Musical form

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The term musical form refers to two related concepts:

There is some overlap between musical form and musical genre. The latter term is more likely to be used when referring to particular styles of music (such as classical music or rock music) as determined by things such as harmonic language, typical rhythms, types of musical instrument used, and geographical origin. The phrase musical form is typically used when talking about a particular type or structure within those genres. For example, the twelve bar blues is a specific form often found in the genres of blues, rock and roll and jazz music.

Descriptions of musical form

Musical form in both senses is contrasted with content (the parts) or with surface (the detail), but there is no clear line between them. "Form is supposed to cover the shape or structure of the work; content its substance, meaning, ideas, or expressive effects" (Middleton 1999). In many cases, the form of a piece produces a balance between statement and restatement, unity and variety, contrast and connection.

Forms and formal detail may be described as sectional or developmental, developmental or variational, syntactical or processual (Keil 1966), embodied or engendered, extensional or intensional (Chester 1970), and associational or hierarchical (Lerdahl 1983). Form may also be described according to symmetries or lack thereof and repetition. A common idea is formal "depth", necessary for complexity, in which foregrounded "detail" events occur against a more structural background, as in Schenkerian analysis.

Formal Depth in Pop Music

Fred Lerdahl (1992), among others, claims that popular music lacks the structural complexity for multiple structural layers, and thus much depth. However, Lerdahl's theories explicitly exclude "associational" details which are used to help articulate form in popular music. Allen Forte's book theories were designed to analyse. (Middleton 1999, p.144).

Extensional and Intensional

Extensional music is "produced by starting with small components - rhythmic or melodic motifs, perhaps - and then 'developing' these through techniques of modification and combination." Intensional music "starts with a framework - a chord sequence, a melodic outline, a rhythmic pattern - and then extends itself by repeating the framework with perpetually varied inflections to the details filling it in." (Middleton, p.142). However, extensional music is a description of a style of composition rather than being an example of a musical form.

Western classical music is the apodigm of the extensional form of musical construction. Theme and variations, counterpoint, tonality (as used in classical composition) are all devices that build diachronically and synchronically outwards from basic musical atoms. The complex is created by combination of the simple, which remains discrete and unchanged in the complex unity...If those critics who maintain the greater complexity of classical music specified that they had in mind this extensional development, they would be quite correct...Rock however follows, like many non-European musics, the path of intensional development. In this mode of construction the basic musical units (played/sung notes) are not combined through space and time as simple elements into complex structures. The simple entity is that constituted by the parameters of melody, harmony, and beat, while the complex is built up by modulation of the basic notes, and by inflexion of the basic beat. All existing genres and sub-types of the Afro-American tradition show various forms of combined intensional and extensional development (Chester 1970, p.78-9).

Syntactic music

Syntactic music is "centered" on notation and "the hierarchic organization of quasilinguistic elements and their putting together (com-position) in line with systems of norms, expectations, surprises, tensions and resolutions. The resulting aesthetic is one of 'embodied meaning.'" Non-notated music and performance "foreground process. They are much more concerned with gesture, physical feel, the immediate moment, improvisation; the resulting aesthetic is one of 'engendered feeling' and is unsuited to the application of 'syntactice' criteria" (Middleton 1990, p.115).

Middleton (p.145) also describes form, presumably after Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968, translated 1994), through repetition and difference. Difference is the distance moved from a repeat and a repeat being the smallest difference. Difference is qualitative and quantitative, how far different and what type of difference.

Connection and Contrast

Procedures of connection include gradation, amalgamation, and dissolution. Procedures of contrast include stratification, juxtaposition, and interpolation.

Formal structures

In classical and Popular music, there are many labels applied to forms, abstract formal designs, as contrasted with the principles and procedures of combining materials: form.

In formal analysis, sections, units etc., that can be defined on the time axis, are conventionally designated by letters: capital for basic, small for sub-divisions. If one section (etc.) returns varied or modified (one or more times), it is assigned a small digit or the appropriate number of apostrophes behind the letter.

Single-movement forms

Traditional

In a Sectional form, the piece is built by combining small clear-cut units, sort of like stacking LEGO bricks (DeLone, 1975). When these units are not referred to by letters (as outlined above), they often have generic names, such as Introduction or Intro, Exposition (see sonata and fugue), Verse, Chorus or Refrain, Bridge or Pre-chorus, Interlude, Break or Breakdown, Conclusion (music), Coda or Outro, and Fadeout.

