconde section. Motif da capo, abrégé./Nouvelle exposition d’idées dans d’autres tons. Developpement accessoire.
Troisième section. Motif da capo, abrégé./Troisieme exposition d’idées dans d’autres tons. Développement accessoire.
Quatrième section. Motif da capo, en entier, mais sans reprises./Développement remarquable, en rappelant ce
qui est le plus saillant dans les trois sections précedentes./coda.

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289
8/6/10 10:02:29 AM
pratique (first published ca. 1816–18), the Traité de mélodie, and the
Traité de haute composition musicale. This anthology was issued serially by
Diabelli of Vienna in 1832 and eventually by the same firm again as a
complete set (in four volumes) later that year.
After Reicha
Reicha’s schematic innovation attracted relatively little public notice
and few imitators in the decades that followed. Of the three contempo-
rary reviews of the Traité de haute composition (in either its original form
or Czerny’s bilingual edition), only one made any reference at all to the
presence of diagrams in the treatise, and even then merely in passing.
In his lengthy account of the Traité de haute composition, published in Cä-
cilie in 1829, Daniel Jelensperger (1797–1831), a colleague of Reicha’s
at the Paris Conservatory, remarked in connection with the treatment
of the coupe ternaire that “a drawing renders tangible the outline [Plan]
of this form.”49 Over the next seven decades, only three other treatises
would use diagrams that follow Reicha’s model. The first of these was
Hippolyte Raymond Colet’s Panharmonie musicale, ou Cours complet de com-
290 position théorique et pratique, published in Paris by Pacini in 1837, a year af-
ter Reicha’s death. The connection is scarcely surprising, for Reicha had
been one of Colet’s instructors at the Conservatoire, and his Panharmonie
musicale borrows heavily from the elder theorist’s writings and methodol-
ogy. Unlike his teacher, however, Colet (1808–51) presents what we now
call sonata form as a ternary rather than binary structure: the “Première
coupe à trois parties” distinguishes between a second section (“Intrigue,”
“Dévéloppements”) and a third (“Dénouement,” the recapitulation), but
the similarity in the design of his diagram is unmistakable (fig. 6). Colet
provides schemas of ternary (“Seconde coupe à trois parties”), variation,
minuet, and rondo forms as well. The pupil’s diagrams are not nearly as
elegant, nor do they convey as much concern with issues of proportion.
Colet’s graphic representation of rondo form, for example, seems more
tabular, without the spatial subtleties of its model.
The second of the nineteenth-century writers who followed Reicha’s
lead in this regard was the English composer and Oxford professor of
music Frederick Arthur Gore Ouseley (1825–89), whose Treatise on Form
49 D[aniel] Jelensperger, “Recension. Traité de haute composition musicale, par A. Re-
icha,” Cäcilia 11 (1829): 175: “Eine Zeichnung versinnlicht ebenfalls den Plan dieser
Form.” The other two commentaries on Reicha’s treatise are an anonymous notice in
Harmonicon 3 (June 1825), 108; and J. Feski, “Etwas über Theorien der Musik,” Neue
Zeitschrift für Musik 3 (1835): 145–47; 149–50. On the reception of Reicha’s theoretical
oeuvre as a whole, see Renate Groth, Die französische Kompositionslehre des 19. Jahrhunderts
(Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1983), 153–69; and Jo Renee McCachren, “Antoine Reicha’s Theo-
ries of Musical Form” (PhD diss., University of North Texas, 1989), 214–23.
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figure 6. The “Coupe du rondeau” from Hippolyte Raymond Colet’s

Panharmonie musicale (1837), 259
291
and General Composition (1875) includes extended descriptions of vari-

ous formal prototypes. Ouseley describes sonata form—which he calls
“modern binary form”—at length and summarizes his account with a
diagram (fig. 7) whose purpose echoes that articulated by Reicha him-
self: “to assist the student in impressing it on his memory.”50
The diagrams in Ernst Pauer’s Musical Forms (1878) follow the same
basic patterns as Ouseley’s, though their general appearance is decidedly
less elegant.51 Ouseley’s and Pauer’s diagrams remind us that, whereas
the process of engraving allows for greater flexibility of design, a typeset
book can be almost as effective in conveying the proportions of elements
within a space. The treatises by Reicha and Colet had been engraved
throughout, making the insertion of graphics a matter of no technical
difficulty. But Ouseley’s publisher (Clarendon Press) demonstrated that
50 Frederick Arthur Gore Ouseley, A Treatise on Musical Form and General Composition
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1875), 39.

