There is every justification for a study of the solo keyboard sonata that emerged from Italy in the earlier part of the eighteenth century. Given its historical importance, the relatively limited scholarly coverage of this repertory is surprising. Of course, ‘historical importance’ can be tantamount to damning with faint praise, and editor Rohan H. Stewart-MacDonald notes the obstacles of reception that have contributed to this state of affairs. There is the ‘evolutionary narrative that construes the mid-century Italian sonata as a stepping-stone to the transcendental “high-Classical” synthesis achieved in the sonatas of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven’ (xiv), and so finds formal and stylistic ‘problems’ that are not solved until that later time – in particular, the final solution represented by sonata form. Then there is the broader perception of a lightweight aesthetic that the term galant readily evokes. The editor notes the tendency to ‘construe . . . the style galant in negative, and in some senses anachronistic, terms’, focussing on what it lacks rather than emphasizing what ‘would have been experienced as fresh [and] novel’ (xiii). A challenge for the current book, therefore, is to offer an appreciation of this music in its own historical moment.

Gregory Barnett provides a weighty survey of ‘Origins, Influences, and Disseminations’ to set the scene. He takes the twelve sonatas by Lodovico Giustini published in Florence in 1732 as a point of orientation on two counts: they explicitly use the term sonate on their title-page, and each work, also bearing the name sonata, is a multi-movement entity with clear internal contrasts. While these attributes now seem unremarkable to us, Barnett shows that history had to work hard, as it were, to reach such a point. Seventeenth-century applications of the word to keyboard music either implied a contrapuntal piece after the manner of a canzona or functioned as a ‘catch-all term’ (19) for just about any type of solo piece. The latter meant that individual pieces within a collection of ‘sonatas’ would carry their own generic labels (toccata, fantasia and the like), as was still the case with Pasquini's Sonate per gravecembalo of 1702. This usage continued with figures such as Zipoli and Della Ciaia, though they now partially adopted a multi-movement format that reflected the impress of a form outside the world of solo keyboard music: the ensemble sonata. This meant above all the sonatas of Corelli, and Barnett argues that these were influential in more than a nominal sense. Corelli's sonatas not only did much to standardize the concept of a ‘multi-movement genre, composed of diverse but relatively brief and non-virtuosic movements’ (34), but also represented a more public orientation; their transmission via print rather than manuscript reflected the fact that they were catering to a much wider market. Nor should one forget that treble-plus-bass ensemble sonatas could readily be played independently at the keyboard, and Barnett lists a number of publications that explicitly suggested this alternative means of realization.

While Barnett argues that changing musical styles and functions counted for as much as the terminology (13) in what is a rather tangled history, he nevertheless makes much of the title and its specific application to solo keyboard music. He is, in other words, tracing the process whereby ‘keyboard sonata’ achieves the status of a genre, deriving from a weight of common practice that arouses specific expectations among musical consumers. But not all contributing authors define their subject matter in this particular way. Stephen Roe's chapter on the sonatas of J. C. Bach devotes considerable attention to accompanied sonatas and keyboard duets alongside the solo output, both of which one might have thought irrelevant to the remit of the book, yet he also comments that a toccata in B flat minor written in Italy ‘does not strictly fall within the remit of this study’ (195). On the other hand, in his chapter ‘Handel's Keyboard Sonatas’ Graham Pont offers a lengthy discussion of eleven toccatas attributed to the composer in a manuscript now held in Bergamo, most taking the form of a prelude then fugue. As Pont acknowledges at the outset, if we take things literally, we have a very slender Handelian contribution to the genre: just four movements, hwv577–580, to which the five Sonatinas hwv581–585 might be added to generate a grand total of nine single movements (145). But taking advantage of the composer's ‘capricious nomenclature’ (146), whereby terms such as suite, capriccio, concerto, aria and partita seem to have been used with gay abandon, Pont conducts an intensive survey of various sources in order to suggest that the composer's perceived sonata output might be greatly augmented: ‘any attempt to identify the corpus of Handel's keyboard sonatas cannot place much reliance on the presence or absence of such generic descriptions in early sources: the music itself is the best and, in most cases, our only guide’ (148). On the one hand this seems a reasonable stance, and it allows for the fact that titles may reflect not only the understanding of the composer, but also, after all, the agency of a copyist (William Babell is to the fore in this particular context). On the other hand, the establishment of a genre, as Barnett has laid it out earlier in the volume, involves some narrowing of such options, and certainly a less permissive attitude to what might be thought relevant to a history of the form. One might also ask what intrinsic musical factors would determine when a solo keyboard piece should be excluded from consideration, if works with a prelude-and-fugue structure can be sheltered under the sonata umbrella.

