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Richard, when you say "lack of fixed form": what is the definition of "form" for you?

I'm not able to offer a suitable definition without long cogitation to withstand the legal level of scrutiny applied to many of my posts but here's an excerpt from the wiki page that might offer enough of an idea.

But I was aware of the confusion. That is why I made the explanations that I made.

[cross-posted]

I don't mean forms as related to the sonata-allegro principle. Let me try asking a different way: what are some examples of fixed forms? Then I'll try to infer what defines "form" (as distinct from "principle"). PM me if you prefer.

This is interesting and it makes sense.

We're at a simpler stage here. If we can get what the general outline of sonata form is, so that we can recognize it, then we've done what we need to do.

The specific problem was confusion between "sonata" and "sonata form", one being the collection, and one being what happens within a movement. This is elementary knowledge that has to be there.
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We have a principle, and we also have a loose structure. Regardless of how we call this loose structure. The reason why "sonata form" is taught in at least an elementary way, is because it gets adapted into all kinds of things so we'd better recognize it in a general way.

At this point we are learning to recognize this structure, and also when it is and isn't there.

There is some rather extensive information here.

Wiki - musical form

and also a list of musical form by era

musical form by era

Those are interesting articles. Thank you, keystring. However, Wiki won't help me understand the distinctions Richard is making, since that article lists "sonata form," the precise thing with which Richard makes the contrast of fixed forms vs. the sonata principle.

I think I understand what Richard's professor was trying to expressing by coining that expression, and what distinction was being made.

You have music where the form is the thing, and the music is written into the form strictly. Actually, if you look up "fixed form" you'll find that in an earlier period, there were three forms (Virelai is one I remember) that had a rigid form. Well, think in poetry - the Haiku that must have 17 syllables, and the point of the poem is to write 17 syllables.

"Sonata form" - in contrast - has a rough framework. It grew out of earlier forms, and the mentality was also changing in later periods. Your rough framework is that something is set up in the beginning that has at least two ideas (Exposition), then you get to play around (Development), and then you go back to your original ideas (Recapitulation). You can go a million directions with this. You can use it to express things. You can create drama and so forth. The purpose is no longer to fit music into a form, but to use this loose framework to express whatever you want to express. This is what I think the contrast is.

The wikki article reminded me of what I read about form in Goetschius, which is also what gave me the first real picture of what "form" is about. It was super important for me, and it might also go toward what Richard was expressing.

Goetschius starts by talking about the nature of music, which he describes as being "painted on a canvas of time". The factor of time is important, because music is something that happens in real time, and we experience. A painting, otoh, is something that we see instantly as a whole, and we can then examine it at our leisure.

Music cannot be 20 minutes of random notes, or the listener would be disoriented and lost. Music has to have a predictable element - something for the listener to be oriented and relate to - and it also must have variety so that the listener doesn't get bored. The three elements of music that the composer plays with are time (rhythm etc.), harmony (vertical part, progressions etc.), and melody. At the most elementary level, these are the three elements we look at when studying musical form. Meanwhile, "form" is what we get when trying to create some kind of pattern for the predictable part. (All this is Goetschius).

We get some of this explained in Wikki. And we also get a list of "forms", knowing at the same time that there is a lot of variety within these forms.

I was thinking about the rigid forms. What if you had to invent on the spot in some kind of musical situation? In that case you would need the form to be rigid. We know that the early musicians would have to accompany singing, and all they had was the figured bass, and a keyboard that had no sustain. So they had to create a flurry of notes that also had to be interesting. If form were unpredictable, the keyboardist would get lost. So maybe that's one reason for rigid form. How closely do jazz players stay to the 12 bars of 12 bar blues when they're doing their thing? (fuzzy territory for me).

I was also remembering tidbits about the Renaissance. The high class people had to be the "Renaissance man/woman", having studied the fine arts, and knowing the musical forms of the day. Knowing these things also set them apart from the rabble. We read of composers who wrote music for a king or other noble, and who did clever things - like spelling a secret message - or turning something upside down in form - to the king's delight. The nobles were specialists who looked for such things. A later audience wouldn't know an inverted line of music if it wore a party hat and tapped them on the shoulders. So any fascination with form would no longer exist.

Greener, I had an odd thought about the variations. I know that you play by ear, and imagine that you improvise. Well what about reverse engineering these variations? Imagine that you are starting off with the naked theme as it appears before the variations, along with those chord progressions, and then how many different things you might do to improvise them - the variations are essentially improvisations, I'd think. And then listen to them as you would listen to someone improvising on a theme.

keystring, your summary is excellent.

