"The study of musical form is an attempt to understand
the way in which musical gestures can be prolonged
and brought to a conclusion. The work of a great critic
like Charles Rosen can entirely change our
understanding of form— not merely by destroying the
neat categories of traditional musicology, but by
showing that form is a large-scale working-out of forces
that are brought into being by the musical material itself."
— The Aesthetics of Music , by Roger Scruton,
Oxford University Press, 1997 (according to
a free online text version of the book)
The link to Rosen has been added. He died on Sunday.