Such differences of definition among the various contributors might be defended precisely as a ‘realistic’ enactment of the various views that contended at the time, in this case of the differing approaches to the naming of movements and works for solo keyboard. Another such variable is the number of movements needed to constitute a sonata. While Barnett's ‘ideal type’ comprises between three and five movements (5), he acknowledges that composers like Durante and Domenico Scarlatti ‘bucked the broader trend’ by writing single-movement works (56). And indeed for some individual composers considered in this survey, the number of movements seems equally to have been variable, if not a matter of accident or indifference. This is the case both for Galuppi, surveyed by Stewart-MacDonald, and, more problematically, for Sammartini. The published multi-movement sonatas of the latter, Filippo Emanuele Ravizza believes, were assembled more or less at random by publishers, and so he has considered each individual movement in its own right. This is needed all the more because Sammartini's solo keyboard output presents problems of authentication. Ravizza notes that the bar has been set rather low in this respect because the genre was aimed squarely at amateur performers, and so ‘the very simple expressive and technical style of some of the sonatas . . . has not led to any suspicions about authenticity’ (‘L'impostazione tecnico-compositiva ed espressiva assai semplice di alcune di queste sonate . . . non è stata determinante per sospettarne l'autenticità’, 115; my translations throughout). The result is a thematic catalogue of just eighteen sonatas that follows the main part of the chapter, followed by a long list of dubious and spurious works, and just three of the eighteen works are in more than a single movement.

Stylistic analysis plays a determining role in Ravizza's assessment of authenticity. Leaving aside the arguments for and against this undertaking as such, what is of particular note is his recourse to very traditional terms of reference. This means above all a focus on the formal disposition of each movement, aligned with one of the three style periods established for Sammartini by Bathia Churgin and Newell Jenkins. If the tripartite division of a compositional output will cause no surprise, nor will the designations: baroque or pre-classical, then galant, and then a ‘final stage of development towards properly classical compositional solutions’ (‘ulteriore stadio di sviluppo verso soluzioni compositive propriamente classiche’, 115). The emphasis on form and on the development of style would certainly seem to skirt the editor's challenge to avoid an ‘evolutionary narrative’. Stewart-MacDonald himself does better in his study of the sonatas of Galuppi, with the subtitle ‘Textures, Topics, and Structural Shapes’ immediately suggesting a different approach. Clementi's sonatas come into play in the final part of the chapter, in the name of offering ‘an “integrated” view of eighteenth-century musical style’, one that ‘emphasis[es] continuities between mid- and late-century practice’ (97–98). Stewart-MacDonald does in fact consider formal matters, in particular what happens in the second halves of Galuppi's binary structures. Many of these feature new or ‘thematically “neutral” material’, giving an impression less of development in its conventionally understood sense than of ‘rambl[ing]’ and ‘sequential meandering’ (90). But, he continues, this cannot be held to the account of an uncertain mid-century style, since such apparently athematic development sections continue to feature throughout the rest of the century. The point is well made, though the author might try to provide a more positive rationale for such ‘episodic’ approaches to the centre of a sonata-form movement.

