Yale University Department of Music

Review
Reviewed Work(s): Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style by Leonard G. Ratner
Review by: Jane Stevens
Source: Journal of Music Theory, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Spring, 1983), pp. 121-127
Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the Yale University Department of
Music
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/843564
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Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style
by Leonard G. Ratner
New York: Schirmer, 1980
xvii, 475 pp.

RE VIEWER

Jane Stevens

The appearance of this book is an event of the first order for all
musicians who deal with music of the classic period, whether they call
themselves theorists or historians. It takes an approach to its subject
radically different from that of any earlier survey, either analytic or
historical, an approach that has grown in part out of the author's con-
tinuing interest in eighteenth-century music theorists. Well known for
his ground-breaking studies of early descriptions of sonata form and
periodic structure, Professor Ratner has devoted much of his career to
analyzing and teaching the music of the late eighteenth century in the
light of contemporaneous theoretical writings. His book is clearly the
product of his long attempt to assimilate eighteenth-century viewpoints
into a modern analytic understanding of classic style. If it gains the
audience it deserves,it should help to bring about long overdue revisions
in the way that music of the classic period is analyzed and taught.
All this said, it must also be admitted at the outset that this work
has serious deficiencies that may unfortunately stand in the way of its
having its deserved impact on academic musicians. First and probably
foremost, from a practical point of view, is the problem of audience: it
is not clear who might read this book without confusion and/or frustra-
tion. It seems designed as a textbook, and has been promoted as such
by the publisher; according to the preface, "the volume is addressed to
students, performers, and listeners." Yet it often assumes a broad and
sophisticated knowledge of eighteenth-century style which can be ex-
pected only of those at the graduate level and beyond. This latter group,
on the other hand, will be hampered and often frustrated by the syn-
thetic nature of the discussion, which frequently fails to differentiate
clearly between eighteenth-century ideas and the author's own analyses,
and by the absence of any but the most rudimentary scholarly apparatus
to facilitate the confirmation and further investigation of the many new
approaches which are opened up here.
Classic Music is divided into four main parts of unequal length. The
first, "Expression," while the shortest (thirty pages), gains emphasis
through its position, and represents one of the most useful, as well as
most radical, innovations of this book. To approach the music of the
classic period not through its techniques of musical construction,
whether termed form or style, but first of all through ideas and figures

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of expression is indeed an innovative undertaking. Under the closely
related headings of "Types" and "Styles," both included under "Topics"
of "muscial discourse," Ratner attempts to lay out a guide to the varie-
ties of musical expressive content, based in late baroque ideas but en-
compassing a much wider range of reference. Here he briefly defines
and illustrates the distinctive characteristics of common dance rhythms
and of various other styles such as the French overture, the strict or
learned style, "Turkish music," and so forth. These opening sections,
together with part 4, "Stylistic Perspectives," which discusses national
styles and high and low styles, and ends with analytical treatments of
three major works, will probably be the most stimulating parts of this
book for the majority of readers. The central two parts, which comprise
nearly three-quarters of the whole, are concerned with rhetoric-that is,
the particulars of classic stylistic language and form. While the subject
matter of these chapters is more conventional, here too the author
draws on the works of a wide variety of contemporaneous theorists to
direct or amplify his discussions. Furthermore, he makes clear, partly
by bringing in examples from a wide variety of composers, that his
interest lies not merely with Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, but with
the stylistic premises that they shared with three generations of com-
posers.
Part 1 ("Expression") may be taken as a typical section of Classic
Music, illustrating many of its strengths and weaknesses. These few
pages are enormously rich in ideas, drawing on Professor Ratner's
incomparably broad knowledge of both theoretical and musical lit-
erature. Contemporaneous commentary is introduced into well-focused
associations with relevant musical examples, all within a discussion that
is obviously directed toward an integrated modern understanding of
eighteenth-century music. What emerges is a kind of iconographical
principle: the stylistic gestures of "absolute" music are seen as refer-
ences to specific styles or types, with particular expressive associations,
that have their origin outside the piece itself. This principle is then
worked out in a specific work, the first movement of Mozart's Prague
Symphony, K. 504. Both the principle and the particulars are pregnant
with possibilities for new ways of dealing with classic music. Yet they
are presented here almost like lecture notes, with a minimum of ex-
planation and seldom with more than one example of each topic. Even
after some considerable effort on the reader's part, the meaning some-
times seems unacceptably vague. The discussion of the march, for in-
stance, mentions the common use of march rhythms in first movements
of instrumental works, but about those rhythms themselves tells us only
that the march is in a "moderately quick duple meter"and has "dotted
rhythms" (p. 16). The basic difficulty of this single brief section is one
that becomes much more troublesome in later chapters: it does not

