ABSTRACT
Despite the recent growth of Formenlehre research and pedagogy, the repertoire of sonata form pedagogy remains impoverished: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Joseph Haydn, and Ludwig van Beethoven wrote an astonishing 84% of sonata form examples in three current leading textbooks, suggesting that students only learn the sonata form practices of three White male composers from Germany and Austria, all writing music around the same time. Yet this consistency comes at a cost. Poundie Burstein has noted that focusing on too few composers distorts one’s understanding of history and style. Furthermore, only studying the works of cisgendered White men continues to reify what Philip Ewell has called music theory’s “White racial frame.” To tie both points together, whose norms are we teaching and why?
Our chapter responds to these problems with a two-week unit on sonata form that focuses on works by a more diverse set of composers: Guadeloupe-born French composer Joseph Bologne (1745-1799), Afro-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912), and African American composer Florence Price (1887-1953). The unit comprises a flexible set of four lesson plans that can be implemented directly as a sonata form unit within an undergraduate core theory course or graduate review.
