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How Sonata Forms
OXFORD STUDIES IN MUSIC THEORY
Series Editor Steven Rings
Studies in Music with Text, David Lewin
Metric Manipulations in Haydn and Mozart: Chamber Music for Strings, 1787–​1791,
Danuta Mirka
Songs in Motion: Rhythm and Meter in the German Lied, Yonatan Malin
A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common
Practice, Dmitri Tymoczko
In the Process of Becoming: Analytic and Philosophical Perspectives on Form in Early
Nineteenth-​Century Music, Janet Schmalfeldt
Tonality and Transformation, Steven Rings
Audacious Euphony: Chromatic Harmony and the Triad’s Second Nature,
Richard Cohn
Music as Discourse: Semiotic Adventures in Romantic Music, Kofi Agawu
Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era, Roger Mathew Grant
Mahler’s Symphonic Sonatas, Seth Monahan
Pieces of Tradition: An Analysis of Contemporary Tonal Music, Daniel Harrison
Music at Hand: Instruments, Bodies, and Cognition, Jonathan De Souza
Foundations of Musical Grammar, Lawrence M. Zbikowski
Organized Time: Rhythm, Tonality, and Form, Jason Yust
Flow: The Rhythmic Voice in Rap Music, Mitchell Ohriner
Performing Knowledge: Twentieth-​Century Music in Analysis and Performance,
Daphne Leong
Enacting Musical Time: The Bodily Experience of New Music, Mariusz Kozak
Hearing Homophony: Tonal Expectation at the Turn of the Seventeenth Century,
Megan Kaes Long
Form as Harmony in Rock Music, Drew Nobile
Desire in Chromatic Harmony: A Psychodynamic Exploration of Fin de Siècle
Tonality, Kenneth M. Smith
A Blaze of Light in Every Word: Analyzing the Popular Singing Voice, Victoria
Malewey
Sweet Thing: The History and Musical Structure of a Shared American Vernacular
Form, Nicholas Stoia
Hypermetric Manipulations in Haydn and Mozart: Chamber Music for Strings,
1787–​1791, Danuta Mirka
Exploring Musical Spaces, Julian Hook
How Sonata Forms: A Bottom-​Up Approach to Musical Form, Yoel Greenberg
 How Sonata Forms

A Bottom-​Up Approach to Musical Form

Yo el Gre e nb erg

1
 1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2022
This book was published with the support of the Israel Science Foundation.
Chapter 7 was written with the collaboration of Omer Maliniak.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress
ISBN 978–​0–​19–​752628–​6
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197526286.001.0001
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
To Shlomit, Uri, Roni, Mattan, and Alon, with all my love and gratitude
... there’s a sense
Derived from things themselves as to what’s happened in the past,
And what is here and now, and what will come about at last.
No one perceives Time in and of itself, you must attest,
As something apart from things at motion and from things at rest.
~ Lucretius (De rerum natura, Book 1, 459–​63)
CONTENTS

About the Companion Website xi

Introduction: Musical Form and Movement of the Multitude 1

1. The Fuzziness of Form 12
Synchronic Fuzziness 13
The Replacement Strategy 14
The Refinement Strategy 16
The Relaxation Strategy 17
Diachronic Fuzziness 20
In Lieu of a Definition 23
2. Wholes in the Theory 27
Between Synchrony and Diachrony 27
Synchrony and Diachrony in Musical Form 28
The Synchronic Nature of Formenlehre 29
On the Incompatibility of the Three Strategies with Diachrony 31
Rethinking the Whole 36
Holistic Diachrony 42
3. From Selfish Sonatas to Egoistic Elements 48
On Reductionism 50
An Abstract Model 53
Independence 57
Summary 60
4. A Periodic Table of Elements 63
The Medial Repeat 67
Modified Medial Repeats 72
The Double Return 73
The End Rhyme 79
Interim Summary 82
Independence of the Elements 83
Defining Independence 85
Summary 90
x T Contents