51 Ernst Pauer, Musical Forms (London: Novello, 1878).
JM2703_01.indd 291 8/6/10 10:02:32 AM

figure 7. “Modern binary form,” from Frederick Arthur Gore Ouse-

ley’s Treatise on Form and General Composition (1875), 40
292
much can be accomplished with typeset figures as well, and Colet, as we

have seen, failed to take advantage of the inherent flexibility available
through engraving. The dearth of spatial representations of reductive
form in the nineteenth century thus cannot be attributed solely or even
primarily to the mechanical processes by which such images might be
reproduced. Rudimentary diagrams could be conveyed even by a simple
row of typeset letters, such as A B A, yet even these are never found be-
fore Reicha and only rarely afterward before the twentieth century.
In the end, such diagrams would remain isolated within the tradi-
tion of nineteenth-century pedagogy, which continued to approach
form overwhelmingly from the temporal perspective, describing it in
purely verbal terms as a series of events. Still, the idea of represent-
ing formal structures synoptically did begin to take hold, albeit in
ways much simpler than Reicha’s models. Robert Schumann, for ex-
ample, used a pair of rudimentary diagrams to compare the structure
of the opening movement of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique against
the “older norm” of symphonic first movements (fig. 8). Schumann’s
arching typographical layout of what he considered to be the form-
defining moments of Berlioz’s first movement helps convey the sense
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JM2703_01.indd 293
figure 8. Robert Schumann’s schema of the first movement of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. From Schumann’s
“‘Aus dem Leben eines Künstlers’,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 3 (1835): 37

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293
8/6/10 10:02:34 AM
figure 9. A. B. Marx’s diagram of the finale of Beethoven’s Piano

Sonata in Ab Major, Op. 26, from Marx’s Die Lehre von der
musikalischen Komposition, vol. 3 (1845): 175
of a progression that reaches its high point in the middle of the

movement (the Mittelsätze, or what we would now call the development
section) at its point of furthest remove from the tonic (G major–E
minor–G major). This same kind of synoptic layout for the “older
norm” allows Schumann to convey graphically—both literally and
metaphorically—his central point at this stage of his review: that the
first movement of the Symphonie fantastique, unconventional as it may
seem, is in fact not so terribly different from the conventional pat-
terns of sonata form.52 As diagrams go, Schumann’s may not seem
terribly sophisticated to us today, but it reflects a manner of presenta-
294 tion that was unusual for its time.
In his monumental Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition
(1837–47), Adolph Bernhard Marx restricted himself almost entirely
to descriptive, event-by-event accounts of form.53 The relatively few
graphic representations in the treatise that supplement his descriptions
of binary form, ternary form, sonata form, rondo, and the like are mod-
est at best: most are restricted to simple rows of typeset letters. One
of his more elaborate diagrams depicts the rondo form of the finale
of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in A Major, op. 26 (fig. 9). The top line
taken by itself (HS = Hauptsatz or Main Idea; SS = Seitensatz or Second-
ary Idea) reflects Marx’s method, elsewhere in the treatise, of diagram-
ming forms in the abstract; here, in analyzing a specific example of a
particular movement in rondo form, he adds additional data under-
neath, showing the two-part structure of the Hauptsatz (A and B) and
the central tonality of each section.
52 Robert Schumann, “‘Aus dem Leben eines Künstlers’: Phantastische Symphonie
in 5 Abtheilungen von Hector Berlioz,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 3 (1835): 37. The
substance of Schumann’s review of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique has been addressed on
many occasions, most notably by Edward T. Cone in “Schumann Amplified: An Analysis,”
in Fantastic Symphony: An Authoritative Score, Historical Background, Analysis, Views, and Com-
ments, ed. Edward T. Cone (New York: Norton, 1971), 249–77; and by Fred Everett Maus,
“Intersubjectivity and Analysis: Schumann’s Essay on the Fantastic Symphony,” in Music
Theory in the Age of Romanticism, ed. Ian Bent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996), 125–38.
53 Adolph Bernhard Marx, Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition, 4 vols. (Leipzig:
Breitkopf & Härtel, 1837–47).
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Given the prestige of Marx’s treatise in its time, surprisingly few

