Dean Sutcliffe ends his book by saying that he has ‘not attempted an encompassing view of all the musical-cultural currents that might be traced in later eighteenth-century works’ (558). Notwithstanding that modesty, this volume is a true magnum opus, the result and distillation of a lifetime of work on the music of this period; moreover, it does in fact offer a comprehensive (though not exclusive) poetics of the instrumental music of this period. That poetics, which relies on foundational work by the likes of Leonard Ratner (Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York: Schirmer, 1980)), Wye J. Allanbrook (Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: ‘Le nozze di Figaro’ and ‘Don Giovanni’ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984)) and Robert O. Gjerdingen (Music in the Galant Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)), as well as more traditional music-theoretical work, justifies, contextualizes and valorizes the very qualities of this repertory that have allowed the ‘grabbier’ and often more conspicuous aesthetics of both earlier and later music to deflect scholarly interest from the underlying principles of this style.

Sutcliffe sets out to validate these underlying principles; he argues for the style's preference for the everyday over the sublime, for subtlety and ambiguity over raw power and emotional onslaught, for pleasantness over more ecstatic emotions, for decorum and manners over Romantic iconoclasm, for the deployment of convention over conspicuous originality, for the give and take of regular interchange over the obsessiveness of individuality, and for the pleasures of the accessible surface of the music over its less easily reachable ‘depths’. This list seems to suggest that the book fights a series of pitched battles looking for ‘wins’ for the sociable virtues, but while all of these oppositions form an overarching frame (or perhaps better, an ever-present substrate), Sutcliffe's tone and method actually embody the qualities for which he is arguing. Just as the sociable style makes room for moments of raw power, extreme emotions, celebrations of individuality, and so on, so Sutcliffe's defence of musical ‘good manners’ and ‘politeness’ allows for other aesthetic preferences, argues for the deeply serious intent of music that celebrates pleasantness and good cheer, and is basically asking for sociability's place at the table without requiring that all the other place-settings be removed.

Sutcliffe's basic contention about sociability (though he doesn't frame it quite this way) is that it is manifested along two related but separable axes. One is what we might call sociable mimesis – that is, the use of musical procedures and devices that imitate social processes. In an operatic context sociable mimesis would involve the relationships between the characters on the stage within the world created by the work. Late eighteenth-century instrumental music directly and effectively imitates dialogue, disagreement, accommodation, moderation, faux pas and many other aspects of interaction, whether by textures, phrase-relationships, larger structures or affect, and Sutcliffe provides us with huge numbers of examples from composers great and small to illustrate this point. The other axis is what we might call sociable outreach, whereby the composer (or ‘the composer’) conspicuously offers up his compositional strategies and processes for listeners’ examination, appreciation and interpretation, inviting them into a dialogue with him (or ‘him’). Again, in an operatic context, sociable outreach could be what happens between the characters and the theatre audience through or beyond the fourth wall, whether as specifically audience-directed asides or soliloquies, or as patterns of expression and behaviour that create, continue and thwart audience expectations independently of how they affect other characters. Instrumental music of this period invites the audience into the compositional process (often with a wink) by its conspicuous manipulation of conventions, by the use of highly various materials which keep listeners engaged, by unprecedentedly lucid ‘sentence’ structures, and by setting up clear expectations in all musical domains and then being able to satisfy or thwart them. Sutcliffe does not theorize much about these two axes of sociability, though the relation between them clearly underpins a lot of his thinking. One of the very few things I miss in his study is a bit more attention to the admittedly squishy boundary between mimesis and ‘outreach’; I would argue that this is worth highlighting because the composer–audience relationship is (I believe) always about who has power over whom, whereas the sociabilities imitated by music are more various.

An obvious question to ask of anyone proposing a new framework for understanding a familiar repertory is ‘what does this give me that I don't already have?’. For me, having been schooled in the 1960s and 1970s to think of late eighteenth-century style as all about Formenlehre, with (for me) the tiniest smattering of Schenkerian thinking mixed in, plus having grown up with performances that emphasized the (endlessly vibrato-full) long line and the ethereal and often not very differentiated perfection of the music, getting introduced to topic theory in 1984 through Wye Allanbrook's Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart was an intellectual cataclysm; here was a way of looking at the music that embedded human behaviour in our understanding of it, that made engaged listening accessible even to those who didn't know what a retransition was, and that connected the notes to historically verifiable circumstances beyond the (variably relevant) biography of the composer. Sutcliffe's book does not have the thunderclap effect on me that Allanbrook's work did, but that is in large part because the move from abstraction to concrete humanity has already been made and absorbed into mainstream thinking about this music. Topic theory is a sine qua non for Sutcliffe's basic approach, along with Robert Gjerdingen's more recent schema theory (Music in the Galant Style). He expands these earlier theories to a way of thinking that is comprehensively grounded in historical mores, analytically flexible, less susceptible than topic theory to mere taxonomizing, and capable of absorbing the partimento conventions into a broader synthesis of the self-enclosedly analytical with the referential. What a sociability frame gets me that is new and worthwhile, then, is a way of observing and enjoying a wider variety of musical representations of human gestures, self-presentations and interactions, as well as persuasive historical justification for hearing this music in embodied and enculturated human terms on every level of its construction. Indeed, in Sutcliffe's many accounts of individual passages of music, one hears the voice of a gifted teacher bringing the music literally ‘to life’ for students perhaps yet to be persuaded either of the virtues Sutcliffe celebrates or of the emotional impact of this music.

