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.

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[edit] Descriptions of musical form

Musical form (the whole or structure) is contrasted with content (the parts) or with surface (the detail), but there is no clear line between the two. 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. For example: Schenkerian analysis. 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 The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era 1924-1950 analyses popular music with traditional Schenkerian techniques, but this is only possible because pre-rock popular ballads are the genre most accessible similar to the Romantic music that those theories were designed to analyse. (Middleton 1999, p.144).

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 is "centred" 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.

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 principals and procedures of combining materials: form.

[edit] Single-movement forms

In a sectional form, the piece is built by combining small clear-cut units, sort of like stacking legos (DeLone, 1975). Each unit is labelled with a letter. When these units are not referred to by letters, 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 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.
  • Binary form uses two sections, one after the other (AB), and each section is often repeated (AABB)
  • Ternary form (sometime called tertiary) has three parts, where third section is a recap of the first section (ABA). Occasionally the first section repeats (AABA), or is slightly modified (ABA', or AA'BA')
  • Arch form, (ABCBA)


In Developmental forms, piece is built from small bits of material given different presentations and combinations, usually progressive (DeLone, 1975):

In Variational forms, the piece is built from sections treated to one type of presentation at a time, but varying successively (DeLone, 1975):

These structures are defined by the distribution of different thematic material, melodies, key centres, and other materials. While many of the above forms are partly defined by their tonal schemes, these forms may be applied to music which has a differing or no tonal scheme (DeLone et. al. (Eds.), 1975, chap. 1). More than one formal method may be used, including in-between types, and music which is not composed with the above or any other model is called through composed.

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)

[edit] 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.

[edit] Content

"Form is supposed to cover the shape or structure of the work; content its substance, meaning, ideas, or expressive effects." (Middleton 1999)

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

[edit] References

  • DeLone et. al. (Eds.) (1975). Aspects of Twentieth-Century Music. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. ISBN 0-13-049346-5.
  • 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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