In the end, the same might apply to how Stewart-MacDonald answers his own stylistic challenge of hearing the music on its own historical terms: there remains a need to vaunt the virtues of galant style more strongly rather than emphasizing problems of reception. One way to achieve this might be to talk up the qualities of some of Galuppi's bel-canto-style slow movements, many of which unfold their melodic lines in a quite mesmerizing manner. The author guides us nicely through one such specimen, with a close reading of the Cantabile movement from the Sonata R.A.1.5.02, whose ‘lyrical thread’ is spun by means of ‘an apparently spontaneous process of motivic reference and substitution’ (74). (The rather forbidding catalogue number derives from the ongoing complete edition of Galuppi's instrumental works: Opera Omnia delle opere strumentali di Baldassare Galuppi, general editor Claudo Scimone (Padua: Armelin Musica, 2009–). Four volumes of the keyboard output, which amounts to some 170 sonatas, have thus far appeared.)

Another author who has to face the ‘problem’ is John Irving, who offers a welcome discussion of the Oeuvres Melées published by Johann Ulrich Haffner in Nuremberg between 1755 and 1765. This was an anthology of twelve volumes of solo keyboard music that truly traversed the Continent in its selection of composers: all multi-movement sonatas, let it be noted, showing the near-complete triumph of Barnett's model, even as its exponents had spread well beyond Italian soil. A series produced in parallel, the five-volume Raccolta Musicale, had a much closer Italian focus. Irving's is one of the rare chapters in this collection that considers organological matters. The frequency of detailed dynamic indications in the Oeuvres Melées suggests the desirability of realization on a touch-sensitive instrument (clavichord or fortepiano); changing between the manuals of a two-manual harpsichord would often be less satisfactory (212–213). Organology makes just one further appearance in earnest, in Andrea Coen's brief appreciation of Giustini's sonatas of 1732, and with good reason: Giustini's publication was the first in history to specify fortepiano on its title-page (Sonate da cimbalo di piano e forte detto volgarmente di martelletti). Irving closes his chapter by discussing several sonatas by Salzburg-based composers, two by Adlgasser and one each by Eberlin and Leopold Mozart. At this point some familiar difficulties make themselves felt, since for Irving these works show that ‘in the mid-eighteenth century the keyboard sonata was in a state of considerable flux’ (220), ‘a genre in transition’ (221). This bears further witness to Stewart-MacDonald's strictures against the ‘extremely tenacious . . . concept of a formal evolution’ (xiv).

One manifestation of this difficulty comes in Irving's account of Leopold Mozart's Sonata in B flat major, published in Haffner's sixth volume, where the author feels obliged to note the absence of both a ‘“development section” as such’ and a ‘double return’ that ‘coordinat[es] the recurrence of the primary theme and tonic key’ (220). Similarly, Roe makes reference to an ‘embryonic sonata form’ in the first movement of an early Solo in A minor by J. C. Bach (193). Yet a better way has now been shown. The Elements of Sonata Theory from James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) has made a major advance in this respect by identifying and naming five types of sonata form, Types 1 to 5. The quasi-scientific blandness of the designations is valuable in its own right, as it helps us to get around all the inhibitions that have typically attended descriptions of mid-century sonata structures. (And it was consciously done: ‘To avoid the sometimes unhelpful connotations of prior terminology, we designate these types only with numbers.’ Elements of Sonata Theory, 344.) Many of the formal arrangements over which so much musicological literature has stumbled – and which cause evident difficulties in the current volume – fall readily under either Type 1 (forms without a development) or Type 2 (forms that feature some sort of development but then signal their recapitulation by using material other than that which opened the movement). These are all ‘sonata forms’, end of story. Yet only Stewart-MacDonald's chapter makes any reference to the ideas and terminology offered by this volume.