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include a complete treatment of its subject in terms of general princi-
ples, but discusses only certain interesting aspects of it.
Whatever its failures of comprehensiveness, the greatest contribution
made by this work-particularly for the readers of this Journal-is its
sophisticated and knowledgeable use of eighteenth-century theoretical
writings to explicate the music that they describe. On the other hand, it
is in precisely this aspect-which has after all no real precedent-that
Classic Music exhibits its most serious deficiencies. Ratner seems to as-
sume, first of all, that each "theorist" (that is, writer about music) is
clear and straightforward, so that his meaning is unambiguous; and that
the views of these theorists, together with the basic elements of musical
style itself, remained more or less consistent over a period of at least
sixty to seventy-five years. Although this latter attitude grows in part
out of his belief that late-eighteenth-century ideas of musical expression
evolve directly out of late baroque ones, this book does not undertake
to prove even that assumption, which some might not find self-evident.
More unsettling, because more inextricably joined to the very purpose
of this work, is the troubling amalgamation of the author's own ideas
and the eighteenth-century ones with which he has worked for so long.
The whole point, of course, is not simply to parrot early formulations,
but to integrate them into a modern analytic approach, one that will
answer our present needs. Insofar as possible, however, it seems impor-
tant to distinguish the ideas of Leonard G. Ratner (1916- ) from those
of H. C. Koch (1749-1816) or of Johann Mattheson (1681-1764). This
book often makes that distinction nearly impossible for anyone who
has not read many of these theorists himself and who does not have
access to their (largely unreprinted) treatises. In part this difficulty may
stem from editorial policies: footnotes are minimal here, limited for
the most part to quotations, so that one often cannot be sure what
points in a paragraph summarize a particular writer, which are simply a
summary of common eighteenth-century viewpoints, and which are the
author's interpretation of a particular state of affairs.
Even when the theorist's own words are quoted in translation, the
omission of the original language leaves the reader still dependent on
the author. A single example will illustrate what this reviewer finds to
be a disturbing lack of precision in many such translated passages. Rat-
ner begins his discussion of recitative (p. 316, within the penultimate
chapter of part 3, "Form") by citing Koch's Musikalisches Lexikon of
1802 on the four ways in which recitative differs from "true song." The
passage which follows is indented and set apart from the main text in
the manner used throughout for quoted passages. While this format pro-
duces occasional ambiguities (since it is also used for various numbered
lists), in this case the presence of dots of ellipsis, together with the foot-
note reference that is seldom provided except for quotations, seems to

