The New Formenlehre meets jazz: the piano sonatas of Nikolai Kapustin

Nikolai Kapustin (1937-2020) lived the majority of his life under the Soviet Union as a classical composer and as a touring Jazz Big Band pianist. His experiences in both the classical and jazz worlds are synthesized in his works. While the composition titles resemble the classical tradition (Sonatas, Bagatelles, Prelude and Fugues, Etudes, etc.), they nonetheless evoke the sonorities of jazz. The synthesis of jazz and classical form has been remarked upon by many concert critics and performance-studies scholars within the last decade. Prominently featured among Kapustin’s hybrid compositions are the sonatas, hallmarks of the classical era. If Kapustin’s sonatas are to be taken at face value, and they fulfil some of the expecations of a classical sonata, it stands to reason that these works can be understood by the analytical methods of today. The most recent theories of sonata form build on Caplin’s Classical Form (1998) and Hepokoski and Darcy’s Elements of Sonata Theory (2006), pioneers of an analytical school known as the “New Formenlehre”. While the New Formenlehre represents a modern approach to sonata form, the literature is still strongly rooted in 18th-century repertoire. Only within the last decade has the current discourse veered from the high classical style towards romanticism. As one would expect, Kapustin, as a composer from the 20th-century working with jazz idioms, is left out of this discourse. As such, there is a considerable gap of knowledge not only in regards to Kapustin’s compositions but also to jazz idioms more broadly. The premise of this thesis is to bridge the gap by engaging the Kapustin piano sonatas with the New Formenlehre literature in analytical dialogue. This will extend current sonata theory into newer territories such as jazz with its idiosyncratic harmonies and key relationships. This thesis develops a new jazz sonata theory, a framework built out of jazz-inclusive modifications to Caplin’s theory of Formal Functions, “microform”, and Hepokoski and Darcy’s framework, “macroform”.