5. On Positive Interaction and the Emergence of the Recapitulation 92

The Binary Rotation 99
The Recapitulatory Rotation 106
Trans-​Action 112
6. Rival Repeats: On Negative Interaction and Form in Flux 116
Wilhelm Friedemann Bach and the “Condensed Recapitulation” 120
Unobtrusive Double Returns 124
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and the Triple Rotation 135
The “Synthesizing Recapitulation” 141
The “False Recapitulation” 144
Summary 146
7. Converging Forms 148
Sonata Forms? 148
On Convergence 149
Ritornello Form versus the Classical Concerto 153
From Texture to Thematicism 156
Midway Models, from Quantz and Riepel to Koch and Galeazzi 157
Conditions for Convergence 159
Expansion of Concerto Form 163
Shifting of Agency 167
Telltale Differences: The Tutti Medial Repeat 171
Summary 179
8. Beyond Sonata Form 181
A Bird’s-​Eye View 184
Fuzzy Transitions 185

Appendix 1: The Sample 191

Methods for Constructing a Sample 191
The Method for Constructing the Sample in this Research 193
Annotating the Corpus 195
Appendix 2: Statistical Significance and Confidence Bounds 199
Bibliography 225
Index of Musical Works 235
General Index 239
A B O U T T H E C OM PA N IO N W E B SI T E

www.oup.com/​us/howsonataforms​

Oxford has created a website to accompany How Sonata Forms. Material that
cannot be made available in a book is provided here, namely an online Appendix
listing sampled Binary-​Form Works, Concertos, and their composers. We
encourage you to consult this resource in conjunction with the chapters.
Introduction: Musical Form and Movement
of the Multitude

My engagement with the idea of a bottom-​up evolution of common practice in the

creative arts, and specifically the spontaneous rise of sonata form, dates back to the
early days of my doctoral studies, when a member of my academic committee
asked me to provide a clear definition of sonata form in my research proposal. My
initial response, to my own surprise, was antagonistic. I argued that sonata form is
such a complex and widely debated phenomenon—​ these were the years
immediately following the publication of Hepokoski and Darcy’s Elements and
Caplin’s Classical Form—​that it would be at once unnecessarily partisan and
paralyzingly complex to define something that is, at the end of the day, quite
intuitive. As I walked away from the meeting, I tried to understand why it was that
I objected so strongly to the request. It was not so much the complexity of the
question, or the need to take sides within the new Formenlehre, as it was a
fundamental objection to the very idea of a definition in a Platonic, essentialist
sense that I found deeply contrary to the way I grasped form.
The initial, naïve formulation of the source of that objection took the form of a
hypothetical model, which forms the basis of Chapter 3 of this book: What if form
was, at least initially, no more than a haphazard collection of formal elements?
What if that collection was recognized as a musical form only ex post facto? What
if it is impossible to draw the exact line between when a work just “happened” to
have those elements and when it had those elements because it was in sonata
form? Would not a definition in the traditional, synchronic sense necessarily do
violence in such a state of affairs?
Within ten minutes, and less than a hundred yards from the building in which
the committee had met, I had a rough blueprint of what was to become an exciting
intellectual odyssey over the next few years. The question itself went through
numerous changes of form in the years that followed, but from the start two
interrelated central threads stood out, both of which opened the way to my
acquaintance with the great thinkers who have become my constant intellectual
soul mates and sources of inspiration ever since. Some of these will feature in this
introduction and throughout the book, not only because I am eager to share my
enthusiasm for some truly exciting thinkers, but also because I hope, through a
brief exposition of some of their ideas, to tease out some of the crucial characteristics
of the systems they envisaged as a way of pondering the shape that a bottom-​up
explanation of form should assume.
The first of the two threads arose early on, in a conversation with my adviser,
Naphtali Wagner. His response to the initial idea was to propose that transferring