subsequent theorists over the next fifty years followed even this fairly
modest approach to the graphic depiction of forms. František Skuher-
ský’s treatise Die musikalischen Formen (1879) represents the exception
rather than the rule.54 Throughout the remainder of the nineteenth
century, writers would occasionally present lists of structurally impor-
tant moments (either as formal prototypes or as analyses of a specific
movement or work) in what might be called a quasi-spatial format. Jo-
hann Christian Lobe, for example, in the first volume of his Lehrbuch
der musikalischen Komposition (1850), provides an overview of the first
movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet in G Major, op. 18 no. 2 (fig. 10),
that represents something of a middle ground between Reicha’s spa-
tially proportioned diagrams and a straightforward prose description.55
The content is basically an enumeration of events; beyond indicating
the number of measures within each section as applied to this specific
movement, however, the format is conceptually not all that different
from Koch’s event-by-event narrative of what happens when. Still, the
presentation reflects at least a degree of spatial conceptualization.
Only toward the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning
of the twentieth did formal diagrams establish themselves as standard 295
elements of theoretical and analytical literature. A. J. Goodrich’s Ana-
lytical Harmony (1893) proudly proclaims its “diagram illustrations of
musical form and construction” on its title page.56 Hugo Riemann’s
Katechismus der Kompositionslehre (1889), subtitled Musikalische Formen-
lehre, uses rudimentary diagrams of the A-B-A variety that show at least
basic spatial relationships, following the approach of A. B. Marx (whose
Kompositionslehre Riemann had edited and revised in 1887). Similarly
basic diagrams appear in Stephan Krehl’s Musikalische Formenlehre (Kom-
positionslehre) of 1902. We find more sophisticated applications of spa-
tial diagramming in William Henry Hadow’s Sonata Form (1896), Otto
Klauwell’s Geschichte der Sonate von ihren Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (1899),
Percy Goetschius’s Lessons in Music Form (1904), and vol. 2 of Vincent
d’Indy’s Cours de composition musicale (1909).57 Publications aimed at
54 František Skuherský, Die musikalischen Formen (Prague: Mikulas & Knapp, 1879).
The same kinds of diagrams presumably appear in the original Czech-language version of
the book (O formách hudebních, 1873), unavailable to me.
55 Johann Christian Lobe, Lehrbuch der musikalischen Komposition, 4 vols. (Leipzig:
Breitkopf & Härtel, 1850–67), 1:324.

56 A. J. Goodrich, Goodrich’s Analytical Harmony: A Theory of Musical Composition from
the Composer’s Standpoint (Cincinnati: John Church, 1893).

57 William Henry Hadow, Sonata Form (London: Novello; New York: H. W. Gray,
1896); Otto Klauwell, Geschichte der Sonate von ihren Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Cologne:
H. vom Ende, 1899); Percy Goetschius, Lessons in Music Form: A Manual of Analysis of All
the Structural Factors and Designs Employed in Musical Composition (Boston: Oliver Ditson,
1904); Vincent d’Indy, Cours de composition musicale, vol. 2, part 1 (Paris: Durand, 1909).
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figure 10. Lobe’s diagram of the first movement of Beethoven’s String

