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This chapter begins by exploring static and dynamic models of musical form that emerged in the 18th century and the way these models were transformed by changes in ideology and music education that took place beginning late in that century. It then considers two models of musical hierarchy that were initially developed to apply to domains other than music. It was only in the early 19th century that they were applied to music, and then to two rather different aspects of musical organization. The first model views hierarchy as a matter of control: each level in a hierarchy (with the exception of those at the extremes) controls the next-lower level and is itself controlled by the next-higher level. This model stretches back at least to the Middle Ages and is most often used to account for tonal organization. The second model of hierarchy relies on a more componential approach: the elements of level A of the hierarchy combine to make up individual elements at the next-higher level (level B of the hierarchy); the elements of level B then combine to make up individual elements at the next higher level (level C of the hierarchy), and so on, until the account of structure is exhausted. This model emerged during the 17th century and is most often used to explain music's metrical structure.

This chapter examines the ways in which school-aged children construct meaning through the generation and performance of musical play forms, both drawing on and transforming cultural influences. It addresses issues of appropriation, transculturation, and identity as manifested in musical play. The interactive pedagogy of the playground, through which children's agency is fully realized in processes of mutual learning and teaching, is also demonstrated.

This chapter discusses the evolution of instruments and the orchestra in the theater — onstage, offstage, in the pit, and in the theatrical space — along with issues of musical form in theatrical music. It ends with a discussion of the breakdown of the stage/audience barrier, the use of live electronics, and the introduction of digital technology to transmit, transform, and create sound.

The musical form known as “passacaglia,” which is first cousin to the “chaconne” and “ground” of Henry Purcell, has always been a favorite device with composers. The violin chaconne and the organ passacaglia of Johann Sebastian Bach are well known. The Variations in C minor of Ludwig van Beethoven and the Finale of Johannes Brahms' Fourth Symphony are also in the passacaglia form, though not so called. The device consists in a melodic or rhythmical pattern that persists without interruption throughout the piece, usually in the bass, surrounded by simple or complex figuration as the composer desires. The “well-known” theme on which Gordon Jacob founds his passacaglia is the tune “Oranges and Lemons,” whose bell-like character is well suited to contrapuntal treatment.

This chapter analyzes a live recording of the iconic song “Sorriso Aberto” (“Open Smile”) by Guará in order to bring out some of the principal sonic characteristics of pagode, a radical reformulation of samba initiated in the 1970s in Rio de Janeiro’s Zona Norte. Rather than reducing pagode performance to a set of characteristic patterns, it proceeds from the notion that pagode is a set of practices that subsists on the micro-nuances of continual variation. The recording has a dense profile—instruments blend together, and subtle sounds are covered over—raising questions about audibility that this chapter addresses. It provides an overview of the history of “Sorriso Aberto,” and recounts the particular circumstances of this performance. The song’s lyrics and its melodic and harmonic structure are analyzed. The final part of the chapter analyzes studio “re-recordings”, assembled into an audiovisual “virtual roda” that allows the reader to listen to any combination of instrumental parts. The chapter thus proceeds from general history to a particular analysis of the micro-level sonic details of a single performance.

This chapter treats six connected issues of musical expertise. It examines the difficulties associated with characterising expertise in a way that offers a genuine foothold for cognitive psychology, and suggests that expertise may not, in fact, be ‘special’ in any cognitively interesting sense. It goes on to review some experimental studies of music, which suggest that most members of a culture possess tacit musical expertise, expressed in their ability to use high-level structural information in carrying out a variety of perceptual tasks. This expertise seems to be acquired through casual exposure to the musical forms and activities of the culture. The chapter then provides two detailed examples of exceptional musical expertise that apparently developed in the absence of formal instruction, suggesting that normal and ‘exceptional’ expertise may be parts of a single continuum. It finally discusses that musical expertise requires an apprehension of a structure-emotion mapping.

This chapter provides an analysis of a multi-section South Indian classical composition, covering: Indian Classical Music and Carnatic Music; Performance Contexts for Carnatic Music; Raga, Tala, and Musical Form in Carnatic Music; Introduction to Valachi Vacchi; and Analysis of Valachi Vacchi.

The balletto and canzonetta have highly regulated strophic sectional forms. Three characteristics of these forms facilitate tonal expectation: they are comprehensible, and can easily be segmented by a naïve listener, they are highly repetitive, facilitating statistical learning and directing listener attention toward higher structural levels, and they are predictable, both because they are repetitive and because they manipulate consistent generic norms. Together, these features equipped listeners to attend in meaningful ways to ever more remote relationships between dominant and tonic signposts. In turn, composers exploited the stability of form and tonal structure across the repertoire, manipulating formal norms to create meaning.

This chapter focuses on the musicals of the first two decades of the twentieth century, when musical forms were both consolidating and evolving. Musicals were either romantic or satiric, but the two extremes borrowed from each other so casually that at times it became difficult to tell comic opera from musical comedy. Sometimes even the manager—or, as he was often called now, the producer—did not know which of the two forms he was producing.