How Sonata Forms. Yoel Greenberg, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197526286.003.0001
2 T How Sonata Forms

the arena of action from form to formal elements was analogous to Richard
Dawkins’s shift from the level of the organism to that of the gene in The Selfish
Gene. In my subsequent explorations of Dawkins’s oeuvre I learned to appreciate
the freedom gained by the adoption of a reductionist approach to understanding
evolutionary processes. Under a reductionist approach, elements at a lower level
may be appreciated each in its own right, and not only in light of its contribution
to the whole. Their emergence no longer needs to fit in with a larger, usually
problematically teleological picture, and as a consequence, their relationship with
one another becomes considerably more interesting than those among the parts of
a well-​planned machine. Instead of working together in a predetermined fashion
toward a common goal dictated or inspired by a coherent whole, low-​level elements
that just happened to come together can contradict or compete with one another,
can change their meaning, or can combine and recombine, creating an unstable,
dynamic whole.
The second thread is an almost-​immediate corollary of reductionism,
namely, that evolution of order under such circumstances inevitably occurs
bottom up. If the whole is unable to provide the raison d’être of the parts, then
the parts must, through some invisible hand or some process of self-​
organization, generate the whole. My exposure to the field of cultural evolution
during my work with Simon Levin in the Department of Ecology and
Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University allowed me not only to appreciate
biological evolution as but one manifestation of self-​organization, but also to
glimpse some of the possible analogies and exchanges of ideas between
different self-​organizing systems. Biological evolution, ecology, and population
genetics were all valid sources of influence in accounting for aspects of the
evolution of culture.
In 2013 I chanced upon a newspaper interview with the Harvard literary
historian Stephen Greenblatt in an Israeli newspaper. Greenblatt spoke with
passion of the great poem by the first-​century bce Roman philosopher and poet
Titus Lucretius Carus (generally referred to as Lucretius), De rerum natura (On the
Nature of Things). Apart from being dazzled by the lucid logic and exquisite
elegance of the selections from Lucretius’ poetry presented by Greenblatt with
infectious zeal, I was particularly struck by one quote:

Especially since this world is the product of Nature, the happenstance

Of the seeds of things colliding into each other by pure chance
In every possible way, no aim in view, at random, blind,
Till sooner or later certain atoms suddenly combined
So that they lay the warp to weave the cloth of mighty things:
Of earth, of sea, of sky, of all the species of living beings.1

I could not help noticing the kinship between my own approach and that of a
thinker born more than two thousand years earlier, and when I subsequently read
both Lucretius’ poem and Greenblatt’s account of its afterlife in his book The
Swerve, I felt as if I was being sworn into an eclectic brotherhood of bottom-​up
thinkers.
 Introduction: Musical Form and Movement of the Multitude T3

De rerum natura is the single most important exposition of the atomism

promulgated by Democritus, Leucippus, and Epicurus centuries earlier. In it,
Lucretius reduces all existing matter to combinations of “atoms” (basic units that
are identical to one another) and void. That these atoms come together to create
the vast variety of existing things, animal, vegetable, and mineral, is due, in
Lucretius’ view, to one agent above all—​chance.
The ramifications of this idea are colossal. To point out but two: If everything
consists of the same ingredients (atoms and void) created through the same
process of random collision of atoms, then there is ultimately no difference
between humans and anything else, let alone animals. Furthermore, God or gods
have no essential place in Lucretius’ world, which self-​organized without the aid of
an external designer. This bottom-​up, chance-​driven explanation frees us of the
need for a designer. Without delving further into many of Lucretius’ other ideas—​
his rejection of an afterlife, his advocacy of the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance
of pain, his denial of a moral obligation toward the gods, and his renouncement of
religions as cruel, to name but a few—​there was enough in those two ramifications
alone to make Lucretius the avowed enemy of the early Christians. De rerum
natura was suppressed, all but vanishing before a lone copy was discovered and
copied by the fifteenth-​ century Italian humanist Gian Francesco Poggio
Bracciolini.
Greenblatt has been criticized for caricaturing the Middle Ages, for
misinterpreting the reasons for the near loss of the poem, and for overstating the
case of the influence of the book, which had probably been circulating in the ninth
century, too. But for my purposes, that is neither here nor there. In the astonishing
list of thinkers who promulgated bottom-​up philosophies from the seventeenth
century onward, it matters not whether it was Lucretius’ book that helped shape
their thought or whether his inclusion on their bookshelf and frequent citation in
their work simply reflected their having found an intellectual forefather without
whom they would have formed similar conclusions. One thing is clear: bottom-​up
explanations have accounted for some of the most far-​reaching and influential
ideas in the modern era.
Adam Smith, who studied Lucretius, was the father of two such bottom-​up
theories. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Smith rejects the role of moral
philosophers in prescribing morality. If the prevailing, religious view was that “the
devisings of the human heart are evil from youth,”2 and therefore morality had to
be imposed top down by a higher authority for society not to disintegrate into
chaos, Smith believed that morality could arise spontaneously, in a bottom-​up
process or, to use Smith’s memorable term, with the aid of an “invisible hand.”3
Besides self-​interest, all that was required was the simple, local rule that Smith
called “sympathy,” which entails gauging situations “by conceiving what we
ourselves should feel in the like situation.”4 Through the local agency of sympathy
alone, argues Smith, dictates of morality, such as self-​ restraint, compassion,
humanity, prudence, benevolence, and self-​command, arise on their own. Moral
philosophers are thus not the devisers but the documenters of morality; they
observe what people do but do not invent; they describe but do not prescribe.
Smith’s account, in the words of Smith scholar James Otteson, “declasses moral
4 T How Sonata Forms

