If Raymond Monelle's twenty-first-century, topic-theory-inspired sense of music ‘out-historicizes the historians’ (Michael Spitzer, review of Monelle, The Sense of Music: Semiotic Essays, Music & Letters 83/3 (2002), 507), then The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory (OHTT) heralds the historians’ strike back. Over the course of some twenty-five highly insightful and rich chapters subdivided into five cogent facets of musical topics – (i) Origins and Distinctions, (ii) Contexts, Histories, Sources, (iii) Analysing, (iv) Performing and (v) Listening – this impressive and invaluable addition to the field from predominantly British and American authors attempts to reclaim for the eighteenth century what is, strictly speaking, a late twentieth-century, cultural-theory-inspired, soft-core semiotic reading of music's expressive intertextual gestures or commonplaces of style.

The historicist counterattack (to invoke a military topic) comes in the form of a pincer movement presented early in Danuta Mirka's Introduction. On the left flank, she attempts to overthrow Monelle's central Peircean claim that topics function more as indexes than as icons (30–32), under which even apparently ‘iconic’ topics such as the ‘Noble Horse’ or ‘pianto’ – for many other theorists straying beyond the bounds of topic theory into open pictorialism – nevertheless possessed ‘indexicality of content’, in common with other topics that rely on evocation of particular musical genres and styles (such as ‘French overture’ or ‘sarabande’). On the right, she marshals an army of eighteenth-century aesthetic theorists (Forkel, Heinichen, Kirnberger, Koch, Mattheson, Scheibe, Sulzer and so on) trumpeting music's affective, expressive, ‘pathetic’ qualities, through theory, performance and reception, in order to ground twentieth-century topic theory – in particular that of Wye J. Allanbrook – in Sulzer's and Koch's Enlightenment aesthetics (28–29). This dual-pronged approach, amplified by a number of contributors throughout the book, highlights a telling difference in the treatment of these two late (relatively recently deceased) eminent topic theorists. Displaying more than a hint of ‘anxious influence’, the critique of Monelle – who analysed and interpreted musical topoi widely beyond the confines of the eighteenth century, while questioning the problematic historical underpinnings ascribed to them by Ratner – comes in marked contrast to the more lionizing tones one detects towards Allanbrook. Her equally pioneering and invaluable work was confined largely to eighteenth-century repertoire and to an area of central concern to this Handbook: musical topics in Italian opera buffa and their use as mixed expressive styles capable of being deployed in classical Viennese-School instrumental works.

The contrasting treatment of these two seminal topic theorists is particularly to the fore in the frequency of nods throughout the book to Allanbrook's landmark readings of Mozart; to the point, indeed, that one is almost ready to agree with Joel Galand's tongue-in-cheek suggestion that ‘there should probably be a moratorium on using Mozart's Piano Sonata in F major, K. 332[,] for any further topical analysis’ (465). Such thoughts are immediately dispelled three chapters later, however, when Robert Hatten's insightful contribution highlights the still uncharted topical riches of even that most over-analysed of works in a penetrating hermeneutic reading of its subtle juxtaposition and superimposition of multiple competing topics – akin to Umberto Eco's concept of ratio difficilis operating over the ratio facilis of single, unambiguous topics (Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 238–239). Hatten's welcome call for ‘a higher degree of interpretive abduction’ (519), through his hallmark tropological mediation, balances the overall centripetal historicist pull to the eighteenth century of OHTT with a call for more centrifugal, reader-oriented approaches, be they nevertheless historically grounded. Kofi Agawu's analysis of topics and form in Mozart's string quintet k614/i further underscores this with a powerful reminder of the subtleties and shadows within which topics tend to operate, observing that ‘topics have no independent existence; they are agents of intermittent intertextual signaling’ (476).

Aside from the tussle to wrest back topic theory for the eighteenth century, the contrasting treatment of Allanbrook and Monelle is perhaps symptomatic of the book's almost exclusive focus on music from the classical era. Only Julian Horton's concluding chapter offers an exception. He points, by way of comparison, to the difficulty of seeing musical topoi in the nineteenth century as natural continuations of eighteenth-century ones when (to use his example) the industrial and social identities of the later era form a new pastoral ‘other’ that would have been wholly unimaginable to eighteenth-century composers (643). OHTT’s all-encompassing title is thus a little misleading. One might prefer to see a subtitle of ‘Volume 3: The Eighteenth Century’, indexing prequel and sequel volumes yet to come. Even that perhaps risks selling topic theory short: topoi are music's ultimate referential signs of intertextuality and as such they are among music's least diligent respecters of period boundaries. Confining their study to volumes drawn on sharp historical period lines or viewing them exclusively through an eighteenth-century prism, though valuable in many regards, seems an injustice to their free-roaming, ahistorical, intertextual spirits.

