Facts About Binary Form

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. I will say here that musical forms are a guide. A tool to help you organise your composition. They do not have to be followed slavishly, but they may well help you to write, especially when you are starting out with composition and trying to learn how to turn your musical ideas into a piece of music.

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 started this series off with one of the easiest forms to explain, Theme and Variations, and if you want to learn more about this structure, please see the link at the bottom of this paragraph. This post, is another relatively simple form to learn about. It is Binary Form. 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.

What is Binary Form anyway?

• Binary Form is a relatively simple form for your musical composition to take on. It essentially involves two musical ideas in one piece of music. When talking about a piece in Binary Form one idea would be idea A, and one idea B.
• The 2 musical ideas in Binary Form are usually roughly the same length, but this is not set in stone, and many composers would not have identical length A and B sections.
• What do I mean by your musical ideas? Well, in this context it would be a passage of music, say a 16 bar phrase (though in many compositions in Binary Form the musical ideas will be much longer than 16 bars, and in some pieces, especially songs in binary form, that musical idea may be shorter).
• For your first section of music, your A section, you would write a passage in the main, or tonic key, of your piece.
• Your second, B, section would be a different musical phrase. It could be very similar to your first musical idea, or it could be entirely different. For those 2 sections to fit nicely together and flow well from one to the other, you may well change the key for that B section to a related key.
• What would be a related key? Well, you would have some options. You could move your key to the dominant key (count up a fifth from your main key’s starting note and that is the dominant key); you could go to the relative major or minor key; you could choose to modulate (change keys) to a different key (count up 4 notes, or 6 notes and use that as your starting point from your next key.
• Often composers would repeat their musical ideas, so you would have one appearance of section A, followed by a second appearance of section A, before section B appears.
• Many composers choose to end their piece with section A, to round it off (this version of Binary Form is called Rounded Binary Form, can you guess why?!) So, the structure of the piece may be ABA, or AABBA.

History of Binary Form

• Binary Form as a musical structure was very common from the 17th Century. This was the Baroque Period in music history. Composers in this period wrote a lot of sacred music (music written for the church), and music not written for the church was likely to be music to entertain the Court of a country’s Kings and Queens, or local noblemen. There would have been a lot of dances written last this time, and Binary Form was a great form to use to structure music for those dances.
• Binary Form was also used in the composition of many folk and traditional songs, songs that would have been passed down from person to person singing to each other and memorising those songs rather than being written down.
• I discussed above, that it is common in Binary Form for each of the sections to be repeated, particularly the first A section. As Binary Form was first being developed it was common for composers to add in repeat marks at the end of each section to show that it should be repeated.
• As we head into the 19th Century, though, composers started to want to maybe vary their A and B sections on the repeat; they may want to add in some decorated notes (trills for example), they may be writing for an ensemble (group of instrumentalists) and want to move the melody from one instrument to another. It became more common for composers to write the whole section out again rather than use repeat marks.
• I mentioned above that particularly in the Baroque Period composers wrote short pieces like dances in Binary Form, as new forms were developed to allow composers to write longer pieces of music, Binary Form was used for one or more of the movements in a larger musical work (in longer works, like sonatas, concertos, or symphonies, composers would write a set of movements, or related pieces that would sit together to form the whole work).
• Binary Form continues to be used as a musical form either for, say, the composition of a song, or as a structure for one movement in a larger work.

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:

• Traditional Greensleeves
• Traditional Oh, Susanna!
• Morely Now Is The Month Of Maying
• Bach Minuet in G Major BWV Anh 114
• Mozart Piano Sonata in D Major K 284, III Tema con variazioni
• Chopin Prelude No 4 in E minor, Op. 28 No. 4
• Brahms Waltz, Op. 39 No. 3
• Schubert, 20 Minuets, D 41, No. 18 in F Major
• Hindemith Nine English Songs, No 3. The Moon 
• Billie Eilish Happier Than Ever (note, if listening with young children you will need to look for a clean version, as there is some language used you may not want young children picking up)
• Gorillaz Empire Ants (note, if listening with young children you may wish to think about whether to include this in your listening. There are lyrics in this, for example, “The falling alcohol empire, is here to hold you”, or “And if the whole world is crashing down/ Fall through space out of mind with me/ Where the emptiness we leave behind on warm air rising/ Blows all the shadows far away”)

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 Binary Form. 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 3/4 time and which lasts no longer than 16 bars, your A section.
• Your A section should be repeated. You can choose to do an exact repeat of the A section, in which case, please add repeat marks at the end of the section. If you would like to change your A section slightly, please write it out in full.
• Your second, B section should be in a related key, but have a similar rhythmic pattern. Please note that I have suggested that this rhythmic patter should be similar, but not necessarily identical.
• You should end your piece after section B.

I look forward to hearing what you have created.

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