Quartet in G Major, Op. 18, no. 2, from his Lehrbuch der
musikalischen Komposition, vol. 1 (1850): 324
296
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table 1
Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century treatises on form that do
not incorporate synoptic diagrams
1844 Johann Christian Lobe, Compositions-Lehre oder umfassende Theorie von der
thematischen Arbeit und den modernen Instrumentalformen. Weimar: Bernhard
Friedrich Voigt.
1848 Carl Czerny, School of Practical Composition. 3 vols. London: R. Cocks.
1852 Ernst Friedrich Richter, Die Grundzüge der musikalischen Formen und ihre
Analyse: als Leitfaden beim Studium derselben und für den praktischen Unter-
richt. Leipzig: G. Wigand.
1862 Benedikt Widmann, Formenlehre der Instrumentalmusik. Nach dem Systeme
Schnyder’s von Wartensee zum Gebrauche für Lehrer und Schüler. Leipzig,
C. Merseburger.
1878 Ludwig Bussler, Musikalische Formenlehre. Berlin: Habel.
1893 Ebenzer Prout, Musical Form. London: Augener.
1895 Ebenezer Prout, Applied Forms. London: Augener.
1895 Salomon Jadassohn, Die Formen in den Werken der Tonkunst. Leipzig:
F. Kistner.
1897 Percy Goetschius, The Homophonic Forms of Musical Composition. New York: 297
Kalmus.
1904 Max Loewengard, Lehrbuch der musikalischen Formen. Berlin: Max Staege-
mann Jun.
1904 Alfred Richter, Die Lehre von der Form in der Musik. Leipzig, Breitkopf
& Härtel.
1909 Hugo Leichtentritt, Musikalische Formenlehre. Berlin: Habel.
music lovers begin to incorporate diagrams around this same time as

well, for example The Appreciation of Music by Thomas Whitney Surette
and Daniel Gregory Mason (New York: H. W. Gray, 1907). Alexis Chit-
ty’s entry “Rondo” in the first edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and
Musicians (1898) contains an extremely simple diagram, but the entries
for “Form” and “Sonata” (by C. H. H. Parry) do not.
With the formal diagrams that illustrate Donald Francis Tovey’s
entries on “Rondo” and “Sonata Form” in the eleventh edition of the
Encyclopedia Britannica in 1911, the spatial representation of musical
form may be to said to have become a standard feature in discourse
about large-scale structures in music. Throughout the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, however, treatises devoted to form that
do not include synoptic diagrams (limiting themselves to reductive de-
scriptions) outnumber those that do (see table 1).
The spatial representations of musical form from the first quar-
ter of the twentieth century best known today are those produced by
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Heinrich Schenker. Schenker’s voice-leading “graphs” combine conven-

tional notation and special signs with a novel method of reduction that
preserves a sense of spatial proportion, though even these did not be-
gin to appear in print until the first installment of Der Tonwille in 1921.
Still, his desire to integrate local and global issues of voice-leading,
harmony, and form is evident almost from the beginning of his career
as an analyst. In an essay of 1894 entitled “Das Hören in der Musik”
(Listening in Music), Schenker had outlined a manner of listening
that would “elevate the ear . . . to the power of the eye.”
But the highest triumph in listening to a work of art, the proudest
bliss, is to elevate the ear as it were to the power of the eye, to intensify
it. Imagine a landscape, broad and beautiful, surrounded by moun-
tains and hills, full of fields and meadows and forests and brooks, full
of everything that nature can create in the way of beauty and variety.
And now one climbs to a point from which one glance encompasses
the entire landscape. . . . Thus there is also, somewhere high above a
work of art, a point from which the spirit can clearly see and hear the
work of art, with all its paths and goals, its dalliances and storms, all its
variety and limitations, its every dimension and their relationships.
Whoever has found this pinnacle—and from such points the compos-
298 ers must also unfold his work—he may safely say that he has “heard”
the work. But there are truly only very few such listeners to be found.58
Schenker’s synoptic perspective on hearing is revealing. His pri-