Mirka mediates this problem at the outset by abandoning Agawu's broader ‘universe of topics’ for a tighter, Ratner-induced definition of ‘musical styles and genres taken out of their proper context[s] and used in another one’ (2). This establishes two themes that permeate the subsequent chapters. The first, pace Monelle's situating of musical topoi as imagined cultural ideals built on the separation of ‘signifiers from their signifieds’ (Monelle, The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military and Pastoral (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 13, 35), enables Mirka to set the course for many of the contributors to Section II, arguing that topical style or genre was indeed recognized by contemporary writers and practices to a far greater extent than hitherto acknowledged. Lawrence M. Zbikowski thus advocates ‘the importance of embodied knowledge’ – from which we have become divorced – in understanding the musical communication of the French noble dance, highlighting the overly simplistic misreading of the bourrée as a dance invariably expressing ‘moderate joy’ (157–159). Eric McKee, who covers the popular Ländler and Walzer dance culture of the time, similarly sensitizes us to the bodily and social ramifications of ‘the dizzying nature of the German waltz’ as a spinning, twirling genre designed in ‘pursuit of vertigo’ (176–177). Andrew Haringer questions and extends Monelle's survey of the hunt, military and pastoral topics, unearthing contemporary sources to suggest that their signifiers and signifieds were perhaps not so far removed after all. Other topics receive their individual case studies, the respective authors of which each operate under this broad banner of heightened sensitivity to contemporary practice: Catherine Mayes surveys ‘Turkish and Hungarian-Gypsy Styles’ (respectively built on military and dance precedents); Sarah Day-O'Connell tackles ‘The Singing Style’ (transformed from Ratner's under-definition and Monelle's charge of a ‘weak signified’ into a topic prone to ‘roam away from the voice to the domains of the feminine, the amateur, domestic space, nature, simplicity, beauty, and sociability’ (254)); Matthew Head discusses fantasia (‘resembling the Dionysian force of Romantic musical aesthetics’ (263)) and sensibility (the appeal to emotion); ombra and tempesta are dealt with by Clive McClelland, who understands them respectively as expressions of horror and terror, rather than as manifestations of a genuine Sturm und Drang topic; Keith Chapin takes on ‘Learned Style’ (shown to embrace a much wider subset of styles than the term would suggest) and Roman Ivanovitch completes the section with an examination of ‘The Brilliant Style’ (‘both virtuosic music and music about virtuosity’, a topic imbued with a sense of persona (348)).

The second theme, setting the tone for Mary Hunter's (opera buffa), Elaine Sisman's (symphonies) and W. Dean Sutcliffe's (chamber music) Section I contributions, sees Mirka focus the topical microscope on the use of referential signs when mixed with other styles and genres, paving the way for much discussion on the migration of topics (jostling, juxtaposed and rapid-fire in nature) from Italian opera buffa into Viennese instrumental works. The genre polemic that arose is symptomatic of a rubbing-up of Germanic ideals – organicist, harmonic, structuralist, unity-based aesthetics – against those of the new (Italian) instrumental style; the perceived ‘disorder’ and ‘mishmash’ (disunity and difference) of its commedia dell'arte-derived ‘comic spirit’. At heart this is a clash between ‘the Lutheran tradition of insisting on the moral function of music [and] the commercial demands of the musical market relished in its function as entertainment’ (9). This is broadly an extension of the uneasy semiotic marriage of introversive syntax and extroversive style motivating many topic-theory analyses. It is a meta-theme grappled with in the Section III chapters, grouped under the rubric ‘Analysing Topics’. Thus Mirka relates topics to metre and phrase structure; Vasili Byros identifies the frequency with which topics associate with harmonic schemata; William E. Caplin analyses the lament topic across the descending tetrachord schema; Galand assesses the influence of topics on tonal processes; Agawu analyses the interaction between topics, sonata form and thematic identity; Stephen Rumph uncovers topical phonemes, ‘figurae’, and evaluates their structural significance; and Hatten further explores the expressive trajectory of a work informed by the structural interaction of troped topics. OHTT is perhaps unduly conservative in broadly equating ‘analysis’ with structural formalism. With the notable exceptions of Agawu and Hatten, mentioned above, the more hermeneutic-inspired readings so readily ignited by topics are demarcated to a different disciplinary and period domain, adding slightly to the book's sense of anxious influence towards Monelle.

Section IV's welcome exploration of the performance aspects of topics takes an intriguing turn to classical rhetoric in distinguishing music from language. John Irving seeks guidance in feeling, rationalizing and expressing ‘topical content in the gesture of performance’ (548) from Aristotle and Vico, while Tom Beghin observes an irresistible sense of fun in playing with topics transcending the important distinction between ‘modern-day music theorists. . .recognizing musical topics’ and their ‘eighteenth-century counterparts. . . executing rhetorical figures’ (552–553). Sheila Guymer concludes that the ‘the essential value’ of Ratner's topics for the performer lies in their ability to identify ‘character’ in music as an aid to the performer in ‘systematically identifying and executing contrasts’ (594–595). In addition to Horton's caveats on nineteenth-century topics (discussed above), the concluding Section V sees Melanie Lowe and Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis employ empirical statistical analysis on listening to topics, respectively concluding that ‘amateur topical competency might not be up to the job’ when it comes to the ‘listener's interpretative responsibility’ (626), and that topical context can influence the way musical surprise is felt (638).

OHTT is thus an insightful and invaluable contribution to the field of musical topoi that will be welcomed by topic theorists and scholars of eighteenth-century music alike. Its rehistoricizing pull on the reins of twentieth-century topic theory provides a welcome disciplinary check, its layers of further and deeper context preventing this particular ‘Noble Horse’ from freely galloping away in pursuit of its every intertextual lead. In the right hands, OHTT will both restrain and liberate the future of topic theory both in and beyond the eighteenth century.