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make it clear that this is in fact a translation of Koch's text (cols. 1231-
32). Ratner's point 1 includes an exact translation of Koch's first clause,
together with a paraphrase of a footnote, enclosed in parentheses but
giving the impression of direct quotation through the use of dots of
ellipsis. Point 2 includes only direct quotation, but with some freedoms
of translation: gleichffrmig, literally "uniform," is translated as "sym-
metrical"; and man beobachtet dabey bloss die Einschnitte des Textes,
ohne auf ein Ebenmaass der melodischen Theile zu sehen (literally:
"one takes note merely of the caesuras of the text, without being
particular about a balance of the melodic parts") emerges as "the various
points of punctuation are made without reference to balance of melodic
phrases." In point 3, the two clauses of the single sentence are reversed
but are otherwise unchanged (aside from the rendering of "melismatic
ornaments" [melismatischen Verzierungen] as "melodic elaboration");
point 4 is a reasonably close translation except for the inexplicable
addition of the phrase, "that can be effective" (modifying "freedoms
in modulation"). Similar inaccuracies have emerged in many other trans-
lated quotations. In the excerpt from Koch (cols. 1451-52) on the
strict style, for instance, italics have been added without comment, an
editorial addition has been enclosed in parentheses instead of brackets,
and Bindung, which Koch defines (col. 253) as a tie (or slur) has been
translated in one place as "closely-bound progression" (p. 23).
This lack of verbal precision extends to Ratner's text as well. "Bal-
ance," "symmetry" (used in the translation cited above as synonymous
with "uniformity," but seeming to carry more complex meaning than
that), and "periodicity" (which finally seems to be identified with the
idea of "arrival" [as, for instance, on p. 203] rather than with any
pattern of regular recurrence) all reappear frequently and even form the
subject of a chapter (chapter 3, pp. 33-47), but are never explicitly de-
fined. Some undefined words are used in obviously idiosyncratic ways
(for example, "declamation," fugal "exposition"); others seem not to
carry a consistent meaning. Ombra, for instance, is first defined as a
dramatic subject (ghosts) for which "fantasia style" is often employed
in opera (p. 24); later it is used to identify a style in its own right (pp.
176, 315), and then as a label for an "affect" (p. 315). Sometimes the
author seems unable or unwilling to verbalize clearly at all. In a work
that offers so much insightful and precise analysis of musical events, it
is especially disconcerting to find passages such as the following: "The
texture is typical of J. C. Bach's style-full of ingratiating melodic con-
tent, neatly turned, with little room for complicated and sophisticated
obbligato texture" (p. 139).
If theorists, and historians of theory, may be disturbed by such lack
of rigor in the use of words and concepts, historians of music and
musical style are similarly likely to miss the kind of critical historical

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rigor that they might expect to find in so historically grounded a work
as this one. More serious than the occasional uncritical acceptance of a
dubious source (such as the quotation of "Mozart's view" about tempo,
taken from the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung of 1798 [p. 184]) are
the sometimes cavalier assertions about historical styles and develop-
ments. In a detailed analysis of the first movement of Mozart's Quintet
in Eb Major, K. 614,. for example, the author refers to passages in "the
brilliant style [virtuoso figuration], taken from the [category of the]
divertimento," a genre about whose identity he seems to feel much
more certain than do many historians. Two of the styles included as
topics of expression, that is, as styles which composers invoked at will
for the particular expressive content of a piece or of a passage, are
"Sensibility, Empfindsamkeit" (p. 22) and "Storm and Stress," a term
which "refer[s] to... the expression of subjective and intense feel-
ings" (p. 21).
A few more mechanical aspects of the book require some comment
as well. The bibliography of secondary literature was apparently com-
pleted some years ago, since it includes very few publications from the
last decade or so. The separate list of primary theoretical sources, how-
ever, appears to be as complete as one could wish. The occasional errors
of page reference in the index, and the much more frequent omissions,
usually of additional references but occasionally of terms used in con-
fusing ways, should probably be ascribed to the editor. This book is
liberally provided with musical examples, as indeed it needs to be; but
evidently in the interests of economy, very few have been specially pre-
pared. Sometimes the reproduction of musical examples provides a
positive support for the text, as in a ten-measure example from Tiirk's
Klavierschule illustrating the relative stress patterns of first beats in a
series of phrases (Ex. 11-10, p. 192), or in Mattheson's examples show-
ing how to transform a chorale melody into a minuet or gavotte (Ex.
5-3, pp. 72-73). The choice of sources for reproduction is not always so
felicitous, however; most examples not taken from the treatises them-
selves are excerpted from uncritical modem editions, complete with
clearly unauthentic marks of dynamics and articulation (for instance, Exs.
8-13 and 9-5, pp. 139 and 150) and sometimes even with metronome
indications (as in Ex. 2-24 and 24-9, pp. 24 and 435). Fragments are
often insufficiently edited: examples taken from the middle of a move-
ment have no tempo markings; measure numbers are often lacking even
when particular measures are referred to in the text (see Ex. 20-1, p. 337);
excerpts sometimes begin before the passage referred to in the text;
and, in the most glaring case (Ex. 8-14, pp. 139-140), a four-measure
phrase is presented not in score but in parts, the violin on a recto page
and the harpsichord on the following verso. A few long examples are
abridged without comment or adequate signal in the score itself, as in