judgements, not to mention moralists, by locating their origins in the messy

empirical world of human experience.”5 Theory, as is so often the case, follows
practice.
Smith’s second major work, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth
of Nations (1776), most commonly referred to as The Wealth of Nations, applies a
similar bottom-​up approach to economics. Although the book has become the
cornerstone of laissez-​faire economics, Smith is interested (as the full title of the
book implies) not only in the synchronic question of how economic systems
should be run, but also in the diachronic one of how they came to be. Smith thus
locates himself as part of what Matt Ridley has called “a Scottish tradition that
sought cause and effect in the history of a topic: instead of asking what is the
perfect Platonic ideal of a moral system, ask rather how it came about.”6 And the
explanations within this tradition invariably invoked bottom-​up, emergence-​
based, rather than top-​ down, design-​based arguments. The individual,
argues Smith:

generally indeed neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how
much he is promoting it. . . . He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in
many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of
his intention.7

As in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, local incentive creates global order. And as
Smith astutely points out, the actions leading to an ultimate end can be achieved
through complete ignorance of that end.
Among the best known of Smith’s bottom-​ up-​thinking contemporary
compatriots were David Hume and Adam Ferguson. The latter, in a famous quote
from An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), eloquently drives home the
difference between “human action” and “human design”:

Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed
enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble
upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the
execution of any human design. If Cromwell said, That a man never mounts higher,
than when he knows not whither he is going; it may with more reason be affirmed
of communities, that they admit of the greatest revolutions where no change is
intended, and that the most refined politicians do not always know whither they
are leading the state by their projects.8

Two key attributes of bottom-​up systems stand out in Ferguson’s account.

First, although with the benefit (or perhaps handicap) of hindsight the steps taken
appear to be purposeful, as if striving toward a specific end, each step is in fact a
“stumble,” taken “with equal blindness to the future.” With the dissociation of local
motivations from the long-​term effects, the agents driving the history of the system
“promote an end which was no part of [their] intention” (as Smith put it).
The second attribute pertains to the identity of those agents. Smith, to illustrate
the dissonance between personal selfishness and the social benefit it can engender,
invites us to imagine a prototypical selfish individual landowner. The identity,
 Introduction: Musical Form and Movement of the Multitude T5

