The Sonate auf Concertenart: A Postmodern Invention? David ...

Sonate auf Concertenart, p. 9
15
paralleled by particular movements of Vivaldi." Whether such movements were regarded as
specifically concerto-like may be doubted, however, for many early eighteenth-century works
entitled concerto do not consistently employ ritornello form or tutti-solo alternation. It is by no
means uncommon to find early concertos in which only the first quick movement has anything like
a ritornello structure, and even then its design may be far from that given in modern textbooks on
the basis of certain movements from Vivaldi concertos. No doubt the form of the first quick
movement is particularly important in defining the genre of the work as a whole, if only because
this is usually the longest, most complex movement. Nevertheless, one must question whether
formal design was involved in the genre categories of early eighteenth-century theorists andinsofar
as we can judge it--of composers and listeners.
More fundamentally, however, it is by no means clear how the early instrumental concerto
was understood to differ from the contemporary sonata. Hence the crucial question, from a
historical point of view, is when the two did diverge. When Bach was composing the works now
known as the Brandenburg Concertos, did he think of them as concertos? If so, did that
expression imply a distinct contrast to other works designated as sonatas? Were there, for
example, formal elements characteristic of one genre but not the other? If one heard something
resembling a ritornello in a sonata, would one have heard this as a reference to a foreign genre, or
would this simply have been an ordinary formal procedure, one ultimately derived from the aria,
perhaps, but not yet associated with concertos and employed in sonatas as a special effect?
The generic status of Scheibe's Sonate auf Concertenart
If the Sonate auf Concertenart had been a widely recognized genre, one would expect it to be
documented in various historical sources. But although modern commentators have found many
compositions that seem to belong to such a category, Scheibe is the only writer to have used the
term itself, in a single chapter of a large theoretical work. His description is far from clear on
many points and cites not a single specific composition. Even if he accurately reflects the
perceptions of an intelligent listener of the late 1730s, the relevant works of Bach were composed
at times and under circumstances that remain uncertain and, in any case, they cannot be precisely
fitted to Scheibe's description. 16
Scheibe's failure to name specific pieces is in keeping with his and other
eighteenth-century music theorists' tendency to write normatively. Although ostensibly a figure of
the Aufklärung, Scheibe tends toward a prescriptive nominalism that leads him habitually to
essentialize categories that are based more on theoretical invention than empirical description.
17
Thus he distinguishes genres (Gattungen) by stating how each "must" go. Jeanne Swack points
15
Peter Williams, The Organ Music of J. S. Bach, 2d edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), 204.
16
As noted by Dreyfus, Bach and the Patterns, 106.
17 One might note the frequent use of the verb müssen in the quotations below (see
appendix). For example, Scheibe's account of the solo sonata includes at one point six sentences
in a row that each prescribe something about how such a work "must" proceed (pp. 681-2). This