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 with my Facts About…. series I am writing about different musical forms, or structures that can be used for music composition. As human beings we are primed to like patterns, and to like to recognise those patterns. And the structure that you give to your music helps a listener to recognise where they are within your music, to give them a chance to spot the pattern in your music. The structures are always a guide. They don’t have to be slavishly followed, 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.
My blog posts aim to give you an introduction to these musical structures letting you know a little about how they work, a little about their history, and a suggested playlist of pieces composed in that particular form for you to listen to. For previous months’ posts please click on the link immediately below
Facts About Theme and Variations Structure
This month’s musical structure is Rondo Form.
What is Rondo Form anyway?
- So far I have written about the simplest musical forms – Theme and Variations where a composer will write a musical idea and the rest of the piece will be made up of different ways of varying that first musical idea; and Binary Form where a composer will contrast 2 different musical ideas with each other. Rondo Form is a slightly more complicated structure, but it offers a composer more room to express different musical ideas.
- When writing a piece in Rondo Form, a composer will write one musical idea, idea A. This is then contrasted with one or more – usually at least 2 – different musical ideas, ideas B and C. Where Rondo Form is different to Binary Form particularly, is that the first idea, idea A, will keep returning after the other musical ideas have been heard.
- 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 Rondo Form the musical ideas will be much longer than 16 bars, and in some pieces, that musical idea may be shorter, the length of your idea is very much up to you).
- 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. And you would then choose another new musical phrase for your C section, again you would want your C section to be related to your A section as they will appear one after the other in your piece.
- 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.
- There are various different ways that these A, B and C sections can fit together, and for the A section to return with the most simple being the A section following one statement of each of the other B and C sections: ABACA.
- Other common ways that the A, B and C sections can be combined are: ABACAB, ABACBA or ABACABA.
History of Rondo Form
- Rondo Form was developed in the Baroque Period of Music History (roughly between 1600 and 1750).
- Rondo form appears to have developed from a musical structure that French Composers used for music for the keyboard, the keyboard rondeau. In this form composers would write short 8 or 16 bar phrases and they would alternate with a series of couplets to form their piece of music.
- The word Rondo comes from the French word rondeau, which means “a little round”, indicating that A idea that keeps coming back around in the music.
- The first examples of Rondo Form being used outside of the French keyboard rondeau probably came from the arias sung in Italian operas (a song within an opera, that does not necessarily move the action of the opera forward).
- Rondo Form became more and more popular with composers during the Classical Period (roughly between 1750 and 1820), where Rondo Form would often be used by composers for one of the movements in a larger work (a large work such as a symphony, a concerto, or a sonata will be made up of a number of movements which are individual pieces of music that could be played by themselves. These movements are related and contrasting to each other – so the first may be lively, the second slow, and the third very fast and exciting for example – and together make up the whole of a larger work).
- Rondo Form has continued to be used by many composers throughout music history every since.
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:
- François Couperin Les baricades mistérieuses
- Purcell Rondeau from Abdelazer Suite
- Mozart Rondo Alla Turca
- Mozart Horn Concerto in No 4 in E-flat major, final movement
- Beethoven Two Rondos, Opus 51
- Beethoven Rondo a capriccio (Rage Over a Lost Penny), Opus 129
- Chopin, Rondo à la Krakowiak in F major, for piano and orchestra
- Strauss Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks
- Dvořák Rondo for Cello and Orchestra
- Prokofiev Symphony No. 5, fourth movement
- Anderson Sleigh Ride
- The Beatles Don’t Let Me Down
- The Police Every Breath You Take
- Lin Manuel Miranda from Encanto We Don’t Talk About Bruno
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