There are other occasions in The Early Keyboard Sonata when the gap between the types of knowledge cultivated by music theory and music history might profitably have been bridged. Schematic analysis as promulgated by Robert O. Gjerdingen in Music in the Galant Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) is also conspicuous by its absence, especially since the theory was in the first instance devised as a means of getting a grip on the ‘problematic’ nature of mid-century musical creativity. One of its advantages is that it can lead to more measured assessments of similar materials in different works. For example, Graham Pont spots a resemblance between the openings of a Gigue attributed to Handel in the Gerald Coke Handel Collection and the final movement from a Telemann trio sonata, twv42: d9. Both works are in D minor. That they share the same ‘pitch profile’ is undeniable; harder to accept, though, is Pont's suggestion that this could be ‘yet another of Handel's many borrowings from the music of his old German friend’ (159). Both incipits move by step from $\hat{1}$ up to $\hat{5}$ , from d² up to a², interspersed with repeated returns to a pedal note a¹ – a compound structure that suggests violin style, in a key that favours such bariolage technique. In fact, Domenico Scarlatti's Sonata k295, also in D minor, opens with more or less identical material, and there will be many more such specimens in existence. Such concordances suggest that we are dealing with, if not a schema as such, then at least a melodic formula inspired by a typical violinistic idiom of the time.

A rather more abstruse theoretical reference point might be needed by Mark Kroll for his ‘Con Furia: Charles Avison and the Scarlatti Sect in Eighteenth-Century England’. Avison's arrangements of Scarlatti sonatas into twelve concertos, published in full in 1744, make a number of changes to the solo-keyboard originals as found in Thomas Roseingrave's edition of c1739. (In addition, he devised ten movements of his own to remedy the lack of material suitable to act as slow movements.) Among the changes that reflect Avison's ‘ambivalence’ about certain aspects of Scarlatti's style (253), Kroll detects a particular pattern that he calls ‘telescoping’, whereby various patterns are moved to different positions in the bar (271). But he does not attempt to explain such changes from Avison's point of view. They may reflect not just that composer's different feeling for what constitutes ‘proper’ phrase syntax, they may also bear witness to changing conceptions of metre across the eighteenth century. There might also be differences between implied metre and notated metre to consider, and on all these fronts there is plenty of recent theoretical literature available for consultation. Kroll might also have availed himself of a number of discussions of Avison's arrangements that have not been cited in his chapter. These include Joel Sheveloff's ‘The Keyboard Music of Domenico Scarlatti: A Re-Evaluation of the Present State of Knowledge in Light of the Sources’ (PhD dissertation, Brandeis University, 1970), Todd Decker's ‘“Scarlattino”, the Wonder of His Time: Domenico Scarlatti's Absent Presence in Eighteenth-Century England’ (Eighteenth-Century Music 2/2 (2005), 273–298) and my own The Keyboard Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti and Eighteenth-Century Musical Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

One straightforward change effected by Avison in his concerto arrangements is that he takes single-movement works and makes them keep company with their fellows. While Barnett had quite correctly pointed out that Scarlatti's sonatas are stand-alone works – each carrying its own ‘sonata’ designation in the main sources – he did not point to the practice of pairing works in the same key that prevails in those sources and many others besides. These pairs, though, can vary considerably according to the source consulted, suggesting that such arrangements may often have been in the gift of the copyist rather than being pre-arranged by the composer. This raises serious questions about the ontology of the multi-movement instrumental work that was coalescing for the keyboard sonata in the particular ways that Barnett describes. These questions get a good airing in Rudolf Rasch's account of Geminiani's keyboard music. None of these works, published in collections of 1743 and 1762, are original solo pieces, almost all being arrangements of works that originally appeared as sonatas for violin and bass. Rasch distinguishes carefully between various kinds of what we tend loosely to call arrangement, noting the utility of other terms that may be more appropriate such as revision, transcription and translation (232). He notes too that, as we saw from Barnett's chapter, solo-keyboard versions need not be regarded as such a leap from their source works, given that ‘many eighteenth-century compositions for violin and figured bass, including those by Corelli, can be found in keyboard sources, in nearly identical notation’ (239). For all that, Geminiani did far more than the bare minimum to adapt his movements for the solo keyboard player; Rasch shows in parallel an Adagio movement from the Op. 4 original for violin and bass together with its keyboard adaptation from the 1743 publication that is almost unbelievably lavish, with melodic lines ‘dissolved in figuration that goes far beyond the model’ (242).

