Ab And Aba Form - Openbucs

Alright, we've looked at lots of little tiny bits and pieces of music. We've looked at all the little parts we put together to make a piece. Let's think of that in terms of painting. So when you... you have a painting, you have colors, you have lines and shapes and even different textures of paint. If you're painting there'd be different layers of paint. So, you put all those things together, you get a picture. It's easy to see. You can look at it and say, "Oh, that's a person because it's got two ears and two eyes and all the bits that you look for in a person." Music is harder because we can't see the form that comes out at the end. We have to listen to it and the hard part especially for sort of beginner listeners to art music is that the pieces aren't generally short. If you have a pop song it generally lasts 3-4 minutes. You can handle that. You can process three or four minutes worth of aural information. But if you go to a concert and the first piece last 20 minutes, what are you supposed to do about that? Pieces are organized. We don't just throw it all together. There is a structure and the structure is intended to help you to be able to follow along. But the trick is you have to learn where the structure is. So that structure that we're talking about, we refer to as form, and what we do to identify form, for the most part, is to give it letters. Remember when you took high school English and you had to do poetry, and you had to match the rhymes at the end, so the first line, whatever the word was it was 'a,' and if the next line rhymed with it, that was also 'a.' When you found something that didn't rhyme that was 'b.' We use the same principle for talking about form. But instead of talking about rhymes, we're talking about... is this like the preceding section or is it different than the preceding section? So, it's just like going back to that basic melody idea. You gotta have contrast, you have to have repetition. So we're looking for something that's the same and usually, you'll hear it more than once, the first part, because that's obviously the composer threw that out there first, that was the part they liked the best, and then we'll have something that's different and contrasting. The trick is that it can be a long time before you get to what the real contrasting section is, and so what novice listeners tend to do his hear any little change as being a new section of form. So they end up with a formal structure that looks like A-B-C-D-E-F-A-G... something... you know they have too many letters. I can't think of any form that goes beyond about C or D as a letter. So, if you're hearing that many things, you're not thinking big enough pieces and that's the real challenge to a longer piece of music. So we're gonna start with simple forms first because they'll apply to most popular music and to a lot of things that you might hear in daily life and we'll work our way up to the big forms. So obviously the simplest one we could have would be just 'a' where we had a melody and we just had the one little section. The easiest example I can think of for that, 'cause you really don't hear much that's just 'a,' 'cause there's no contrast and we like contrast, is, believe it or not, the "Battle Hymn of the Republic." So, we've got (singing)... (singing)... Everybody knows the tune I hope! So, you get all that, that's the verse. You think okay so that's the 'a' section. The chorus must be 'b.' But listen to how the chorus goes. (singing) It's exactly like the verse in terms of the melodic line. The only thing that's different is the rhythm. (singing) Exactly the same! So, it's really just an 'a' form. Sounds as if the verse and the chorus have the same melodic structure, just with a slightly different rhythm. You're not going to hear very of that. 'a-b' you're also not going to hear a lot of because we just like to come back to 'a.' It's like coming home, you know, we went on a trip, we started at 'a,' we went somewhere else we'd like to come back to 'a.' But there are some things that are in 'a-b' form. So I'm gonna do another Bach piece here that's short, that's in 'a-b' form. So I'm just going to play it straight through. See if you can decide where 'b' actually happens. (playing music) Okay, think you got that? That one's pretty easy so let's just review so we have our little tune at the beginning. (playing music) Now if you thought that was the end of 'a,' think bigger chunks 'cause that's not finished, and you can tell that he even sort of let's us know that we're not done because he puts (plays music)... That's not an ending point! You don't get a sense a being at your arrival point. (playing music) See there we came to a nice conclusion, long note, back on the home key, in this case we're in the key of G, so it came to a G. That was mostly a jump-down with a run-up. Jump-down, run-up. The 'b' section (playing music) We have jumped down, little run, jump down, little run, jump down, and then running down. So we sort of reversed the pattern and you'll see that a lot. If the first section moves on upward, the contrasting section will have more downward motion. If the first section is very legato, you might hear more staccato in the second section. So you can listen for those kinds of contrast, not just to what the notes are, but the ways in which the notes move, and then he goes off somewhere completely different here (playing music) ...which really solidifies that this is our 'b' section. So we have 'a.' We have 'b.' Very simple form. The form that you will hear a lot in popular music is 'a-b'. A verse, plus a chorus, with perhaps a short bridge section. In art music, you won't hear as much 'a-b,' but you will hear a lot of 'a-b-a.' As I said, we like to come back home. So, we like to get back to our 'a' section. So, this piece is by Cesar Frank, who is a french composer from the late 1800s. Just listen! See if you can figure out where 'b' happens and where 'a' comes back. (playing music) So, did you think we've already had 'a' and 'b' and 'a'? Fooled you! That's all 'a'. Even though it has that little section in the middle that's sort of contrasting, It's very short. Goes right back in, and we have the 'a' again. So, we keep going with the piece. (playing music) See, here's our 'a' coming back in, it's a very friendly familiar face. (playing music) So you can see that in this piece, the middle section was very different from everything else. Instead of.... You have this sort, what we call a dotted rhythm, it has this kind of ta-dum effect to it. You hear a lot of that. We get to the middle section; it's very straight. (playing music) Almost like a clock that's moving along. And the bottom part is very... (playing music) Not exciting, right? So, in contrast to this we had going at the beginning.. (playing music) ...we had a more interesting harmonic part. We had a dotted, kind of melodic line. Very different. Very contrasting in the middle section, and then we come back and you say, "oh, there it is again and we get, oh yea, I could get excited about that," but does he do 'a' exactly the same way the second time around? No. And you're not often going to hear 'a' exactly as it was the first time. After all, you've already heard it, they've already written in There's no point in just doing the exact same thing. So we start out you go, "Oh yea, we're back in 'a'" but then, you know, it kind of comes to a little thing here... (playing music) and then it comes somewhere else... (playing music) Still keeps the same qualities of 'a', we still have the dotted rhythm, we still have that, you know, rocking back and forth in the bottom But, just something a little different to take us to a conclusion. We call that conclusion that's a little bit different a coda, or an ending, or a tail is the proper Italian translation for that. We should think of an ending. So you'll hear the 'a' come back again, but it will probably not be exactly like you heard it the first time. So, 'a-b,' you'll hear sometimes, something-something different. 'a-b-a' is most common, 'a,' something different.....'a,' slightly modified So, those are two simple forms. Now we'll take on a little bit more complicated!