A multipart strategy interrogates the positive methodology championed by Vande Moortele and such like-minded theorists as Horton and Wingfield.
Vande Moortele contrasts this “negative” approach to an as-yet-unrealized “positive” theory that would derive its concepts directly from nineteenth-century music. Many of these efforts proceed under the assumption that late eighteenth-century norms continued to influence Romantic sonata form even in the face of nineteenth-century innovations. Form theorists have shown increasing interest in applying the methodologies of Caplin and of Hepokoski and Darcy to sonata forms of the nineteenth century.
