In the second chapter of Music as Cultural Practice, Lawrence Kramer explores the structural trope of expressive doubling in Beethoven's two-movement piano sonatas, creating a dialectical engagement between the two movements, as the second movement responds to problematic aspects of the first movement, transposing them to a different expressive plane. Robert Hatten uses Kramer's concept of expressive doubling as a means of understanding the dramatic content of Beethoven's String Quartet in B-flat major, Op. 130. Hatten argues Beethoven's design for the inner movements involves two pairs of contrasting movements with each having a scherzo and slow movement, creating a six-movement amplification of the more traditional four-movement structure.

An interpretation involving expressive doubling provides a useful means of understanding ruptures and returns and large-scale narrative trajectory in Dmitri Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 3, Op. 73. In the Third Quartet, Shostakovich composes a work in which the five movement form can be interpreted as an amplification of a three-movement form through a framework of movement doublings. Specifically, the third and fourth movements present alternative versions of the musical subjects of the first and second movements respectively, as each of the later movements seem to be structured out of the earlier movement's points of dissolution. Both the first and second movements reference traditional rhetorical and structural forms, yet each has a rupture within its whole, which leads to a fracturing of the musical subject at the movement's end. These ruptures then expand to become the musical subject of the following two movements, and the third and fourth movements represent a subjective doubling of the first and second movements. The resulting expressive interpretation is one that moves from high to low, as the points of dissolution in the first set of movements, which are comparatively nontragic in character, are used to create movements which express a sense of inescapable brutality (the third movement) and intense sorrow (the fourth movement).

The finale suggests the three formal types alluded to in the previous movements, the sonata, dance and trio and passacaglia, yet the finale does not conform to any of these types. In addition to formal references, the finale brings pack the passacaglia theme of the fourth movement and makes an allusion to the opening theme of the piece. After the brutality and tragedy of the third and fourth movements, the original state presented in the first two movements cannot be regained, yet perhaps, through the act of memory, the closure in the finale gives expression to a resigned acceptance.