Sectional forms traditionally include:

  • Strophic form, usually used in vocal songs, repeats the same tune: (AA...) - several times. The sections of these pieces are often known as "verse 1", "verse 2", etc.
    These strophes are however often subdivided into other sectional forms - especially the binary and ternary forms below.
  • Binary form uses two sections, one after the other: (AB); each section is often repeated: (AABB), or repeated and modified (usually at the end): (AA1BB1).
  • Chain form: the binary form extended with more sections, like (ABCD); also this often with repeats, like (AA1BB1CC1DD1).
  • Ternary form (sometimes called tertiary) has three parts, where the third section is a recapitulation of the first section: (ABA). Very often, the first section repeats. When a section recurs, it is often modified as above: (ABA1), (AA1BA1).
  • Arch form: (ABCBA).
Especially the forms from here on are often concluded with a coda.
  • Rondo form, which has a recurring ritornello separated by different (usually contrasting) sections. It comes in two categories: 1. asymmetrical: (ABACADAEA); 2. symmetrical (somewhat related to the Arch form above): (ABACABA). Here, a recurring section is sometimes more thoroughly varied - especially the 'A'.


In Developmental forms, the pieces are built, as a rule, from smaller bits of material - motifs - combined and worked out in different ways, usually balancing between a symmetrical or arch-like "supporting" structure of the whole, and a progressive development from beginning to end.

  • Sonata form. On the basic level, this very important form is almost always cast in the mould of the ternary form above. Usually, but not always, the "A" parts (Exposition and Recapitulation, respectively) are then subdivided into two or three themes or theme groups, which are then, so to say, taken asunder, kneaded, and recombined in the "B" part (the Development) - thus e. g. (AabB[dev. of a and/or b]A1ab1+coda).
    (It has also been called "sonata-allegro" form, but that is misleading: allegro is really a tempo indication, but a sonata-form movement can be in any tempo.)


In Variational forms, variation of some sort or another is given the rank of formative element.

  • Rondo as above, the sort with sections varied, like: (AA1BA2CA3BA4), or (ABA1CA2B1A)
  • Variation form: a theme, which in itself can be of any shorter form (binary, ternary,etc.), but which is repeated, and varied each time - e. g.: (AA1A2A3A4A5A6). (Cf. the sectional chain form.)
  • Passacaglia and Chaconne. Basically, these are also variation chains; but the chain itself consists of an unvaried ostinato, usually in the bass at least to start with, over and around which the rest of the structure unfolds, in piecemeal sections with the chain links or more continuously - often, but not always, by spinning polyphonic or contrapuntal threads.


These structures are defined by the different distributions of thematic material, melodies, key centres, etc.. While some of the forms listed above are traditionally partly defined by tonality schemes in the European Major/Minor tradition, nothing precludes their use within other tonalities (two mere hints of the wealth under "Musical modes" and "Dodecaphony") or with none at all. A single piece or movement may conform to more than one formal pattern, or seem to diffuse over part of the scale-of-greys the patterns are of course embedded in; if musicologists fail to categorize such a composition, they call it "through-composed".

(DeLone (1975) and countless others)

More recent developments

Especially recently, more segmented approaches have been taken through the use of stratification, superimposition, juxtaposition, interpolation, and other interruptions and simultaneities. Examples include the postmodern "block" technique used by composers such as John Zorn, where rather than organic development one follows separate units in various combinations. These techniques may be used to create contrast to the point of disjointed chaotic textures, or, through repetition and return and transitional procedures such as dissolution, amalgamation, and gradation, may create connectedness and unity. Composers have also made more use of open forms such as produced by aleatoric devices and other chance procedures, improvisation, and some processes. (ibid)

In an effort to define more precisely a framework for a systematic form-creating device based on timbre, composer Panayiotis Kokoras introduces the term Morphopoiesis. It is proposed to give a rather specific and descriptive process paradigm of structuring musical form that derives from the interaction between content and form. Morphopoiesis offers an abstraction of the primary principles by which a new musical form is built up. It focuses on the procedures of the inner formal characteristics of a musical work which give to a sound its specific identity, the functional relations between it and other sounds, and the motion and direction of those sounds. In contrast with past procedures of musical form which are based on musical elements such as rhythm, harmony and melody, Morphopoiesis is mainly based on timbre. It is an analytical tool for analysing, listening to, and making music of all kinds, ranging from electroacoustic music to instrumental and vocal music. It refers to music that concentrates its interest on changes in the intrinsic and extrinsic attributes of the sound in the flux of time. :Kokoras (2005)

Multi-movement forms

Forms of chamber music are defined by instrumentation (string quartet, piano quintet and so on). The structure of a chamber work is typically similar to a sonata.

See also

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Musical form.

References

  • DeLone et al. (Eds.) (1975). Aspects of Twentieth-Century Music. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. ISBN 0-13-049346-5.
  • Kokoras Panayiotis (2005). Morphopoiesis: A general procedure for structuring form. Electronic Musicological Review Volume IX. [1]
  • Lerdahl, Fred (1992). "Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems", Contemporary Music Review 6 (2), pp. 97-121.
  • Richard Middleton. "Form", in Horner, Bruce and Swiss, Thomas, eds. (1999) Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture. Malden, Massachusetts. ISBN 0-631-21263-9.
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