A textbook with a history

Percy Goetschius’s The Larger Forms of Musical Composition came out from G. Schirmer in 1915. Its subtitle promises “an exhaustive explanation of the variations, rondos and sonata designs, for the general student of musical analysis, and for the special student of structural composition.” Goetschius taught a generation of American composers, and books like this one were how form was taught in American conservatories in the early twentieth century.

This copy is worth a note because of where it has been. It belonged to Max Hollander, father of the pianist Lorin Hollander.

A textbook is a record of how someone was taught to hear. Goetschius explains sonata form as a set of rules for building a movement. Seventy years later, Charles Rosen’s Sonata Forms, on the same shelf, argues that it was never a set of rules at all, but a way of dramatizing key and expectation that theorists codified only after the composers were done with it. Reading the two together is a lesson in how much the way we describe music shapes what we hear in it.