The ways a sociability framework stretches and deepens topical thinking are immediately obvious in the second (and by far the longest) section of the book, ‘Reciprocity’. Sutcliffe's first example of musical reciprocity is what he calls the ‘gracious riposte’, whose most literal and obvious manifestation is heard in movement openings that juxtapose assertiveness or bombast with gentleness or hesitancy. Mozart's ‘Jupiter’ Symphony and Haydn's ‘London’ Symphony both begin this way. This most obvious example of the gracious riposte is clearly a topic, and its identification doesn't seem to get us much beyond topic theory. But Sutcliffe expands the idea of reciprocity (which is, of course, related to but behaviourally richer than the hoary notion of ‘balance’ in this style) to relations between movements and to Beethoven's ubiquitous subito pianos, and deepens it to representations of tolerance, inclusivity, reproachfulness and irony, among other attitudes.

If reciprocity is the interpersonal basis of musical sociability, convention is the way that sociability is communicated. Sutcliffe points out much that is historically revolutionary about this style – including its variety, flexibility, quicksilver changes of mood and address, and its unprecedented use of silence to articulate its communication. But he also implies – correctly, I think – that these extraordinary novelties can only work with material that seems instantly familiar to listeners. That is, if the point of this style is in part to offer a simulacrum of communicative or sociable behaviour, both outwards to the audience and within the work, the content of that communication has to seem to be meaningful. Conventional or formulaic gestures and patterns, then, are elements to be deployed and celebrated rather than transcended. The third section of the book, ‘Formula’, deals with these issues. The conventions that Sutcliffe is most interested in are what he calls ‘the little things of life’ (277). These are gestures that have to be conventional to fulfil their functions, but that usually go overlooked, such as cadences, repeated notes or standard phrase construction. In the pages on ‘Attention and Boredom’, Sutcliffe argues that such gestures garner attention not only when the formulae are broken or oddly deployed, but also simply in the fact that they exist. Such devices ‘carry their own individual life. Boredom need never set in if nothing can be taken for granted, even when the musical phenomenon is the most uneventful that one can conceive’ (370). He also points out that these ‘little things’ are often expressively either neutral or ambiguous and thus invite listeners to supply their own emotional or affective content, and that that invitation is part of the style's way of communicating with the audience.

The fourth section, ‘Tone’, is probably my favourite in the book. Sutcliffe asks how we can square this style's emphasis on socially acceptable pleasantness and willingness to accommodate with the fact that the late eighteenth century was also a period when the notion of individual (and sometimes extreme) self-expression was increasingly important. For Sutcliffe this is not so much a problem of the period as an opportunity to understand the space that public affects and private emotions shared, and once again, he turns to the sometimes ambiguous, often fleeting, emotional positions suggested by the music. He writes, ‘it is not so much feelings as the transitions between feelings that were the new element of the modern musical style, generated by the frequent, possibly unpredictable movements between different materials’ (432). This formulation, which cleverly connects the readily legible and publicly intelligible aspects of this style with a messier stew of ungraspable individual feeling, demonstrates (among other things) how Sutcliffe has both incorporated and gone beyond topic theory to a much more comprehensive understanding of this style.

The one thing I would quibble with in the book is Sutcliffe's lack of real attention to performance. He does not completely ignore performers, but he typically treats them as special examples of listeners rather than as crucial co-creators and communicators of the music. For example, in the section on attention and boredom he writes that it is not only the job of the composer to maintain attentiveness and then moves directly to the relation of the listener to the music. To be fair, this assumption that the music happens in the space between the composer and the listener, magically unmediated by the habits and choices of particular performers and performance traditions, is still the norm in both musicology and music theory. Sutcliffe is not in any way an outlier. But if late eighteenth-century style is, as Sutcliffe suggests, fundamentally about communicative acts, then those who most directly allow the music to be communicative – that is, those who turn it into sound – should surely be credited. Moreover, the effects that Sutcliffe most treasures – clear phraseology, a sense of give and take, the dramatization of both politeness and its opposite, and the kaleidoscope of intense but fleeting sentiments, literally live or die in performance. One striking example of this is the indecorous and misplaced cello cadenza too close to the beginning of Boccherini's C major string quartet Op. 32 No. 4, which Sutcliffe describes vividly – so vividly, indeed, that I thought I would check it out in performance. The performance I heard ignored the printed crescendo, and the ‘episode of mutual embarrassment’ that Sutcliffe describes becomes (perhaps) a good-natured wink at the fact that Boccherini was a cellist, rather than an illustration of a horrible faux pas (79). One could say that these performers simply got it wrong, that Boccherini clearly intended to enact a lack of decorum. Nonetheless, most listeners then and now would not see the score or be aware that the performers were (possibly) subverting Boccherini's intentions, and the joke about social behaviour is completely lost, even as the formal quip (cadenza in the wrong place on a slightly surprising chord) remains. Someone familiar with that performance and reading Sutcliffe's account might wonder what he was talking about. And even if these performers had obeyed the score and been less decorous, the length of the pause after the cello's cadenza (as, according to Sutcliffe, the participants try to figure out how to manage the unseemliness) is not prescribed, and the comedy of the moment depends largely on how performers manage that silence.

It is worth noting that the more rhetorical, contrastive and differentiated performance habits of ‘Early Music’ players were becoming mainstream at the same time that topic theory was taking off. One does not have to claim that one caused the other to see that the aural and the intellectual environments were in sync with each other. By the same token, Sutcliffe's convincing, meticulously documented and deeply felt reading of late eighteenth-century style as embodying and enacting the wonderful richness of human interaction could be an opening for all of us who write about music routinely to include performers in our descriptions of what music means and how it goes.