390 BENJAMIN DUANE

Table 2 Number of developments in the corpus that end with a standing on the
home-key dominant, with counts broken down by both composer and decade

Standing on V?
Composer Decade Yes No Total

Haydn 1760s 2 11 13
1770s 7 17 24
1780s 8 13 21
1790s 8 9 17
Mozart 1770s 7 8 15
1780s 13 2 15
Beethoven 1790s 10 3 13

Table 3 Number of developments in the corpus that end with some version of the
home-key dominant

Final V?
Composer Decade Yes No Total

Haydn 1760s 12 1 13
1770s 23 1 24
1780s 18 3 21
1790s 14 3 17
Mozart 1770s 14 1 15
1780s 15 0 15
Beethoven 1790s 12 1 13

quoted above. In particular, one might retain the notion that developments
typically end on the dominant but abandon the idea that that dominant is
prolonged. Indeed, this refined assertion seems to better fit the synchronic
sample reflected in Tables 1 and 2. If one tallies the number of developments
in this corpus that end with some type of dominant – momentary or prolonged,
inverted or root position, triad or seventh chord – then this rate tops 80% in
every decade of each of these composers’ careers (Table 3). On its surface, this
broader category – dominant rather than dominant prolongation – would seem a
viable way to salvage a common theoretical precept.
But the commonness of the development-ending dominant – the high counts
in the ‘Yes’ column of Table 3 – might arise from structural constraints. After all,
recapitulations begin in tonic following a digression to other keys, and there are
few ways to prepare this return without a retransition that ends on some form of
the home-key dominant. In that sense, it is no wonder that so many developments
conclude in this way. The Schenkerian view of sonata form, moreover, offers
another explanation of the high counts in Table 3. Invoking Schenker, William
Rothstein suggests that ‘in the vast majority of sonata forms the harmonic goal
of the development is [ . . . ] V’ (1989, p. 112). And, as Hepokoski and Darcy

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 THE DEVELOPMENT-ENDING DOMINANT AND THE LATE CADENCE IN VI 391

assert, ‘[W]hen a major-mode exposition ends, as it usually does, with a tonicized

dominant [ . . . ] the entire development may be heard as a prolongation of this V,
regrasping it and activating it as a chord [ . . . ] at the end’ (2006, p. 198). Thus,
the sonata’s structure probably encourages composers to end developments with
dominant chords, if not through middleground prolongation then simply by
leaving few alternatives.
Put another way, the assertion that developments normatively end with
some form of dominant conflates stylistic norms with other sorts of statistical
regularities. It is one thing for musical structure to encourage composers to end
developments in a particular way. It is another for composers to choose an ending
because it is the norm – what Hepokoski and Darcy (2006) would call a ‘first-
level default’.7 As these authors put it, composers often select options from ‘the
backdrop of normative procedures within the different zones or action-spaces
of the late-eighteenth-century sonata’, and many options were ‘almost reflexive
choices – the things that most composers might do as a matter of course, the first
option that would occur to them’ (pp. 9–10). Such ‘first-level defaults’ are not
the same as tendencies born of structural constraints, and sonata theories should
recognise the distinction.
This distinction can be maintained by acknowledging historical changes in
the norms surrounding the development’s ending. Such norms, of course, do
not develop overnight, and not every composer embraces them in the same way
and to the same degree. While the standing on the dominant might at some
point have become a default development ending, this norm did not seem to
emerge until around 1780, and Haydn accepted it only as a low-level default,
whereas Beethoven and late Mozart embraced it as a first-level default. Structural
constraints might have steered most of these composer’s developments toward
the same final chord, but only in later decades did they choose (and prolong)
this chord in deference to convention.
The standing on the dominant also seems more likely than a mere dominant
to become a default option. As a musical gesture, the former is very different
from the latter, not only in its length but also in its level of tension and energy.
And precisely because the standing on the dominant is so distinctive, so marked
by specific features, a composer could easily come to view it as a normative
technique. But a mere dominant arrival, which could be anything from a half
beat of V 42 to sixteen bars of dominant pedal, would hardly translate into a
distinct compositional option. Would a group of composers be likely to decide –
collectively, tacitly – that such a gesture deserved special status as a norm?
Although the standing on the dominant did not become a default option
until later in the eighteenth century, a second norm seemed to influence the
ends of developments in earlier years. This second norm, as many scholars have
noted, was to cadence in the submediant and then modulate back to tonic, most
often touching on the home-key dominant just before the recapitulation.8 As
explained below, the heyday of this technique was the decades prior to 1780, and
its importance to this earlier sonata style cannot be overstated. Indeed, this late

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392 BENJAMIN DUANE

cadence in vi, as I call it, was even more pervasive in its time than the standing
on the dominant became in later decades. The cadence was, as Charles Rosen
suggests, a genuine ‘stereotype’ in these earlier times – in other words, a strong
first-level default (1988, p. 263).
Rosen is not the only scholar to notice this norm. Indeed, many have presented
the late cadence in vi as an important alternative to ending developments
with dominant arrivals – and a more common option in some portions of the
repertoire. Wayne Petty, for example, noted that although ‘the vast majority
of Classical development sections [ . . . ] reach a well-articulated dominant
harmony at the end’, most of C. P. E. Bach’s developments end with a late
cadence in vi and proceed to the recapitulation with little or no bridging
material (1999, p. 151). Petty argues that Emanuel Bach’s developments are
best analysed not with Schenkerian techniques, in which local keys are viewed
as subordinate to a prolonged dominant, but rather with the approach proposed
by Koch, which emphasises cadences and local keys (though Petty recommends
Schenkerian analysis as a secondary tool). In other words, Petty acknowledges
that development-ending dominants are not a default option for every composer
in every era and adjusts his theoretical posture accordingly.9
Other theories address the late cadence in ways implying that it is less central
to the sonata’s structure than a development-ending dominant. Hepokoski and
Darcy, for example, explain that ‘the submediant, vi, was a common goal,
frequently marked with a vi:PAC. In mid-century works this was sometimes
the only tonal goal of “the first part of the second section”’.10 But they also
claim that ‘the development’s last task is to prepare for the dramatized return of
the tonic [ . . . ], usually by deploying an active dominant [ . . . ] and proceeding
forward with it, often gaining energy in the process’ (2006, p. 197). Although
they acknowledge that a cadence in vi may happen earlier, cases in which the
development ends with a half cadence in this key are placed in another theoretical
category – one in which the final V of the home key is replaced with a ‘lower-
level default’ (pp. 198–205). Thus, the norm of ending with a dominant is
given higher theoretical status than the norm of cadencing in vi. How such a
cadence is interpreted – as a low-level default at the end or as a high-level default
earlier – depends on whether that cadence is followed by a dominant arrival.
In other words, the authors view the attainment of this final dominant as an
organising principle more important than the late cadence. This same trend –
the subordination of the late cadence in vi to a subsequent arrival on V – is
evident in many other theories of developments.11
In other words, many theories of retransitions seem to exhibit the same
problem that Paul Wingfield (2008) identified with regard to Hepokoski and
Darcy’s theory – namely, an overrepresentation of certain subsets of the
repertoire. As Wingfield points out, most of Hepokoski and Darcy’s examples
come from Mozart, whose frequent use of the standing on the dominant may help
explain the authors’ overemphasis of this gesture. As explained above, however,

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