ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the work of a little-known music theorist, William Jones of Nayland. It describes what there is relating to musical form in Jones’s main writings on music. Jones wrote two treatises on music. The first, ‘On the Philosophy of Musical Sounds’, is one of the ‘discourses’ in Jones’s Physiological Disquisitions, a book on the physical universe. Fundamental to mechanistic thought is the analysis of an object into a set of units and the arrangement of these units in an order. Although, compositionally, the late eighteenth century seems to have chosen the sonata as its ideal musical form, music-theoretically, it tended to idealise the form and technique of fugue. Jones identifies five properties as constituents of all pieces of music: equivalences, symmetry, mechanism, form relative to number and arrangement of properties and extension. Indeed, Jones’s mechanistic reasoning is so far removed from the music of Boccherini and Haydn that pure intuition made the distance evident.