In 1952, Fred Astaire remarked that “jazz means the blues,” and this chapter examines this comment in practical terms by detailing Astaire's varied use of the twelve-bar blues progression as a musical scaffold for dance making. All the important popular blues-based idioms turn up in his work, from boogie-woogie and swing blues (use of the blues progression by big bands) to 1950s rock and roll and 1960s soul jazz. Astaire danced to popular music, whose structural building blocks are straightforward: thirty-two-bar choruses built on eight-bar phrases in an AABA or ABAC arrangement, twelve-bar blues choruses, introductions, verses, vamps, and big finishes. There was nothing arcane or concealed about the musical forms he deployed: they can be heard easily if we attend just to the music—sometimes hard to do with all that dancing going on. Accompanied on-screen by a group of African American sideline musicians, Astaire created an extended solo dance to “Bugle Call Rag.” His final studio-era solo was a rock-and-roll blues number by Cole Porter.

Superficially similar instances of repetition can be perceived dramatically differently. Chapter 2 scrutinizes this transformation from acoustic to perceived repetition. It surveys theoretical work on musical repetition, ranging from Formenlehre, semiotic, and phenomenological traditions, to work on non-Western and pop musics by writers like Turino and Middleton, to very recent accounts, such as Hanninen’s theory of recontextualization. The juxtaposition of these diverse accounts produces a new perspective about the ways that repeating elements in the acoustic signal can work to engender divergent percepts and experiences.

This chapter looks at the enactment of time over the course of an entire piece. The author presents an analysis of Toshio Hosokawa’s Vertical Time Study I (1993) as a vehicle for examining how the body participates in creating structure in Western contemporary music. The author draws on Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “vertical Being” and Nietzsche’s “eternal return” to argue that the piece’s form might be construed in terms of the listener’s affective engagement with the music. This engagement, in turn, has the potential to reorient the direction of time by bringing into experience its depth. The author concludes by considering how the temporal reorientation signals the possibility of using affect as an analytical tool in contemporary music.

This chapter considers the sonic representation of the helicopter in combat films set in Vietnam and the Greater Middle East. The sound of unseen helicopters has frequently been used as a kind of effects-made music underlining tense narrative moments or dialogue. The sound of helicopter rotors in scenes set on or near helicopters has often been modulated (lowered in volume) or replaced entirely by music. Special attention is given to scenes of soldiers inside helicopters riding into battle and to how music has been used to shape the cinematic experience of helicopter-borne battle. Film form often follows musical form when helos take to the skies on-screen. The helicopter attack on a Vietnamese village to the supposedly diegetic sound of Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” in Apocalypse Now is analyzed in detail. The editor Walter Murch built the sequence on Wagner’s musical form, expressing an equivalence between musical pleasure and the pleasures of firing weapons.

Music’s unique temporal qualities animate the supernatural and metaphysical themes in The Shining. The gradual precipitation of music in the film sounds the approach of danger and of Jack’s assumption of his role as caretaker. The structural continuities in the excerpts of modern music in the film provide the foundation for the film’s sense of consciousness and continuum.

For Beethoven and Bartók, the employment of contrast became a major part of their stylistic and structural vocabulary in the works of their middle and late periods. In Beethoven's Piano Sonata Op.101 and Bartók's Third String Quartet, the pairing of musical materials plays an important role in terms of formal process. Employing topical juxtaposition as a compositional technique to create larger-scale formal connections within and between movements, the two composers share a strikingly similar dualistic approach towards redefining traditional sonata form. The salient aspect of duality in Bartók's formal plan, however, was achieved as the composer strived to synthesize modernist ideals with dialectical thinking inherited from the Beethovenian tradition. While both composers used similar formal procedures in these works, Bartók ultimately responded to Beethoven's dialectical concepts by emulating and re-contextualizing the earlier composer's dualistic formal perception to reflect his own aesthetic goals. This chapter compares Beethoven's and Bartók's dialectical approach to musical form in the aforementioned works, illuminating their compositional strategies to integrate and juxtapose ideas of contrast/interruption, disunity/unity and beauty/essence, thereby underscoring Beethoven's profound influence on the Hungarian composer.

Borrowed Forms has shown how a critical engagement with music is essential to understanding the formal innovations and ethical commitments of the transnational novel. The conclusion extends the discussion of polyphony, counterpoint, variation and opera to consider the influence of concerto form on the work of Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier. Concerto form relies on the principles of opposition, contrast, and dialogue. In Concierto barroco, accordingly, Carpentier foregrounds the dynamic negotiation among Cuban, African-American, and Italian Baroque traditions. Carpentier's novella suggests that the resurgence of Baroque musical forms in transnational fiction cannot be regarded simply as evidence of neocolonialism nor of the entrenched legacy of Western cultural values. On the contrary, musical forms are always hybrid and impure: they are the product of encounters among multiple traditions, and constantly undergo creolization and transformation. The conclusion brings together the book's main arguments, while also pointing to the new musical strategies deployed by emerging writers and the critical challenges this presents.