But standing back from such extravagance of detail, Rasch discerns a larger pattern. What seems like a series of individual keyboard movements may be understood as a series of sonatas: eleven individual pieces form into four sonatas in the first collection, while the larger 1762 publication involves fifteen such multi-movement works, in addition to three pieces that stand on their own. Many factors back up such an understanding – not just shared tonalities, as with Scarlatti's ‘pairs’, but the ways in which the movements are arranged on the page. While these larger entities do not anywhere carry the designation ‘sonata’, Rasch muses on the extent to which they ‘retain [the] “sonata” character’ of the original works, which did of course advertise themselves as such (233). If we assent to this proposal, a problem arises when the original movement sequences in the violin works are by no means always retained in the keyboard versions; individual movements may find themselves with new companions, or migrate to another setting altogether. The author states that the sonata structures uncovered for the keyboard arrangements are ‘essential for a full understanding and appreciation of the pieces’ (246); yet the different sequences of movements were presumably also ‘essential’ as originally laid out in the multi-movement violin sonatas. Does that mean that the larger wholes have no integrity for listener and performer? The same question arises with the paired Scarlatti sonatas; should we accept patterns of transmission that turn these into multi-movement works, and indeed works that involve different configurations in different sources? Rasch, though, is on top of this conundrum. He finishes with some real food for thought:

This collection finishes with two perspectives on the solo sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti: back on familiar ground, one might imagine, but even Domenico Scarlatti scholarship has remained something of a niche occupation, and these final chapters open up some welcome new territory. Beverly Jerold tries to disentangle the implications for performance of the many ornamental small notes found in the main sources for the sonatas. There are some half dozen notated forms these notes can take, and they do not always seem to be consistently applied, either within or between individual works. Jerold consults a wide range of treatises from the time, and settles on the term appoggiatura breve (short appoggiatura) to cover a multitude of precise performance possibilities; to this is opposed the long version, appoggiatura lunga, which always takes significant time from the note of resolution. The composer (or at least his main copyist) often writes long appoggiaturas out in full rhythmic notation, so the real question concerns which of the small notes may also be performed in this way and which should be played short. On the basis of her sources, Jerold states that the long appoggiatura must not ‘damage the harmony’ (289) that it decorates. This notion needs to be clarified, since surely all (dissonant) diminutions – whether passing note, neighbour note, suspension, anticipation or (long) appoggiatura – cause such ‘damage’. Because of the lyrical associations which the long appoggiatura carries in many theoretical accounts of the time, Jerold also advises against its use on expressive grounds too, since ‘this execution detracts from the energy of lively sonatas’ (289).

This will of course be properly a matter of taste, but Jerold overlooks the existence of a ‘mixed style’ in countless Scarlatti sonatas: a ‘lively’ piece, which after all accounts for most of the output, is very likely to contain different topics, textures and therefore expressive typologies, and this can include the lyrical. More specific questions arise when the author applies her guidelines to particular pieces. Of k234, for instance, she notes that while an appoggiatura found in bar 6 could in theory take half of the main note's value, performing it ‘long’ would mean resolution to a hidden octave; in k466, performing a small note as a long appoggiatura would mean resolution to an augmented fourth between the two hands (291). The latter case represents too literal a reading of the notation: the left hand features a compound voice-leading structure in which the bass G remains in effect throughout the bar while the subsequent notes represent a different ‘voice’, meaning that in fact resolution by means of a long appoggiatura would be entirely orthodox. In any case, there is a wider view to take on both these cases. Scarlatti is famously unconventional in his treatment of harmony and voice leading; there is plenty of evidence in the ‘big notes’ that he relishes the kinds of collision that Jerold suggests the performer avoid.

Another type of difficulty is almost inevitable in such discourse. While many of her individual suggestions make good sense, Jerold, like so many of the treatise writers before her, tends to become overly prescriptive and so in this case loses sight of the relative freedom of realization that is the raison d’être of ornamentation in the first place. Regarding her commentary on the ‘vamp’ section of k216, where a small note of varying denominations begins each of seventeen rhythmically identical bars, it is hard to accept the author's suggestion that all should receive a short pre-beat execution (292). A series of seventeen consecutive identically played appoggiature brevi would seem to leave little room for performer freedom.

