Facts About Theme and Variations Structure

Over the years I have written a blog post each month with Facts about either a particular musical instrument, or musical ensembles that your children may find themselves joining or listening to (from the perspective of someone who lives in the UK, so if you live elsewhere in the world your most common ensembles or most familiar musical instruments may be very different).

This year I thought I would do something a little bit different with my Facts About…. series. And this is, as many of my ideas are, inspired by one of my children and their current musical interest. Over the last year or so my son has been getting more and more interested in composing his own music. He started just writing out the lyrics to songs and keeping the melody for that song in his head (he and his sister spent a good week writing and rehearsing a musical production for last Christmas, complete with about 17 costume changes and an interval, and they still sing those songs today).

As my son has learned more and more about music and music theory, he has started to write down the music itself, and over the summer holidays he had a play with the software Sibelius. If you aren’t aware of this software, it is software to use for writing down sheet music, and for a young musician who is still learning how to write musical notation it can be brilliant for making their music much easier to read. My son is not a pianist, and so Sibelius is great for him because it can play his compositions for him, compositions that he could not possibly play on the piano himself. Sibelius is only one of this type of software, but it is the only one we have used, mostly because it was free on the iPad when we downloaded it and with a bit of practice (an looking up how to do specific things on YouTube), is relatively easy to use, certainly for the pieces my son is writing.

He is thoroughly enjoying composing his own music, and I felt that it might be a good time now for him to start learning about different musical forms, to help him structure his compositions, and to challenge him in his composition. Humans are creatures who enjoy pattern. Our brains like to recognise patterns, and patterns in music are no exception. Our brains like to recognise these patterns and then try to predict what may come next. There are many different patterns in music, and one of those patterns in music composition is using specific musical forms, where composers give their composition a structure to work within, and that makes a piece of music that is generally easier to listen to and understand than a piece with no musical structure at all.

All of this is a bit of a roundabout way to say that my Facts About…. series of posts this year will be on the subject of musical forms and structures. I am going to start this series off with a structure that is very easy to explain and understand, and is in fact the structure that I am using with my son to teach him how to structure his compositions, and it is Theme and Variations. In this post I will explain to you what the structure is and how it works. I will give you a little bit of musical history about when composers started to use this musical form to help you put it into context. Then at the end of the post I will give you a playlist of pieces that are written using the form discussed in the blog post for you to listen to music written in that work. At the end of this post I will set your child (or you even if you want to have a go) a little composition challenge using that musical form, and if you have completed this challenge I would love to hear from you about how you found it and to actually hear your composition. Finally, before we get into discussing this month’s musical form, if you would like to have this blog post in the form of a poster to put up in your child’s room (or maybe your classroom if you are a teacher), then please let me know. Right, Theme and Variations then.

What is Theme and Variations anyway?

• Theme and Variations is a fairly simple to explain musical structure. In a composition written using Theme and Variation the piece starts out with a musical theme, and once that theme has been heard, it is varied in some way.
• The Theme in a piece written with this structure will often be quite simple, giving the composer room to vary the theme as it returns. I mentioned how much our brains like patterns and generally when a composer is writing music they will think in terms of patterns of 4 bars at a time, so a composer’s Theme will often last for 8, 12 or 16 bars. Now of course, if you are composing music right now you can do pretty much whatever you like, and your Theme could be as short as a few notes, or much, much longer than 16 bars. It is up to you, but many composers will try to make sure their theme fits into bars in a multiple of 4.
• Once you have written your theme, you then vary it. So how would you vary your theme, well you have many different options at your disposal. You might want to change the note lengths in your theme – do you want to double the length of all or some of the notes in your theme, or half those note lengths?
• Do you want to add different chords underneath your theme? Maybe you are writing for a choir and your theme appears at the start of the piece in just one voice, or with a soloist, and then your first variation is to add in the other voices in the choir, or other instruments in the ensemble you are writing for.
• Perhaps you might want to change the key that your theme is written in. Maybe you would choose the same tonic note from your main key (the starting note for the key you are writing your piece in), but use the minor key rather than the major. Maybe you would change the key to the major or minor version of your starting key which uses the same sharps or flats.
• Your theme may be the bass part of the piece you are writing, and then what you write over that bass part may change throughout your piece.
• If you are writing a piece for an ensemble, you might want to move your theme to the different musical instruments, or voices you are writing for.
• If you want your theme to come back in your piece exactly how it appears at the beginning, you can do that. If you want it to come back just at the end, you can do that; after every 3 variations, yep you can do that too.
• A piece written with Theme and Variations could be a quite short piece, or it could be a very long piece. It could be simple, or it could be a very complex piece. The world (of theme and variations) is your oyster.
• Some composers have used part of another composer’s work and used that as their theme, varying that as their piece continues.