I didn't think I was introducing anything new. Many might say that I just didn't think; a claim I cannot entirely dismiss.

This is an [altered] extract from the Monlight sonata thread, 17 August.

A sonata in a major key may or may not begin with an introduction.
It may have one subject in the tonic or a group of subjects.
It may or may not have a bridge passage to the second subject.
It may have one subject in the dominant or a group of subjects contrasting with the first.
It may or may not have a codetta.
It will have a development section where something from the exposition will be developed through a variety of keys, expanded, contracted, modified, etc.
It may or may not have a passage of dominant preparation or other codetta.
It will recapitulate the first subject or group of subjects and they may or may not have changed after the development.
If there is a bridge passage it will have changed from the first half as it no longer has to change to the dominant. Schubert cannily began the recapitulation in the subdominant so that he could leave the bridge passage unchanged and still end up in the tonic!
It will recapitulate the second subject or group of subjects first heard in the dominant.
It may or may not have a coda.

And from the next day...

"Form is not a straightjacket that composers must adhere to. It's a way of making order out of chaos. We need to understand what form is in order to appreciate the structure of the music we're listening to. It is not set down by the composer as a pattern to work to but it is applied by analysts after the fact in order to see how the piece differs from some kind of norm, how the composer has diverged from previous works or altered the form in some way and expanded the prevailing musical vocabulary."

With apologies to all for any confusion.

There is a problem when teaching something that is brand new. You may know of exceptions and that it isn't straightjacketed into a definition in reality. But for the student when everything under the sun is new, they need some kind of a handle. That's why in teaching reading and writing of English, we teach phonetic rules, "When two vowels go a-walking, the first one does the talking.", hastily amended by "i before e, after a c or G." and then try to explain "receive". We're walking a balance between giving some kind of landmarks, and knowing those landmarks are approximations. When beginning anything we need some things to be clear cut, without falling into the trap of thinking they are in that strict form.

The first time I started to study sonata form, it was via "Materials of Western Music". It gave the Exp, Dev, Recap form. It also said that the exposition has two subjects in tonic-dominant or tonic-parallel keys, a "bridge", and a codetta. It was nice and neat. I would have been in the danger of thinking that's what sonatas have. But there can be more than two subjects, etc.

I've moved on to other sonatas since that time, and have started to taste the varied ways this "form" was used. I do want to hold on to the loose framework, because I need some kind of a framework. And when I began, I liked staying with simple straightforward pieces that were written to formula, until I had a feel for this type of thing.

"i before e, except after c, and when pronounced 'ay' as in neighbor and weigh" is the rule I learned, and explains "receive" nicely.

What you said about the forms being needed to give a pattern to sounds heard in time is illuminating to me.

At the point that I ran into Goetschius, I was doing formal theory in books, and a lot of things were bothering me. For example, we had chords, and the "melody line" was simply whatever notes were in the chord. Then we got to do things like scales, and the extra notes were called "passing tones". Everything seemed to be about chords, and only chords. The "Western Music" book at least considered rhythm as a factor. But altogether we were following these rules which made us write music that sounded like Bach chorales without the genius.

Then along came this Goetschius writing around 1912, giving this first definition. He then started introducing some of the things that I studied, but he always considered the three elements: harmony, melody, time. He turned the definition of "cadence" on its head. No, it was not about V7-I, V7-vi, V-I, IV-I or any particular set of chords. Which had already fallen apart, because in my other theory books I was "prolonging the tonic" at the start of a piece with V-I-V-I-V which was not "cadencing". No.... a cadence was a pause or ending, and these chords were part of this pause or ending. The other factor was rhythm.... a break in the rhythm, a lengthening, a something. And what was happening in the melody was also a factor. We had the three things to look at - not just chords.

Goetschius was huge for me.

keystring, do you know the name of the Goetschius book? I'm trying to find it on interlibrary loan. It sounds wonderful.

I downloaded and printed it out. "Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis" - side note scribbled in "IMSLP & Project Gutenberg" www.gutenberg.org.

The book is very condensed, like Horwood, but even denser. I'd study a single paragraph like these days you'd study ten pages. Assignments at the end of each chapter lists movements and spans of measures for around 20 pieces. He lists which works he wants students to have. I downloaded them all via IMSLP and printed them out. They're all in a big plastic box.

