Overview:
The concept and understanding of structure within music enhances students’ listening experience preparing them for more complex types of analyses. Musical form can be integrated with other art forms and taught through concrete strategies using icons, manipulatives, and other visual aids to help students gain musical literacy and hone their listening skills.
Objectives:
Students will be able to:
- Identify and describe the discrete elements of form,
- Analyze lessons plans in form,
- Design and create lesson plans in form, and
- Demonstrate the implementation of a lesson in form.
Module Summary
The arts are created and designed on structures in ways that are similar to objects found in nature. In music, form refers to the overall structure of a music composition through constructions that are comparable to writing – notes = letters, words = motives, sentences = phrases, and sections or larger forms = paragraphs. This module introduced the basic concepts of musical form, repetition and contrast, through the smallest elements of a musical composition. Important forms included one part, two-part (binary), three-part (ternary), strophic, rondo, and theme and variations, used by composers of Western art music and many of which are used in music of other cultures.
Form can be experienced through kinesthetic and cognitive modes as students identify, move, create, and compose music as responses in carefully structured and sequenced lessons. Listening can also become an effective medium for identifying elements of form using a wide variety of recordings in different genres and styles.