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Musical form - Descriptions of musical form

Musical form - Descriptions of musical form: Encyclopedia II - Musical form - Descriptions of musical form

Musical form: Encyclopedia II - Musical form - Descriptions of musical form

Musical form - Descriptions of musical form

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)

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.

Other related archives

Allen Forte, Arch form, Ballet, Ballet dance form, Binary form, Bridge, Cantata, Category:Musical forms, Chaconne, Chorale, Chorus, Coda, Concerto, Conclusion, Dance, Developmental, Duet, Etude, Exposition, Fadeout, Fantasia, Fred Lerdahl, Fugue, Gilles Deleuze, Introduction, John Zorn, List of musical forms, Mass, Opera, Oratorio, Passacaglia, Prelude, Requiem, Rhapsody, Romantic music, Rondo, Schenkerian analysis, Sections, Sonata, Sonata form, Song structure (popular music), Strophic form, Suite, Susan McClary, Susan McClary's constructions of subjectivity in Franz Schubert's music, Symphonic poem, Symphony, Ternary form, Variation form, Variational, Verse, aleatoric, amalgamation, ballads, binary form, block, blues, chamber music, classical, classical music, concerto, connectedness, connection, contrast, dance, difference, dissolution, form, gradation, harmonic, improvisation, interlude, interpolation, juxtaposition, key, melodies, music, musical genre, musical instrument, open forms, piano quintet, piece, popular music, processes, refrain, repetition, restatement, rhythms, rock and roll, rock music, simultaneities, sonata form, statement, stratification, string quartet, structure, superimposition, surface, symphony, theme, through composed, tonal, transitional, twelve bar blues, unity, variation, variety

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Descriptions of musical form", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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