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Chapter 20 Musical Form(s): The Big Picture By Robert Fleisher, Northern Illinois University At the beginning of Stephen Sondheim's musical, Sunday in the Park with George, the following words are spoken by the character representing French neo-impressionist painter Georges Seurat: "White. A blank page or canvas. The challenge: bring order to the whole. Through design. Composition. Tension. Balance. Light. And harmony."1 How does one bring order to the whole? According to the influential twentieth-century composer, Arnold Schoenberg: "The chief requirements for the creation of a comprehensible form are logic and coherence."2 Artists working in all disciplines, genres, and styles have continually sought and developed ways to shape their creative ideas into logical and coherent wholes. The forms discussed in this chapter represent some of the most enduring and familiar approaches to achieving these objectives in tonal music. It should be stressed that these forms are very flexible models of shaping sound in time, rather than musical "cookie cutters." The actual form of a composition (or movement thereof)—its overall shape, including the proportional, tonal, functional, and motivic relationships among its internal parts)—may employ or resemble (or differ substantially from) these and other time-honored models.3 The lively discourse concerning musical form is already several hundred years old and it continues to this day in scholarly books and journals, in professional music conferences, and in textbooks such as Tonal Harmony.4 Books and courses that focus on musical form typically begin with much of the same material found in Chapters 10 and 20. In their search to better understand how composers shape their ideas in different works, they explore a wide variety of analytic approaches and tools, as well as perspectives borrowed from such disciplines as linguistics and psychology. This study of musical form benefits performers, composers, musicologists, educators, and avid listeners alike.5 The concept of structural function plays an important role in the study of musical form and it offers a handful of powerful clues for making sense of music.6 This potent and effective tool begins a simple question: "what is this music doing—what is its function?" Just as individual chords in tonal music have specific harmonic functions in relation to other chords, virtually every portion of a tonal work may be heard as serving one or more distinct structural functions in relation to other sections. These functions and their principal musical attributes (i.e., characteristics) are:
To put these structural functions to use, listen to any composition and begin by describing the nature (i.e., the musical attributes) of one portion followed by another. With a score in hand, listen again and let the visual and aural cues and contrasts along the way be your guide to important formal divisions that may also mark significant changes in structural function. The following are all useful and important questions to pose along the way: Is the melodic material "tuneful" or fragmentary? Is the tonality stable or unstable? Is the phrase structure regular or irregular? Finally, ask "where are we in the composition?"7 The answers to these questions will help point the way to a more coherent picture of the whole. Repeating this experience regularly and often will increase your ability to think about and listen more deeply to the "invisible architecture"8 of music. Notes1 Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, Sunday in the Park with George, original cast recording, cond. Paul Gemignani, RCA, RCD1-5042, 1984. The word "tension" doesn't appear in the published book or vocal score. 2 Arnold Schoenberg, Fundamentals of Musical Composition (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), p. 1. Elsewhere, he provided a related definition: "Coherence in classical compositions is based-broadly speaking-on the unifying qualities of such structural factors as rhythms, motifs, phrases, and the constant reference of all melodic and harmonic features to the center of gravitation-the tonic." In Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), p. 87. 3 It is also important to note that not all music is tonal. Since the early twentieth-century, much atonal (or post-tonal) music has also been composed; (see Chapter 26). Such works are based on the 12 equal tones of the chromatic scale rather than on the seven hierarchical tones of the major and minor scales. In addition, most music of the non-Western world is based on a variety of other scales (also called modes). Since both atonal and non-Western music lack the functional harmonic basis of tonality, they have also naturally found different ways to "bring order to the whole." 4 As a music student you also participate in this discourse. To further enrich your experience and broaden your perspective, look up any of the formal categories presented in Chapters 10 and 20 in the index of any music anthology; you'll find many examples and can see and hear how the composers of these works variously present and shape their musical ideas. Your instructor can recommend additional resources. 5 Recent years have witnessed ever-increasing attention to the implications of formal analysis for performers. For a thought-provoking discussion with this focus, see Wallace Berry, Musical Structure and Performance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 1-44. 6 See Wallace Berry, Form in Music, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1986), pp. 402-22; also: Peter Spencer and Peter M. Temko, A Practical Approach to the Study of Musical Form(Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1994), pp. 51-59. 7 I am grateful to Edward Klonoski for his thoughtful critique of an early draft of this essay, as part our own ongoing discourse concerning many aspects of music. 8 This term was used as the title for two chapters on musical form in David Reck, Music of the Whole Earth (New York: Da Capo, 1997). |