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How Beethoven 's Harmony Was Perceived By Many Of His Contemporaries

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The preceding quote summarizes the way Beethoven’s harmony was perceived by many of his contemporaries. Beethoven’s music presented an “aversion to the standard harmonic progressions" that audiences had come to expect by the turn of the eighteenth century. The primary vehicle for Beethoven’s tonal innovations was the compositional shape, or style, later termed “sonata form”. There was no single plan for sonata form but there were some standard practices; it was generally conceived as a large-scale binary structure with periodic harmonic tendencies. Beethoven complicated these tendencies through a delay of harmonic arrivals and exploitation of subsidiary keys. Through these procedures, Beethoven was able intensify the resolution of dissonance across broad trajectories and elevate sonata form to “an eminence that made it a major challenge to every composer for more than a century to come.”
Classic Sonata Form(s): The term “sonata form” surfaced in the 1820s and was variously described as: “the first movement of the symphony [or sonata]”, “an elaborate movement [or] a long movement…generally divided into two sections”’, “grand binary form”, et cetera. It wasn’t until the second quarter of the nineteenth century that it was formally defined as an individual-movement structure. Leonard Ratner describes the form in terms of the key-area scheme I – V (III) / x – I and uses a 10-point system (Table 1) to map the points of cadential action. He identifies the most critical points

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