[Music has several primary characteristics. In a series of blog postings I’m calling “Music in Pieces,” I’m looking at them one at a time from the perspective of my own work. Now that I have a “body of work,” I can speak to how I handle each “piece” generally.]

You probably think that these missives have no purpose but to illustrate my extensive knowledge of music. No, they serve another, equally self-serving purpose — to help me organize my thinking while I’m doing. This, of course, is why I have “project pages” for each of my pieces — writing about my composing helps me compose! And my first example below is of a piece currently unfinished!

That current project, “Chak-conne” (from “Pianisms”) is — or, more exactly, will be! — a chaconne, a special case of a traditional form, the “theme and variations.” In contrast to the more general form, its “theme” is a simple bass line called a “ground bass” which is repeated throughout the whole piece, but with increasingly complex variations layered and intertwined on top.

The more general “theme and variations” form places no such restrictions on the theme, and the variations do not require literal repetition of anything. My “Brass Variations” is an example of this general case. Traditionally, the theme and individual variations should be easy to identify, using different tempi, “feel,” even different instruments or keys, to help the listener separate things out and follow the changes. That’s its “macro” structure. My string quartet’s second movement, “Scherzo,” is also one, sorta — In it, the variations are few in count, and none are the same length as the original theme, making the association less obvious.

An interesting twist on this form in a choral setting is “4: Kindergarten” from “20-20, A Choral Suite.” There, each “variation” starts with the same musical idea in the solo soprano (you can consider that the “theme,” only to break apart in varying ways as the teacher loses control of her class (!!). It’s not arranged quite the same as a traditional “theme and variations,” hence calling it that is a stretch. In general, I use past examples of a form just as inspiration. There are always other things happening, so I feel no responsibility to match a form exactly.

In that spirit, for Je danse, J’apprends, I selected dance forms from the 17th-18th Centuries for their rhythmic and stylistic characteristics, which I leveraged with varying degrees of exactness. (Being as a waltz is also a dance, you can find my “Errant Waltz” from “Pianisms” in there too!) You’d have to really be a music nerd to find some of the references to the historical form, but knowing them isn’t a prerequisite for appreciating the pieces.

The “macro” forms of those dances are really quite simple, usually just binary (AB) or rounded binary or ABA. Rondo form (see “Rondo B’out” also in “Pianisms”) extends things to three or more themes — ABACA in that case. To find examples in my works with more than three themes, you’ll have to look at my so-called programmatic pieces. They intend to portray something non-musical through music, which provides a conceptual structure to a piece. Read “The Coast’s” project page for an example of how that actually plays out.

In the world of popular music, the “popular song” with its verses, chorus, and often introduction or bridge, can be considered a form. As you might guess, my vocal compositions use something similar, though I skip the “chorus” concept, since none had a repeated text phrase you can call such. In “20-20…,” several of the movements have only two verses , with one, “1: Alone” using a bridge of sorts. Lyrics, of course, present their own “form” which a composer generally needs to follow. When the lyrics are “free verse,” as is true of “The Voice Lesson,” you’d think things would be more flexible — but nope! Listeners rebel when music has no discernible form, so something is generally added or imposed. In that case, I made slight modifications to produce three “verses,” a bridge, an intro/”outtro”, all with a lot of variation, but still at least close to a “popular song” form.

You’ll also see pieces of forms embedded within compositions. The “fugue” is a form with a glorious history dating back to Bach, but “fugue-like” passages (called “fughettas”) appear all over the place, including in several of my pieces — the first movement of the string quartet, “The Chase” variation from “The Brass Variations,” “Olive sea snake” in “The Great Barrier Reef.” I love fugues! But “fughettas” are “micro” — a full rendering of the historical fugue form would imply adherence to many of the norms of tonality — keys, chord progressions, etc. — they were originally built on. Composers who abandoned traditional tonality were hard-pressed to copy the original form. Most didn’t.

In my body of works, a true student of musical form will notice an absence of “sonata-allegro,” the darling of larger works of the Classical and Romantic period. Frankly, the only larger works I’ve written have gotten their length from other than strictly musical characteristics — “programmatic” concepts. Although I’m not going to say “never,” I’m having a hard time envisioning a time when a form that is inherently large by definition, for pure abstract musical reasons, might be important to me. My attitude towards this isn’t rare these days. I enjoy seeing a Brahms symphony performance, but the audience for new examples of that form are shrinking faster than the audiences for symphony concerts in general.

Which is another way of saying that “formal dress” is decidedly not required. Although lots of composition decisions I’ve made are traditional (instrumentation, thematic development, dance-inspired rhythm, to name a few), I’m not writing music requiring performers in tuxedos.