wealth, or influence of this imaginary landlord is unimportant, for Smith does not
view the process as being driven by any single individual. The real agent of change
is the sum of the parts, or what Ferguson calls the “movement of the multitude,” in
effect an eighteenth-​century vision of crowdsourcing, akin to what we all too often
witness today when watching public opinion emerge through multiple utterances
in social media, or observing how the World Wide Web evolves through self-​
motivated actions of its constituent parts. Bottom-​up, spontaneously ordered
systems are not driven by the dramatic, grandiose actions of individuals as much
as by the incremental and unintentional steps of communities.
Perhaps this is why those who fell under the spell of Lucretius’ bottom-​up
philosophy were invariably opponents of great-​ man accounts of history.
Montesquieu, whose magnum opus, The Spirit of the Laws (1748), refers frequently,
both directly and indirectly, to Lucretius, believed that history is mainly governed
by general causes in which individual humans are just epiphenomena, or
“accidents.”9 Denis Diderot, whose Philosophical Thoughts (1746) has as its motto
a quote from De rerum natura, includes virtually no entries for named people in
the Encyclopédie that he edited together with Jean d’Alembert. A hundred years
later, Herbert Spencer waged war on Thomas Carlyle’s influential “great man”
theory, arguing instead in favor of “the long series of complex influences which has
produced the race in which he appears, and the social state into which that race
has slowly grown.” For Spencer, great men are not cause but effect. Comparing
great man theory to creationism, he directly links bottom-​up historical explanations
with diachronic rather than synchronic questioning, criticizing Carlyle for not
“go[ing] back a step and ask[ing] whence comes the great man.”10
Spencer, of course, was an ardent champion of the most famous bottom-​up
theory of them all, Darwinism. It was Spencer who coined the expression “survival
of the fittest,” which he applied not only to biological evolution, but also to
philosophy, psychology, ethics, and the study of society in what he called his
“synthetic philosophy.” Darwinist theories, whatever their scope or form, epitomize
the strengths of bottom-​up arguments in explaining complexity without a designer.
Through simple, local principles—​mutation and natural selection—​and a series of
gradual and cumulative steps, Darwin’s evolutionary theory succeeded in
explaining the rise of the most complex organisms without having to resort to the
existence of a designer. Most of the properties of bottom-​up systems that I have
been observing are present in Darwin’s theory of evolution: nothing is fixed;
changes are local and incremental, without any knowledge of an end; and the
essence of the explanation is to understand the synchronic in light of the diachronic.
The kinship between the few bottom-​up theories I have mentioned above is no
mere afterthought on my part. As Darwin himself admitted, he owed many of his
insights to Adam Smith’s theories, which he had studied while at Cambridge. As
Stephen Jay Gould observed, “the theory of natural selection is uncannily similar
to the chief doctrine of laissez-​faire economics.”11 Darwinism soon inspired
bottom-​up evolutionary theories on a huge variety of topics. As early as 1863, the
linguist August Schleicher published a pamphlet entitled Die Darwinsche Theorie
und die Sprachwissenschaft (Darwinian theory and language science), in which he
asserted that languages were “organisms of nature” upon which he had used fifty
6 T How Sonata Forms

years of results in historical linguistics to test Darwin’s theory. Although this might
sound the wrong way around, Schleicher’s rationale makes perfect sense from a
nineteenth-​ century perspective, invoking the bottom-​ up imagery of
self-​organization:

Languages are organisms of nature; they have never been directed by the will of
man; they rose, and developed themselves according to definite laws; they grew
old, and died out. They, too, are subject to that series of phenomena which we
embrace under the name of “life.” The science of language is consequently a natural
science; its method is generally altogether the same as that of any other natural
science.12

