"Nobody writes better about music .... again and again, unerring insight into just the features that make the music special and fine."-The New York Review of Books

Charles Rosen says of sonata form: "[It] is not a definite form like a minuet, a da capo aria, or a French overture; it is, like the fugue, a way of writing, a feeling for proportion, direction, and texture rather than a pattern."