What is it that makes music impactful? Does the final chord of a symphony derive its power from the way it’s orchestrated, or from its relationship to what came before? Would this chord elicit the same emotional response if it were heard in isolation (without the preceding symphony)? Any musical element in isolation without its proper context doesn’t have the same impact on the listener. The impact of the music comes from the relationship of the ideas to one another and how they interact and change throughout the piece.

Form

Form as a musical abstraction seems a bit off. When studying form, a young composer learns about large-scale plans for organizing material. For me, this is putting the cart before the horse. The potential of a composer’s ideas and the particular path that a composer chooses to walk through that large space of potentiality, is the form. Putting alphabetical labels on large musical sections feels like it’s missing the plot. Large forms do not strictly exist in the actual content of music. It is a useful abstraction that composers and theorists came up with to solve problems of musical organization.

Idea

The concept of the musical idea is problematic. A composer must learn to see these constituent components of a piece of music because they are what every great composer has used to construct their music, without exception. Most of the time an idea looks like a motive or even a short theme. Ideas will often show up in different guises, but the listener will instinctually make the connection and group them together intelligently. You can often find ideas in a piece of well contrived music by looking for repeating musical shapes that are similar in some way.

Relationships

Ideas are relational in nature. All of the ideas in a piece of music are inherently related. And their relative importance is given by their prominence throughout the work and the order in which the ideas were introduced. Ideas are often given roles. Such as, an idea could be the main theme of the rondo. Or, it could be a single motive that generates an entire symphonies-worth of material.

Characteristics

Outside of ideas, broad characteristics should be considered when discovering the form of a given piece. As time goes on in a piece of music, the relative degrees of contrast and tension from any given moment to the next should be considered. Contrast and tension are terms that are so general that they could apply to any parameter of a piece of music. Many great composers of the past favor variety to stagnation in general. Ruthless introspection in this manner isn’t necessary, but it is a helpful tool when being self-critical regarding the form of your music.

How I Think About Form

Rhetoric, metaphor, and idea are synthesized into an inseparable musical fabric that establishes the expectations of the listener. Composers use their craft, imagination, and sleight of hand to deftly manipulate these facets of musical expression.

To finish up here, I will define these terms a bit more. A metaphor is a literary device that draws a comparison between two things. The classic example of a metaphor is, “Juliet is the sun” from Shakespeare. This simple comparison between two objects brings forth a kaliedoscope of qualities that both things share, from the perspective of Romeo. In music, metaphors can be seen in Beethoven’s thunderstorms and birdsongs. Or, the waterfall from Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe. More abstract metaphors show up in music too. For example, the contest of ideas in sonata form is a nature metaphor.

Rhetoric is an essential concept for composers in the common practice period. The most important thing to understand about rhetoric is that, the way you communicate something, communicates something. It can be thought of as metacommuncation. For example, if someone says “I hate you” to someone else. This statement contains no rhetoric whatsoever. But if someone were to say “I hate you, so much! I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!”. This is a completely different expression and evokes an entirely different set of associations. To me, this rhetorically-inflected version implies that they don’t hate the other person at all (possibly the opposite?), they are just being a bit petulant.