For Schleicher, “life” was tantamount to a cycle of generation and extinction

through self-​organization. Viewing language as a bottom-​up construction would
have been unlikely to surprise anyone in the nineteenth century. Even among
those inclined to take the Scriptures at face value, the top-​down account of the
birth of languages in the tale of the Tower of Babel would have crumbled like the
tower itself in light of the readily available evidence of the rise, fall, and
transformation of languages over written history. The newcomer to the class of
self-​organizing systems was biological evolution, which hence had to be tested
according to the findings of linguistics, rather than vice versa.
Reviewing Schleicher’s pamphlet in the first volume of Nature in 1870, the
philologist and linguist Max Müller proposed that “a struggle for life is constantly
going on amongst the words and grammatical forms in each language.” Darwin
embraced this idea with enthusiasm a year later in The Descent of Man, writing
that “the survival or preservation of certain favored words in the struggle for
existence is natural selection.”13 Evolutionary linguistics was immensely popular
in the late nineteenth century, and although it went out of fashion in the twentieth
century following the publication in 1916 of Saussure’s Course in General
Linguistics, it is now once again in vogue.14
Further extensions of the Darwinian model emerged in the twentieth century,
in particular the theories of the economists Joseph Schumpeter and Nobel laureate
Friedrich Hayek. The economist W. Brian Arthur has argued that Hayek and
Schumpeter saw economic change as resulting from “new combinations of
productive means,” a mechanism he calls “evolution by combination” or
“combinatorial evolution.” In Arthur’s view, technologies, too, evolve “by
combination of existing technologies and . . . (therefore) existing technologies
beget further technologies.”15 The ubiquity of simultaneous discoveries and
inventions serves as evidence in favor of an evolutionary view of technology and
science. The ideas of Galileo and Descartes were discovered shortly before but not
published by Thomas Harriot; Newton and Leibniz discovered calculus
independently of one another; Thomas Edison, Joseph Swan, and Alexander
Lodygin all invented the light bulb; Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray, the
telephone. The list goes on, suggesting that, in a paraphrase of Herbert Spencer, it
was not these men who enabled science or technology, but rather science and
technology that enabled them.16
 Introduction: Musical Form and Movement of the Multitude T7

These days, bottom-​up systems are present everywhere we look, as explanations

for phenomena as diverse as bird-​flocking and crystal formation, as techniques for
allowing order to emerge uncontrolled (e.g., in radio networks or employee-​run
companies), and as ideologies. With the rise of globalization and our day-​to-​day
engagement with bottom-​up networks such as the World Wide Web, we are able
more than ever to appreciate how a system can evolve characteristics of its own
without the involvement of a designer, through human action but not human
design. The wide availability of software and large databases, as well as the
emergence of the realm of big data, has not only encouraged awareness of the
order that underlies seemingly haphazard, or at least uncoordinated, data; it also
makes it possible to tease out and interpret information from corpora that only a
few decades ago would have seemed unapproachable to anyone but select
professionals. It is high time for an application of such approaches to provide
insights about human creativity.

***
In this book, I will present a case for bottom-​up emergence of musical forms, and
specifically sonata form. I will frequently dip into other fields involving bottom-​up
self-​organization such as ecological systems, philosophy of human knowledge,
linguistics, and evolutionary theory, not because there is a one-​to-​one mapping
from any of these to human creativity in general or music in particular, but rather
because I believe that to an extent far greater than we usually allow, form in music
is a bottom-​up phenomenon, and hence part of a broad and diverse class of
bottom-​up systems. The systems within this class are not isomorphic, but they are
connected to one another through a kind of family resemblance, each sharing
typical characteristics with many other members in the class. I believe that the
ramifications of thinking about musical form as a bottom-​up system have not been
fully taken into account in scholarship, which remains essentially top-​down, and
hence I hope that turning to other bottom-​up systems will both enrich the way we
think about musical form and help us question some prevailing modes of thought
in Formenlehre.
But is this advisable? Should musical phenomena be explained bottom up, or
is not creationism, as the word suggests, the natural way to tackle products of
creativity? After all, a work of music is an act of painstaking design by its composer,
and a deeply personal one at that. But then, so is a work of literature. True, Nicholas
Nickleby did not emerge, but was carefully created, or designed, by Dickens. He
constructed its plot, shaped its characters, and planned the twists and turns of the
plot. None of these can be said to have “emerged,” except in a very general sense.17
Its language, however—​grammar, vocabulary, and syntax—​and its genre, the
novel, are all emergent phenomena, implicit assets that were available to Dickens
without having been invented by him, or by anyone else for that matter.
Without venturing into the thorny question of music as a language, for the
present purpose we can safely observe an analogy between a certain class of
musical forms and grammar or a literary genre: neither was invented, and both
were made available to composers and authors through a long process of statistical
learning, based on countless encounters with precedents. In short, both are
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