The term musical form refers to the overall structure or plan of a piece of music, and it describes the layout of a composition as divided into sections. In the tenth edition of The Oxford Companion to Music, Percy Scholes defines musical form as "a series of strategies designed to find a successful mean between the opposite extremes of unrelieved repetition and unrelieved alteration."
Musicologist Richard Middleton describes form through repetition and difference: difference is the distance moved from a repeat; a repeat being the smallest difference. Difference is quantitative and qualitative; how far different and what type of difference. According to Middleton, musical form is "the shape or structure of the work." In many cases, form depends on statement and restatement, unity and variety, contrast and connection.
Read more about Musical Form: Levels of Organization, Single Forms, Cyclical Forms, More Recent Developments
Famous quotes containing the words musical and/or form:
“I was with Hercules and Cadmus once,
When in a wood of Crete they bayed the bear
With hounds of Sparta: never did I hear
Such gallant chiding; for besides the groves,
The skies, the fountains, every region near
Seemed all one mutual cry. I never heard
So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Every idea is endowed of itself with immortal life, like a human being. All created form, even that which is created by man, is immortal. For form is independent of matter: molecules do not constitute form.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)