Musical form
Form in music is the result of the interaction of the four structural elements described above [sound, harmony, melody, rhythm].
"[3]These organizational elements may be broken into smaller units called phrases, which express a musical idea but lack sufficient weight to stand alone.
Form in music is the result of the interaction of the four structural elements," of sound, harmony, melody, and rhythm.
[6] Composer Debussy in 1907 wrote that, "I am more and more convinced that music is not, in essence, a thing that can be cast into a traditional and fixed form.
"[7] To aid in the process of describing form, musicians have developed a simple system of labeling musical units with letters.
For example, the twelve bar blues is a specific verse form, while common meter is found in many hymns and ballads and, again, the Elizabethan galliard, like many dances, requires a certain rhythm, pace and length of melody to fit its repeating pattern of steps.
Simpler styles of music may be more or less wholly defined at this level of form, which therefore does not differ greatly from the loose sense first mentioned and which may carry with it rhythmic, harmonic, timbral, occasional and melodic conventions.
If the hymn, ballad, blues or dance alluded to above simply repeats the same musical material indefinitely then the piece is said to be in strophic form overall.
If it repeats with distinct, sustained changes each time, for instance in setting, ornamentation or instrumentation, then the piece is a theme and variations.
Great arguments and misunderstanding can be generated by such terms as 'ternary' and 'binary', as a complex piece may have elements of both at different organizational levels.
[citation needed] A minuet, like any Baroque dance, generally had a simple binary structure (AABB), however, this was frequently extended by the introduction of another minuet arranged for solo instruments (called the trio), after which the first was repeated again and the piece ended—this is a ternary form—ABA: the piece is binary on the lower compositional level but ternary on the higher.
Organisational levels are not clearly and universally defined in western musicology, while words like "section" and "passage" are used at different levels by different scholars whose definitions, as Schlanker[full citation needed] points out, cannot keep pace with the myriad innovations and variations devised by musicians.
For example: a symphony, a concerto and a sonata differ in scale and aim, yet generally resemble one another in the manner of their organization.
Scholes suggested that European classical music had only six stand-alone forms: simple binary, simple ternary, compound binary, rondo, air with variations, and fugue (although musicologist Alfred Mann emphasized that the fugue is primarily a method of composition that has sometimes taken on certain structural conventions).
"[11] This form is built from a sequence of clear-cut units[12] that may be referred to by letters but also often have generic names such as introduction and coda, exposition, development and recapitulation, verse, chorus or refrain, and bridge.
An important variant of this, much used in 17th-century British music and in the Passacaglia and Chaconne, was that of the ground bass—a repeating bass theme or basso ostinato over and around which the rest of the structure unfolds, often, but not always, spinning polyphonic or contrapuntal threads, or improvising divisions and descants.