mary purpose is analysis, not the pedagogy of composition. His imagery
blends both the temporal and the spatial: one can experience the indi-
vidual features of a valley in sequence (hence his long list of features:
fields, meadows, etc.) and yet at the same time synoptically. It is as if
one were both high above the valley and on its floor at the same time.
This double perspective—both temporal and spatial—imagines an
58 Heinrich Schenker, “Das Hören in der Musik,” originally published in the Neue
Revue 5 (1894): 115–21. The passage here is quoted from Heinrich Schenker als Essayist und
Kritiker: Gesammelte Aufsätze, Rezensionen und kleinere Berichte aus den Jahren 1891–1901, ed.
Hellmut Federhofer (Hildesheim: Olms, 1990), 103: “Was aber im Hören eines Kunst-
werkes der höchste Triumph, die stolzeste Wonne ist, ist, das Ohr gleichsam zur Macht
des Auges zu erheben, zu steigern. Man denke eine Landschaft, eine weite und schöne,
von Bergen und Hügeln umrahmt, voll Felder und Wiesen und Wälder und Bäche, voll
alles dessen, was die Natur in Schönheit und Mannigfaltigkeit, so vor sich hin, schafft.
Und nun besteige man einen Ort, der mit Einem die gesammte Landschaft dem Blick er-
schließt. . . . So gibt es auch, über dem Kunstwerk hoch irgendwo gelegen, einen Punkt,
von dem aus der Geist das Kunstwerk, all’ seine Wege, und Ziele, das Verweilen und Stür-
men, alle Mannigfaltigkeit und Begrenztheit, alle Maße und ihre Verhältnisse deutlich
überblickt, überhört. Wer diesen Höhepunkt gefunden, —von solchen Punkten muß auch
der Componist sein Werk aufrollen, —der mag ruhig sagen, er hat das Werk ‘gehört.’
Aber solcher Hörer gibt es wahrlich nur wenig.” For further commentary on this pas-
sage, see Nicholas Cook, The Schenker Project: Culture, Race, and Music Theory in Fin-de-
siècle Vienna (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 56–57.
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integration of details into the larger whole that his later graphs would
eventually realize to an unprecedented degree. And it is the integration
of these two perspectives that has contributed, in no small measure,
to the widespread adoption of the principles that underlie Schenker’s
“graphs.” For Schenker, however, sonata form was a construct arising
out of the individual work itself, not a convention imposed from out-
side. He consistently resisted the top-down approach to form exempli-
fied by diagrams designed to represent abstract, ideal types. “Instead
of presenting the prevailing organicism of sonata form in the work of a
master,” he complained, “the textbooks offer rubrics, rather like a set of
children’s building blocks.”59
Parallels to Drama
Music was not the only temporal art whose form resisted synoptic
representation. Nineteenth-century critics were equally slow to create
structural diagrams of archetypal plots in drama. Tragedic plots, in par-
ticular, had long adhered to a basic trajectory laid out by Aristotle in
his Poetics and refined, using a variety of terms, by many subsequent
theorists of drama. Aristotle had identified and described the essential 299
elements of a tragedic plot (which he called “the first and most impor-
tant” feature of tragedy), and he outlined this “arrangement of the inci-
dents” as following a predictable pattern. By the end of the seventeenth
century, this conventional trajectory was generally recognized to consist
at the most basic level of an introduction or exposition that established
the time, place, and characters, followed by a complication of events,
which Aristotle named the desis (the “tying of the knot”) and by the
lusis or resolution (“untying”), along with various other optional and
more specific devices including climax (the crucial moment of action
that ultimately shapes the outcome), peripeteia (a reversal of action),
and finally catastrophe (the dénouement or resolution).
This outline is so broad as to accommodate an enormous variety
of manifestations, and theorists of later eras never tired of creating
variations on this schema, identifying elements that might be added
(e.g., episodes, subplots, and parallel plots) and reconfiguring or re-
naming the kinds of structural points outlined above. The underlying
premise that dramatic structures could be described as a series of such
points remained intact, however.60 The very notion of a dramatic plot
59 Heinrich Schenker, Neue musikalische Theorien und Phantasien, vol. 3: Der freie Satz,
2nd ed., ed. Oswald Jonas (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1956), 223: “Statt des in einem
Meisterwerk waltenden Organischen einer Sonatenform stellen die Lehrbücher Rubriken
auf, eine Art Steinbaukasten zu kindischem Spiel.”
60 For a summary of various schemata used to outline dramatic structures from the
time of Aristotle onward, see Hans Günther Bickert, Studien zum Problem der Exposition im
JM2703_01.indd 299 8/6/10 10:02:38 AM