The chapters are as follows:
- introduction
- fundamental details (time, tempo, beats, measures, rhythm, melody)
- figure & motive
- phrase
- cadences (the meaning I gave - not the chord-only meaning)
- irregular phrases

(that's as far as I got)

- the period-form
- enlargement of the period form
- two part song form
- three-part song form
- enlargement of three-part song form
- song form with trio
- first rondo form - evolution, rondo forms
- second rondo form - details
- third rondo form - exposition, middle division, recap.
- sonatine form (classification of larger forms, sonatine)
- sonata-allegro form
- irregular forms
- application of the forms (appl. of several designs in practical composition)

Works you must have in order to do the exercises
- Mendelssohn Songs Without Words
- Schumann Jugend Album Op. 28
- Mozart piano sonatas
- Beethoven sonatas

He also makes reference to symphonies of Beethoven, sonatas of Schubert, mazurkas of Chopin, and other piano compositions of Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Chopin, and Brahms

Dated September, 1904 - Boston Mass.

[cross-posted. keystring, I'll look for the one you named.]

In my local three-college library consortium, there are a bunch of fascinating titles by Goetschius:

• The homophonic forms of musical composition, an exhaustive treatise on the structure and development of musical forms, 1898.
• The homophonic forms of musical composition : an exhaustive treatise on the structure and development of musical forms from the simple phrase to the song-form with "trio", 1913.
• Essentials in music history, by Thomas Tapper and Percy Goetschius, 1914.
• The larger forms of musical composition; an exhaustive explanation of the variations, rondos, and sonata designs, for the general student of musical analysis, and for the special student of structural composition, 1915.
• The material used in musical composition; a system of harmony designed originally for use in the English harmony classes of the conservatory of music at Stuttgart, 1923.
• Exercises in melody-writing : a systematic course of melodic composition designed for the use of young music students, chiefly as a course of exercise collateral with the study of harmony, 1928.
• Masters of the symphony / by Percy Goetschius ; Fifth year of a study course in music understanding, adopted by the National Federation of Music Clubs, 1929.
• Counterpoint applied in the invention, fugue, canon and other polyphonic forms; an exhaustive treatise on the structural and formal details of the polyphonic or contrapuntal forms of music, for the use of general and special students of music, 1930.
• Lessons in music form, a manual of analysis of all the structural factors and designs employed in musical compositions, 1940 (?).
• The theory and practice of tone relations; a condensed course of harmony conducted upon a contrapuntal basis, 1940 (?).

Some of these are later editions, so the timeline may not match up with when he wrote them. They all look fascinating to me. So many books, so little time!

[ETA: I see it now; it's on my list near the end as a 1940 reprint...]

Mozart - Sonata in A major, K331



Var II

Lots of colour and trills but otherwise not venturing much off the melody and harmony of the theme in this variation. It is like a reinstatement of the main theme with some added ornaments after the wandering about in the wilderness a bit in Var I.

The main melody and harmony is followed very closely in every bar. M12 in fact is identical melody and beat treatment in m12 as M12 of the main theme.

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Good discussion on Sonata and music form types. Proves again for me, how much more there is to learn as I continue to learn more.

Mozart - Sonata in A major, K331

Var II

The main variant is the accompaniment. It went to semiq's in Var. 1 and has gone to triplets in Var. 2.

I like how he keeps the theme in RH at M41 while he moves the triplets there out of LH.

Mozart - Sonata in A major, K331

Var II



This would be m5 of Var II by the measure numbering I had posted -- I started the numbering anew for each of the variations. Nonetheless, easy enough to do the math and correlate to where you are.

Yes, agree. This is a nice RH move to triplets in the second occurrence of the phrase. In the second half, he does this again but not for a complete phrase. Rather just the two bar extension and final cadence in m17-m18 ... (m53-m54).

Var III

We are taking a minor detour to the parallel A minor in this variation. I think one needs to use their imagination here a bit, to relate this back to the main theme. It feels like Wolfgang may be leading us through a dream like state in this variation. This would make sense as it will bring us to about mid point in the movement. I would expect thus, for things to pick up again (indeed it appears they will) in the next variation. Meanwhile, this is a lovely minor contrast.

I would say the harmony is the biggest variant. Second biggest is the flowing and even dynamics. No harsh or abruptness in this variation, in much contrast to Var I for example.