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

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See his discussion of fugue (Bach and the Patterns of Invention, 135).
Sonate auf Concertenart, p. 5
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has criticized the reflexive application of the "metaphor of 'genre as form,'" leading one to ask
how useful it is to understand the works in question as alluding to idealized musical genres chiefly
through what we perceive as their formal procedures.
The evidence admits a different interpretation: that the sonata and the concerto were not
clearly distinct genres during the first decade or two of the eighteenth century, when Bach,
Telemann, and their contemporaries were beginning to compose their works for instrumental
ensemble. Rather, the two terms, if not exactly synonymous, at first bore only slightly differing
connotations, emerging as labels for truly distinct genres during the course of these composers'
careers, after each had already written a substantial portion of his output under both titles
"sonata" and "concerto." Modern writers, employing a mode of discourse common in latetwentieth-century
academic prose, habitually speak of eighteenth-century instrumental
compositions as alluding to or referring to other works or genres. But whether, and how, a nonverbal
composition can "refer" to another one is a nice philosophical problem; at what point, if
any, does the presence of common stylistic or structural features achieve the indexical function of
explicitly pointing to another work or type? The argument becomes especially problematical when
the perceived resemblances are not rigorously analyzed or are described through modern concepts
such as "ritornello form," whose precise meaning or applicability to the works cannot be taken for
granted. Far from having been intended to blend or allude to disparate genres, it may be that the
works in question simply happened to employ varieties of form, scoring, and other musical
elements that would later become identified with the genres with which we now associate them.
As is well known, both sonatas and concertos had existed from the beginning of the
seventeenth century. But only during the last decades of the seventeenth century does the term
concerto seem to have been first applied to purely instrumental works. Torelli published his opus
6 Concerti (Augsburg, 1698) while he was at Ansbach, where his pupils included the young
Pisendel--so by 1700 concerto was certainly familiar to some Germans as a title for an
instrumental composition. But these and other early concertos show few of the features that we
associate with the term, and for German musicians and their audiences the instrumental concerto
cannot have become distinct from the sonata along the lines now understood until the second
decade of the eighteenth century. Even in the 1720s and later, the terms sonata and concerto were
still sometimes applied in ways that are now hard to understand, although the expression concerto
was becoming limited to works that employed what copyists and writers of the period called
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concertato parts. To borrow a phrase from Alexander Silbiger, the sonata and concerto for a
while may have formed a genre pair, like the chaconne and passacaglia. But whereas the evolution
of the latter pair converged, the sonata and concerto were in the process of diverging during the
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Although in current usage the term concertato (and its English equivalent "concerted") is
often applied to genres, one rarely discovers such a thing as a "concerted fugue" in
eighteenth-century titles; rather, one finds concerted violin or harpsichord parts--that is, obbligato
or solo parts. It is, then, anachronistic to use the adjective "concerted" to mean "in the style of a
concerto."