archetype—a sequence of certain kinds of events in a predictable

order—may well have served as a conceptual model for the way in
which Mattheson, Koch, Galeazzi, Kollmann, Reicha, and others would
describe various musical forms: their methodology is no different in
principle. Indeed, Reicha explicitly called attention to the parallels be-
tween musical and dramatic form and used terms such as “exposition”
(in its dramatic sense), “l’intrigue, ou le noeud,” and “dénoûment.”61
Many subsequent commentators in turn have noted the similarities be-
tween the conventional structures of certain genres or movement types
and the plots of spoken drama.62
But as in music, it was only in the nineteenth century that literary
commentators thought to “plot” a conventional sequence of dramatic
events in schematic form, as applied either to a specific drama or to an
archetype. The first to do so was the noted German novelist, critic, and
editor Gustav Freytag (1816–95). In his Die Technik des Dramas (1863),
Freytag proposed a means by which to represent the structure of the
“ideal drama” in graphic form. His basic schema consists of a simple
rising and falling line, with points of dramatic significance annotated
through a series of letters corresponding to a descriptive key (fig. 11).63
300 Later on the same page Freytag uses more intricate diagrams to il-
lustrate the relationship of the plays that make up Schiller’s Wallenstein
trilogy (Wallensteins Lager, Die Piccolomini, and Wallensteins Tod), showing
the multiple trajectories of their combined plots and subplots. The ap-
peal of Freytag’s approach, however, was that the most basic form of
his diagram (as applied to Wallensteins Lager) came to be known as
“Freytag’s Pyramid,” and it continues in use today under that name
in accounts of dramatic structure.64 The substance of Freytag’s reduc-
tive depiction has been subject to repeated criticism for being overly
simplistic and too narrow in the range of dramas to which it can be
Drama der tektonischen Bauform: Terminologie, Funktionen, Gestaltung (Marburg: N. G. Elwert,

1969), 22–39.
61 Reicha, Traité de haute composition musicale, 2:298. On Reicha’s comparisons be-
tween dramatic and musical structure, and on his use of terminology drawn from the
realm of drama, see Peter Hoyt, “The Concept of Développement in the Early Nineteenth
Century,” in Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism, 141–62.
62 See, for example, Anthony Newcomb, “Schumann and Late Eighteenth-Century
Narrative Strategies,” 19th-Century Music 11 (1987): 164–74; Fred Everett Maus, “Music as
Drama,” Music Theory Spectrum 10 (1988): 56–73.
63 Gustav Freytag, Die Technik des Dramas (Leipzig: S. Hirzl, 1863), 100.
64 Formal diagrams indebted in one way or another to Freytag’s Pyramid may be
found in Elisabeth Woodbridge, The Drama, Its Law and Its Technique (Boston: Allyn and
Bacon, 1898), 77, 94; Brander Matthews, A Study of the Drama (New York: Houghton Mif-
flin, 1910), 212–18; Carroll Lewis Maxcy, The Rhetorical Principles of Narration (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1911), 230–31; Richard G. Moulton, The Modern Study of Literature
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1915), 186–90.
JM2703_01.indd 300 8/6/10 10:02:38 AM

