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The photo on this website’s home page documents a 2017 session of my Music History undergraduate survey at Yale. On that day we met in Yale’s Beinecke Library to display and get hands-on experience with some of the library’s autograph-manuscript treasures: the Mellon Chansonnier, Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, Debussy, Mahler, Stravinsky, Puccini, Ravel, and so on. In the photo I’m leafing through the autograph score of Mahler’s First Symphony (Hamburg Version), the only known autograph score of this work–the score that includes the “Blumine” movement.

PHOTO: Beinecke Library, Yale University, 2017. Mahler, Symphony No. 1, autograph score.  (See blog post 7/18/2021)

On April 2, 2020 I submitted my new book, A Sonata Theory Handbook, to Oxford University Press. This starts the production process, and with luck it will be out by the end of this year or the beginning of the next. A product of four years of off-and-on work, the book is a complement to and update of Elements of Sonata Theory from 2006. Part of the “pre publication” description is as follows:

“A Sonata Theory Handbook provides a convenient overview of that analytical method’s main points through a step by step introduction to them modeled on author James Hepokoski’s seminars on the subject. The book teaches the method by juxtaposing close readings of eight individual movements—by Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms—with four updated discussions of some of the most foundational concepts behind the theory: dialogic form, expositional action zones, trajectories toward generically normative cadences, rotation theory, the five sonata types, and much more. . . . It advances the discussion not only through a detailed showing of the analytical method in action but also through a deeper, more inclusive engagement with recent developments in form theory, schema theory, and other related studies since 2006, including some of the language and insights of cognitive research into music perception and the more generalized concerns of conceptual metaphor theory. . . . The book ultimately builds to reflections on sonata form in the Romantic era: the heuristic applicability of Sonata Theory to mid- and late-nineteenth century works.”

From my essay “Program Music” (p. 70), in Stephen Downes, ed., Issues in Musical Aesthetics: Musicological Perspectives. New York and London: Routledge, 2014.

First, it is clear that much, perhaps even most, Western instrumental music participates in a historically conditioned, shared semantic network, a significant portion of which is at least approachable by topic-family theory, broadly and flexibly construed. Even though irreducible factors of pure music’s systematic procedures and regulated traditions are also very much in play, the now stale argument that untexted music – much less program music or music with titles – is ipso facto incapable of pointing toward recognizable external referents or affects with cultural connotations is no longer tenable. Conversely, though, one needs to realize that topic theory, still in its raw and rudimentary phases, by no means answers all of our interpretive questions. Overplaying its cards can lead to breathtakingly naive hermeneutic claims. Second, the universe of topic families, including their many shades and variants, is far larger and more varied than anyone has yet described. It also includes overlapping topics and individual figures capable of more than one topical reference. Third, selecting an appropriate (generalized) topic-label for a given figure is more challenging than might initially appear. A procedural risk of topic theory is that it can tempt the overconfident interpreter, with a presumed master-code-book securely in hand, to leap rashly into a quick, reductive labeling. To do so is to discredit what ought to be a more subtly tinged enterprise. We need to think through our descriptors critically, sceptically, weighing alternatives, problematizing what we might mean with such descriptions. Most of the entailments that follow rely on our initial decisions, and those decisions are often the weak links in the chain. (Let Ratner’s designation of the opening of the Eroica as a waltz stand as a caution to us all: Ratner 1980, 223.)

Fourth, even when we think that we have identified the proper family of a given figure, we need to be attentive to the nuances and complications that any individual token of it can present. It may be that the manner of its realization is more noteworthy than the topic itself. Fifth, merely identifying a topic or series of topics is not enough. Topic-recognition must never be taken to be a simple translation of music’s meaning into words. It is only an initial step prompting further inquiry and careful interpretation, particularly with regard to topical inflection and the narrative journey through arrays of topical successions. Sixth, compositionally to illustrate or connote musically is, more often than not, to activate a pre-existing topical tradition of signification and then to tailor it to one’s own cultural and aesthetic purpose. To access a culturally available style is to channel the memory of its historical traditions, to draw on the potential of its past history of connotatively charged accumulations. Any topical study of a single work or set of closely related works should consider the matter both synchronically and diachronically. Individual evocations of birds, water, battles, storms, fanfares, hunts, and all the rest may plug more directly into the topical tradition than into the external referent itself.

