When Structure and Design Collide: The Three-Key Exposition Revisited

Diverging Subordinate Themes and Internal Transitions: Assessing Internal Modulations in Three‐Key Expositions

“…Recent scholarship on the so‐called three‐key exposition, which has risen proportionally with the overall rise in Formenlehre ‐related scholarship, has explored new territory in the landscape of sonata expositions that modulate somewhere during the subordinate theme group. Recent publications have dealt with its historical evolution (Hunt 2009) and Schenkerian voice‐leading considerations (Hunt 2014), and with three‐part structures and digressions in Schubert's three‐key expositions (Grant 2018). Other studies introduce the concept of ‘deflected cadences’ (Black 2015) and a computational model of texture (Duane 2017), 1 and an even more complex phenomenon, the four‐key exposition, has been identified (Rusch 2016).…”

“…11Surprisingly, Duane claims that ‘the second key [in a three‐key exposition] is always understood as structurally subordinate to the first and third key [… and] no analyses have contradicted this idea’ (2017, p. 36), yet I made that very claim three years previously (in the same journal), noting that, for example, Schubert's ‘Death and the Maiden’ String Quartet's exposition is ‘the best case [example of] a middleground I–III–V arpeggiation, in which the second key is not structurally subordinate’ to the first and third keys (Hunt 2014, pp. 253–6).…”