Bonds
figure 11. Top: “Freytag’s Pyramid,” from Gustav Freytag, Die Technik des
Dramas (1863), 100, applied to Schiller’s Wallensteins Lager.
(a) Provocation; (b) Intensification; (c) Climax; (d) Fall or
Reversal; (e) Catastrophe
Middle: Freytag’s diagram for Schiller’s Die Piccolimini
Bottom: Freytag’s diagram for the “double drama” of Die
Piccolimini and Wallensteins Tod
301
JM2703_01.indd 301 8/6/10 10:02:40 AM

applied, but his methodology of representing a sequence of temporal

events in spatial form has not been called into serious question.65
The longevity of Freytag’s Pyramid testifies to the mnemonic and
didactic effectiveness of diagrams in general. His verbal description of
the sequence of events in an ideal drama, the labels on his diagram—
provocation, intensification, climax, and so on—would scarcely be re-
membered today without the graphic element of his rising and falling
line. Spatial representations hold an almost totemic power that even
the most eloquent verbal descriptions can be hard pressed to rival. By
allowing us to take in the form of a work at a glance—as a whole, as a
Gestalt—diagrams by their very nature offer perspectives that verbal ac-
counts alone cannot.
***
Because the notion of form itself is an abstraction, we cannot say
that one manner of representing it is superior to the other. Diagrams
have nevertheless become such a standard element in the discourse of
musical theory, analysis, and pedagogy over the past century that when
we think of specific manifestations like rondo or sonata form, we are
302 more likely to conceptualize them in synoptic rather than temporal
terms. We know that musical form is in one sense temporal: it reveals
itself in performance only over the course of time; yet the power of the
synoptic image is so great that in our minds the form of a work can
become a kind of imagined space in which the music operates.66 This
power of the eye (to use Schenker’s term) allows us to forget that both
the means and the tendency to think of form as a spatial construct are
relatively recent phenomena.
Earlier theorists resisted the graphic realization of time in terms of
space, perhaps with good reason, for it makes the analogy between time
and space more tangible than may be warranted. Sterne’s ridicule of the
idea of a plot moving forward “in a straight line” can be applied with
equal validity to the complexities of musical form. The gradual accep-
tance of the synoptic representation of form nevertheless reflects impor-
tant changes in thinking about the nature of form, changes that in turn
have shaped the ways in which we approach this abstraction today.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
65 On critical responses to Freytag’s schema, see Manfred Pfister, The Theory and Analy-
sis of Drama, trans. John Halliday (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 239–42.
66 For examples of imaginary spaces in other fields, see Imaginäre Räume: Sektion B
des internationalen Kongresses “Virtuelle Räume. Raumwahrnehmung und Raumvorstellung im

Mittelalter,” Krems an der Donau, 24. bis 26. März 2003, ed. Elisabeth Vavra (Vienna: Verlag
der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2007).
JM2703_01.indd 302 8/6/10 10:02:40 AM

Bonds
Abstract
Musical form can be conceptualized in two basic ways, temporally
or spatially. The temporal approach conceives of form diachronically,
as a series of events that unfold through time, whereas the spatial ap-
proach conceives of form synchronically, as a synoptic design in which
the relationship of the individual parts to the whole is apparent at once.
These two modes are interdependent and by no means mutually exclu-
sively. Indeed, virtually every account of musical form—either in the ab-
stract or as applied to a specific work—draws on both concepts to vary-
ing degrees. Narrative accounts that relate a series of events often rely
on spatial imagery, and the formal diagrams that are a standard feature
of analytical discourse nowadays almost invariably reflect the progres-
sion of music through time.
Not until 1825, however, did any critic or theorist attempt to rep-
resent musical form in an essentially spatial, synoptic manner. Antoine
Reicha’s diagrams of binary, ternary, and rondo forms in his Traité de
haute composition musicale, moreover, found little resonance among his
contemporaries. Even the simplest formal diagrams would remain a
rarity for another seventy-five years and would not become a standard
303
element of theoretical accounts of form until the early twentieth cen-
tury. Spatial representations of form were slow to emerge and gain ac-
ceptance, at least in part because of a broader reluctance to accept the
premise of depicting linear time in two-dimensional space.
Keywords: compositional pedagogy, diagrams, musical form, Antoine

Reicha, Heinrich Schenker
JM2703_01.indd 303 8/6/10 10:02:40 AM

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The Spatial Representation of Musical Form

