Much has happened since my first entry into this blog. Now, four months later, I have retired from Yale (after 21 years of teaching there and 41 years of teaching all told) and have moved, now permanently, to Minnesota. In the past four months I have been adding steadily to this web archive, and it’s beginning to take shape, though much more will be added to it in the next months and years. The latest entries are those of the “Elements Archive.” Here I upload early versions of the Elements of Sonata Theory—versions that both Warren Darcy and I used in the early incarnations of our various Sonata Theory classes or seminars, he at Oberlin and I at the University of Minnesota (1990s) and Yale (Fall 1999 onward). The versions online here are my own personal copies, which I used as draft copies to revise, mark up, add marginalia, and the like—so they include my additions and corrections, ready to be trasnferred into the succeeding version. Apart from the early Elements drafts, I have also uploaded early, “pre‑Elements” position papers that I was preparing in the earlier 1990s—initial ideas from which many of the principles of Sonata Theory would spring. As early documents, they are often conjectural, speculative, and they might contain ideas later refined or discarded or factual or analytical errors that I (or we) later spotted. Still, they give a sense of my thinking before things began to come together with the Sonata Theory project proper.
I consider all of these documents to be under copyright. Any use or mention of them should be properly cited. As always, I welcome comments at james.hepokoski@yale.edu.