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533f: Musical form and structure

 

Description
 

The Outline of Cultural Materials gives "scale, pitch, tone, tempo, rhythm" as elements of musical form. Musical form interpreted as scale, pitch, etc., is a way of considering musical form, but musical form in a composition. An in-depth study of musical elements requires they be studied separately, so each element is listed as a separate number.

 

For the sake of clarity, "musical form" is taken here to refer to "form of music" which deals with the overall structural scheme of a musical composition.

 
Kinds of the overall structure of a musical composition.
Strophic “Designation for a song in which all stanzas of the text are sung to the same music, in contrast to a song with new music for each stanza [through-composed]” (Apel 1972:811). Hymns are examples of songs with strophic structure. AAAAAA
Nettl (1956:69) names many types of strophic forms: “with refrains, with antiphonal or polyphonic techniques, and with reverting, iterative, or progressive elements predominating.”
Iterative “The immediate repetition (possibly with some variation) of a section”. (Nettl 1956:68) AA.
Reverting “The repetition of material introduced earlier in the song”. (Nettl 1956:68) ABCA or AABA
Progressive Each section has completely different material. Differs from through-composed in that it has a fixed number of repetitions and the repetitions are generally shorter than through-compose. ABCD
Through-composed Melodic structure with no large-scale repetition. ABCDEFG
Rondo A specific section repeats many times separated by different sections. ABACAB'A
Theme and variations A basic theme is presented and then different variations of it are subsequently presented. A A1 A2 A3 A4 A5 and so forth.
Litany-type form Consists of only one short phrase that is reiterated throughout (Nettl 1956:69)
Sonata A form with three main parts (AABA):
  • Exposition (two contrasting themes presented in two keys)
  • Development (variations on those themes are given)
  • Recapitulation (exposition repeated in same key), may also have a coda, or ending, which often uses material from the Development
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    Go to SIL home page This page is an extract from the LinguaLinks Library, Version 3.5, published on CD-ROM by SIL International, 1999. [Ordering information.]

    Page content last modified: 17 March 1999

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