In music, especially western popular music, a bridge is a contrasting section which also prepares for the return of the original material section. The bridge may be the third eight-bar phrase in a thirty-two-bar form (the B in AABA), or it may be used more loosely in verse-chorus form, or, in a compound AABA form, used as a contrast to a full AABA section.
The term comes from a German word for bridge, "Steg", used by the Meistersingers of the 15th to 18th century to describe a transitional section in medieval bar form.[2] The German term became widely known in 1920's Germany through musicologist Alfred Lorentz[3] and his exhaustive studies of Richard Wagner's adaptations of bar form in his popular 19th century neo-medieval operas. The term entered the English lexicon in the 1930's as its translated guise "bridge" via composers fleeing Nazi Germany who, finding employment in Hollywood and on Broadway, used the term to describe similarly transitional sections in the American popular music they were now writing.
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Lyrically, the bridge is typically used to pause and reflect on the earlier portions of the song or to prepare the listener for the climax. The term may also be used to refer to the section between the verse and the chorus, although this is more commonly referred to as the pre-chorus or link. The theme "The Song That Goes Like This" from the musical play Spamalot spoofs in its lyrics the abuse of the bridge in romantic songwriting: Now we can go straight / into the middle eight / a bridge that is too far for me. Similarly, in the Axis of Awesome song "This Is How You Write a Love Song", the lyrics humorously map the movement of the song from chorus to chorus using bridges. Additionally, Led Zeppelin makes an in-joke regarding the use of bridges in popular music in their song "The Crunge", with Robert Plant asking at the end, "Where's the confounded bridge?" The song, humorously, does not have a bridge.
In classical music, bridges, also known as transitions, are also common. Formally referred to as a bridge-passage, they are used to delineate separate sections of an extended work, or to smooth what would otherwise be an abrupt modulation such as the transition between the two themes of a sonata form. In the latter context, this transition between two musical subjects is often referred to as the "transition theme";[4] indeed, in later Romantic symphonies such as Dvořák's New World Symphony or César Franck's Symphony in D minor, the transition theme becomes almost a third subject in itself.[5]
The latter work also provides several good examples of a short bridge to smooth a modulation. Instead of simply repeating the whole exposition in the original key, as would be done in a symphony of the classical period, Franck repeats the first subject a minor third higher in F minor. A two-bar bridge achieves this transition with his characteristic combination of enharmonic and chromatic modulation. After the repeat of the first subject, another bridge of four bars is needed to lead into the transition theme in F major, the key of the true second subject.
An example of a bridge-passage used to separate two sections of a more loosely organized work occurs in George Gershwin's An American in Paris. As Deems Taylor described it in the program notes for the first performance: "Having safely eluded the taxis ... the American's itinerary becomes somewhat obscured. ... However, since what immediately ensues is technically known as a bridge-passage, one is reasonably justified in assuming that the Gershwin pen ... has perpetrated a musical pun and that ... our American has crossed the Seine, and is somewhere on the Left Bank."[6]
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