From my essay, “Beethoven Reception” (pp. 434-35) in Jim Samson, ed., The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

                                 Between absolute and programme music

It is counter-productive to collapse post-1850 instrumental music into two polarised types. The supposed opposition of absolute and programme music is a false dichotomy, one forged in the heat of nineteenth-century polemics. Nor are such terms to be regarded as verifiable properties of the works themselves. All such classifications serve overwhelmingly as hermeneutic genres – differing modes of interpretation that, for differing purposes, seek to supervise the interplay between a piece and its listener. Hermeneutic genres provide the guidelines encouraging certain kinds of communication to occur while discouraging others; they are lenses through which selected aspects of culturally complex compositions may be called forth for analysis, discussion and commentary. The seemingly mutually exclusive extremes – absolute versus programmatic understandings – are not our only choices. Between them lies a flexible middle ground, a vast zone of nuanced implication that may be tapped in various ways, depending on the desired point of view. Consequently, what we encounter is a spectrum of possibilities under which any single piece might be framed for understanding. There is no single, objectively ‘correct’ approach to any composition. All symphonic works house multiple strata of potential meaning; some are musical, some are extra-musical. Nevertheless, in their interactions with the public, composers sometimes highlighted one or two of these meaning-strata while down playing the others. Some works do invite richer speculation about representational allusion than do others.

From the “Introduction” (p. x) to the collection of some of my essays, Music, Structure, Thought (Ashgate, 2009)

I now regard [my] Verdian work from the 1980s . . . as a preparatory, professionally advantageous holding‑ground that encouraged other, more challenging ideas to arise as potentially fertile provocations within it.  What was needed was to break out of conventional disciplinary scripts.  This entailed a rethinking of basic issues from square one, coupled with a resolution not to fall into one of the new, self‑consciously combative but often musically shallow orthodoxies that were sprouting up on all sides.  At least from this perhaps limited perspective, my work has sought to be radical, though not in the partisan‑political sense, caught up in activist social agendas, but rather in the etymological one: trying to rethink to the root (radix) the most fundamental questions that we ask of music.  From the start, this enterprise has been marked by an abiding wariness vis‑à‑vis the discipline’s several conventional wisdoms and single‑minded, entrenched factions—both old and new.  [To that extent, I have tried to make my post-Verdi work into] . . .  demonstration[s] of larger interpretive principles and modes of current, dialogical questioning, in part, self‑reflexively, to problematize the act of interpretation. What happens to our studies of music when we try to wrest free from comfortable orthodoxies and begin to come to terms with the historical limitations on our own ability to produce adequate readings at all?

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.

Welcome to the JH Archive and blog!  I’m just starting them up today (learning the ropes of how all this works), but let me say a bit about my ideas for, first, the website, and, then, the blog.

My website plan for over the next months–and years–is to build up an archive of downloadable documents culled from the past forty years of teaching, research, and writing. These will include course syllabuses, course PowerPoints, some lecture and seminar notes, professional talks and public lectures, analytical and other formal diagrams, scanned score analyses, published and unpublished writings and handouts, videos, and perhaps much more.  Eventually it might also include newly written professional material that I prefer to make available on the web rather than going through a publisher–getting more things out more quickly without going through the whole publication process. Some of those web-publication items will be “drafts”–or idea-outlines for what could have been developed further into a publishable article–rather than fully polished pieces.

Think of the website as a growing archival collection of “papers” in a research library. But this one is open to the public and houses individual items available as downloads.

I’m hoping that this might be of potential interest to an academic public of professional music scholars and teachers–for whatever use they may wish to make of it.  The only thing I would ask is that if you pursue and publish any of the ideas (or literally use some of the words) that you find here, do acknowledge the source properly.  Otherwise, if it’s, say, a PowerPoint slide selection for our own music history or theory course, feel free to use what you need. (Maybe write me an email to let me know what you’re doing? It would be nice if I could get a sense of this.)

The ongoing and probably intermittent  blog is more informal. I intend it, though, as a site for academic-professional postings: thoughts about musical works or pieces, approaches to scholarship, writing, oral presentation, or study that I have passed on to undergraduate and graduate students in music over the years, other music-related ideas, and so on. The blog, I think, will find its own character as time proceeds.