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Ex. 13-8 (pp. 237-244), where mm. 131-211 (most of the recapitula-
tion) of the first movement of Mozart's Quintet in Eb are omitted be-
tween the end of p. 243 and the beginning of p. 244. In many cases the
text does not explain well enough just how, or in which measures, a
musical excerpt serves as an example of the point at hand.
While many of these difficulties will represent only annoyances for
teachers and scholars, they will lead to more serious confusions for the
students for whom this book is explicitly intended. Its largely non-
discursive nature will in fact make it difficult for most students to read
independently. Yet it offers a useful basis for an organized exploration
of the bewildering wealth of relevant eighteenth-century musical com-
mentary, and can provide students with clear discussions of many topics
(for example, the notion of high and low styles) not otherwise easily
accessible to them. Furthermore, there are many analyses (most obvi-
ously those in the last three chapters) and short sections of text (such
as the definitions of dance types in chapter 2) which could serve as a
basis for extended class discussion, where the music could be analyzed
in much more detail and amplifying examples could be brought in. As a
textbook, Classic Music presents much the same kind of idiosyncracies
as in other respects. The chapters on melody and performance, for ex-
ample, provide outstanding treatments of subjects not addressed in the
same way in any other text. The chapter "Texture," on the other hand,
seems to reveal some confusion about the notion of texture itself, since
much of it is devoted to remarks about genre, quite independent of
texture (a concept that is difficult for many students to grasp in the
best of circumstances); yet at the same time it includes many useful and
revealing comments that are about texture.
It has seemed appropriate to advance this long series of criticisms,
partly because reviews are supposed to point out such things, but even
more in order to persuade the prospective reader that the serious defects
of this book, about which he should be warned, do not negate its im-
portance as a milestone in the musical historiography of the eighteenth
century, nor its value as a work which will reward close study. It repre-
sents not a final statement but a new beginning, opening countless
avenues for new explorations of eighteenth-century style and theory
alike. It promises to be a seminal work, offering to scholars a wealth of
suggestions and citations for continuing the historiographical process,
and to students as to all musicians countless ideas for new ways of hear-
ing and understanding a body of music that some might have thought
was already fully explicated. Significant effort will be required on the
part of the academic musician who wishes to understand fully the ideas
and viewpoints presented here; but that effort will be amply repaid by an
expansion of musical horizons. This is a book to be mulled over, and to
be returned to again and again for the insights it continues to yield. It

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is to be hoped that the study of the music of the classic period will
never be quite the same again.

NOTE

1. "Harmonic Aspects of Classic Form," Journal of the American Musicological

Society 2 (1949): 159-167; "Eighteenth-Century Theories of Musical Period
Structure," The Musical Quarterly 42 (1956): 439-454; and "Ars combinatoria:
Chance and Choice in Eighteenth-century Music," in Studies in Eighteenth-
century Music, ed. H. C. R. Landon (New York, 1970), pp. 343-363.

The Computer Music Journal, 1977-1981

REVIEWER

F. Richard Moore

The Computer Music Journal is the main organ of scholarly com-

munication in the field of computer music. CMJ was founded in 1976
by John Snell, who was at that time involved with computer music at
Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and
Acoustics (CCRMA). Snell, a man of tireless tenacity, enlisted a few of
his close friends, the People's Computer Company (a small, tax-exempt,
independent, non-profit publishing corporation in Menlo Park, which
has brought out, among other things, Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer
Calisthenics & Orthodontia), and most of his own energies in order to
mount the task of founding a serious journal. The first issue, which ap-
peared in February 1977, took many months of grueling effort to as-
semble. Snell's editoral in volume 1, number 1 starts out with two
statements, one typical of Snell and the other true beyond any doubt:
"I apologize for the delay in publishing this journal. It was quite a task

The remainder of the first editorial portrayed Snell's greatest fear

about the first issue: that few would understand it. By 1977, through
research and creative efforts dating back for almost twenty years, com-
puter music had become a well-developed field in its own right, com-
plete with its own quirks, jargon, and deep structure. The lead article,
"Signal Processing Aspects of Computer Music-A Survey," by James
A. Moorer, was preprinted from the prestigious Proceedings of the
IEEE (The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), an un-
familiar source for most non-engineering readers, even those who had
made electronic music. Snell suggested several preparatory books and
articles for the uninitiated:

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