New Formenlehre in Germanic Musicology and Music Theory
26 February 2026, 5pm GMT/6pm CET

Formenlehre has experienced a revival in Anglo-American music theory. Building on the core of Hepokoski and Darcy’s Elements of Sonata Theory and Caplin’s Classical Form, the ‘new Formenlehre’ has since expanded to include Romantic form, corpus studies, and (post-)canonical research. This Anglo-American discourse has been only partially recognised and applied in Germanic scholarship. After a compositional focus established by A.B. Marx and Anton Reicha, the desire to generalise formal conventions gradually faded. In Germanic scholarship, the second half of the twentieth century has been influenced by Dahlhaus’s Problemgeschichte des Komponierens and, around the new millennium, shifted from analysis towards cultural-historical questions. Simultaneously, Musiktheorie asserted itself as an independent discipline institutionally affiliated with the Musikhochschulen, focusing on ‘systematic’ rather than ‘taxonomic theories (Horton 2017) and on pedagogic applications for music education. Whilst Rosen’s The Classical Style and Sonata Forms have been widely received, only a few German-speaking musicologists and theorists currently participate in Anglo-American discourse. Furthermore, the new Formenlehre does not represent a standard in the syllabus of academic curricula of universities (musicology) and Musikhochschulen (music theory).

This online roundtable, organised by Stefan Keym and Dominik Mitterer, brings German and English-speaking colleagues together to discuss Germanic perspectives on the field of Formenlehre: its current and future developments from a comparative perspective. The event is organised by the Formal Theory Study Group of the Society for Music Analysis in cooperation with the Fachgruppe Musiktheorie of the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung. The roundtable will feature brief presentations followed by general discussion from these three speakers:

Markus Neuwirth (Anton Bruckner Privatuniversität)
Felix Wörner (Max-Planck-Institut für Empirische Ästhetik)
Laurence Willis (Musik und Kunst Privatuniversität der Stadt Wien)

https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/88264693719?pwd=vcMymrCI3VwnUNNjXXbKzHe5Hs0Ryw.1
Meeting ID: 882 6469 3719
Password: FTSG