Author(s): Mark Evan Bonds

M usical form, no matter how one defines

Preliminary versions of this article were read at the conference

JM2703_01.indd 265 8/6/10 10:02:21 AM

unfold through time by describing a series of events, a sequential de-

JM2703_01.indd 266 8/6/10 10:02:21 AM

little resonance among his contemporaries. Even as simple a synoptic

JM2703_01.indd 267 8/6/10 10:02:22 AM

Why did it take so long for such representations of musical form

JM2703_01.indd 268 8/6/10 10:02:22 AM

a ground-plan, in order to show where, for example, a hall, a room, a

6 Johann Mattheson, Kern melodischer Wissenschaft (Hamburg: Herold, 1737), 128:

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and it would be promulgated by such diverse figures as Goethe, Hegel,

The Reductive Concept of Form

1768), s.v. “Rondeau”; Johann Nikolaus Forkel, Musikalisch-Kritische Bibliothek, 3 vols.

JM2703_01.indd 270 8/6/10 10:02:22 AM

in their terminology, they clearly recognized the pattern we now call

JM2703_01.indd 271 8/6/10 10:02:22 AM

What is important here for present purposes is not the substance

musical form became primarily temporal and the attention of musi-

JM2703_01.indd 272 8/6/10 10:02:22 AM

This new perception of form rests on a growing sense of linear time

JM2703_01.indd 273 8/6/10 10:02:22 AM

violin part and a figured bass) of the sonata-form Andante of Haydn’s

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speaks of the composer’s obligation to select from his inventive fantasy

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As Hollace Schafer demonstrated, the surviving continuity drafts in

JM2703_01.indd 276 8/6/10 10:02:22 AM

JM2703_01.indd 277 8/6/10 10:02:22 AM

The Spatial Representation of Events in Linear Time

Orders, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

Dubourg,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 52 (1991): 190–230. In addition to Fer-

JM2703_01.indd 278 8/6/10 10:02:23 AM

creation to 1753. The data include the reigns of monarchs, prominent

This explanation may seem overly detailed if not altogether unneces-

derot et al., vol. 3 (Paris: Briasson, 1753), s.v. “Chronologique (machine).”

JM2703_01.indd 279 8/6/10 10:02:23 AM

figure 2. Priestley’s “Specimen of a Chart of Biography” from his “A

As no image can be formed of abstract ideas, they are, of necessity,

JM2703_01.indd 280 8/6/10 10:02:23 AM

idea be nothing that is the object of our senses, it is nevertheless uni-

The success of the Chart of Biography encouraged Priestley to apply

tures (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 50–51.

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Could a historiographer drive on his history, as a muleteer drives on

figure 3. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy,

JM2703_01.indd 282 8/6/10 10:02:24 AM

Sterne would return to the absurdity of representing a narrative in a

JM2703_01.indd 283 8/6/10 10:02:24 AM

ence 8 (1975): 193–213.

JM2703_01.indd 284 8/6/10 10:02:24 AM

JM2703_01.indd 285 8/6/10 10:02:28 AM

As the eye is the best judge of proportion, being able to estimate it

As it turns out, Playfair’s work was better received in France than

JM2703_01.indd 286 8/6/10 10:02:28 AM

JM2703_01.indd 287 8/6/10 10:02:29 AM

Middle Ages: students committed to memory the spaces and rooms in

zwei Pausen: Formprinzipien im 18. Jahrhundert,” paper presented at “Haydn 2009: A

JM2703_01.indd 288 8/6/10 10:02:29 AM

All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

49 D[aniel] Jelensperger, “Recension. Traité de haute composition musicale, par A. Re-

figure 2. Priestley’s “Specimen of a Chart of Biography” from his “A

figure 3. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy,

figure 6. The “Coupe du rondeau” from Hippolyte Raymond Colet’s

figure 7. “Modern binary form,” from Frederick Arthur Gore Ouse-

figure 9. A. B. Marx’s diagram of the finale of Beethoven’s Piano

figure 10. Lobe’s diagram of the first movement of Beethoven’s String