History of Theme and Variations Form

• The first published composition using Theme and Variations form was a set of “diferencias” contained within a volume of work for the vihuela (a Spanish Guitar), Los seys libros del Delphin which dates from 1538.
• Theme and Variation is a musical form that many composers from the Renaissance and Baroque periods in Music History used. Those composers include William Byrd, Claudio Monteverdi, George Frideric Handel (The Harmonious Blacksmith)and Johann Sebastian Bach (The Goldberg Variations).
• As time progressed new musical forms were developed, but composers still used theme and variations for their musical works. One of the pieces that immediately comes to mind for me when I think of Theme and Variations, and which has a tune that you would almost certainly recognise, is a set of variations for piano by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with the title Ah vous dirai-je maman.
• Wonderful and famous examples of this musical form can be found throughout Music History, from the fantastic Sergei Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (the original piece being a set of theme and variations in itself), to examples of this form within jazz improvisation. Theme and Variations continues to be a very useful and effective composition technique today.

Suggested Playlist

If you want to learn about a musical form and how it works, the best thing you can do is listen to it. And there are so very many pieces you could listen to. To get you started, though, I would suggest some, or all it is up to you, of the following pieces of music, and then explore your own taste from there:

• Bach Goldberg Variations
• Pachelbel Canon and Gigue in D
• Mozart Ah Vous Dirai Je Maman
• Beethoven 33 Variations on a Waltz by Anton Diabelli “Diabelli Variations“
• Beethoven Variations and Fugue in Eb major “Eroica Variations”
• Rachmaninov Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini
• Britten Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Purcell from Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra
• Elgar Variations on an Original Theme “Enigma Variations”
• Amy Beach Theme and Variations for Flute and String Quartet
• Florence Price Fantasie Negre
• Gershwin Variations on I Got Rhythm
• Charlie Parker’s Embraceable You

Composition Challenge

While I am writing about musical forms, I would like to set you a musical challenge, and unsurprisingly this month it is to write a piece of music in Theme and Variation style. This is your composition, so feel free to interpret this challenge in any way you see fit. However, for those of you who would like more direction to kickstart your composition, your composition should:

• Start with a simple theme in 4/4 time and which lasts no longer than 12 bars.
• Your first variation should change the length of the notes in the main theme.
• Your second variation should be in a related key.
• Your third variation should add in a lot of, how shall I put this, extra turns and twiddles – think adding in turns, trills etc.
• You should end your piece with a re-statement of your original theme.

Theme and Variations is a fantastic form, especially for a new composer, and the options for how to use it in your composition, well to shamelessly borrow from my current favourite musical you and theme and variations form “Unlimited, together we’re unlimited”.

If you have enjoyed reading my blog post, thank you. I am always looking for ideas for the blog, so would love to hear from you with suggestions for topics you would like me to cover in the future. Also, if you would be interested in supporting me to keep this blog running, buying the books to review here, and supplies to make the DIY instruments, for example, I would be absolutely delighted if you would consider buying me a coffee using the following link: Buy Me A Coffee Thank you!!