Luisa Morales tackles a problem that has long bulked large in the literature: the composer's ‘Spanish style’. She correctly notes that the common assertions of flamenco character or influence are anachronistic, since flamenco did not exist as such in the composer's lifetime. Somewhat less correctly, she counts my Keyboard Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti as one of the many writings that reinforce this trope, providing a fictitious reference to page numbers from the book that have no relevance to the matter at hand. For Morales there is indeed something Spanish going on, but it takes the form of Spanish classical dances that existed at the time, ‘as transmitted by modern-day oral tradition’ (298). It requires a leap of faith to make this connection, since, as Richard Taruskin memorably pointed out some time ago, ‘traditions . . . modify what they transmit virtually by definition’ (Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 182). Nevertheless, Morales has done more than just assert this; she has put it into practice, having performed a number of the sonatas with dancer Cristóbal Salvador (their performances can readily be found on YouTube). These sonatas follow the structure of specific dances – in this chapter she considers k380, 454 and 491, which are boleros that ‘can be danced according to the steps and choreography that have been handed down through oral tradition to the present day’ (299).

Such claims give an exciting specificity to the sense that popular dance forms provide an essential ingredient of the composer's palette. The difficulty lies in the fact that Morales wants to make such dance forms an absolute, ‘explaining everything’ about the material inspiration behind a particular sonata. Thus, for example, she dismisses ‘the “fanfare” topic’ with which the opening of k380 has long been associated; it even prompted a rare nickname, ‘Cortège’. Hearing the sonata ‘as illustrative music results’, though, in ‘contradictions and limitations’ (299), when for her the sonata simply maps out successive stages of the bolero. Once again, though, Scarlatti's ‘mixed style’ should allow for both kinds of possibility to be entertained, even simultaneously. Further, it is hard to deny the presence of a fanfare at the start of this sonata; fanfare is surely one of the least elusive signals in the often slippery field of topical identification.

The second part of Morales's chapter brings a very fresh perspective to another area that has long been thought a source for the composer's style: dramatic music. What Morales has in mind, though, is something more particular, the music performed as entr'actes to dramatic works in the theatres of Madrid during the composer's lifetime. These entremeses (intermezzos) ‘were sung in Spanish by actors and actresses who represented the men and women of everyday Madrid, instead of the operatic inhabitants of Mount Olympus’ (301). This oblique reference to opera seria reminds one that Morales makes no explicit reference to the lavish seria productions mounted by Farinelli in the later 1740s and 1750s. Nevertheless, her invitation to us to imagine Scarlatti present and observant during the popular entremeses rings true on the basis of the single sonata she adduces as evidence. This is k376 in B minor, which for her has both the structure and the stylistic features of a seguidilla, a comparison supported by examples from seguidillas written for the stage by José de Nebra and Antonio Guererro. The comparison is convincing, even if k376 hardly suggests vocal models. Because the sonata is highly monothematic, it could indeed ‘be danced as written’ (313), though one should note that few of Scarlatti's works are quite this single-minded, as un-‘mixed’, in their use of material. This area of enquiry represents something quite new in the field, and – for once in the case of Scarlatti scholarship – Morales is able to supply some very solid documentary support. The only word of caution might be that while there are many puzzling logistical circumstances attending the Scarlatti sonatas, the sonatas are not, as the literature has often seemed to imply, a puzzle awaiting a solution.

If this collection as a whole does not provide a final solution to the problems of coverage and reception that have plagued its subject matter, and if it features inconsistencies that may or may not be understood to be productive, it nevertheless represents an important point of arrival. Further, and unmentioned until now, it is extremely rich in supplementary materials (appendices and tables) that are a mine of information, and will surely help to prompt the more sustained engagement that the early Italian(ate) keyboard sonata deserves