Form: music symbols explained

34 symbols and terms, each explained in a sentence or two — the same dictionary the free Artform score reader uses when you tap a marking on a real score.

Phrase

A musical sentence, usually four bars, ending in a cadence. The unit a player breathes in.

Motif

The smallest idea that can be recognised when it comes back. Beethoven's four notes are a motif, not a tune.

Theme

A full melodic idea a piece is built on and returns to.

Sequence

The same shape repeated at a different pitch. It is how a phrase climbs without becoming a new idea.

Variation

The theme again, changed but still recognisable: decorated, reharmonised, put in the minor.

Binary form

Two sections, AB, each usually repeated. Most Baroque dances.

Ternary form

Three sections, ABA. A tune, something else, then the tune again.

Rondo

A main theme that keeps coming back between other material: ABACA. The Turkish March is one.

Sonata form

Exposition, development, recapitulation. Two key areas set up, argued with, then resolved into one.

Exposition

The first section of a sonata movement, where both themes and both keys are laid out.

Development

The middle section, where the material is taken apart and moved through keys.

Recapitulation

The return, where the exposition comes back with everything now in the home key.

Introduction

Music before the first theme proper. Often slower, and often not heard again.

Bar form

AAB: two matching sections then a different one. Older than it sounds, and the shape of a great many hymns.

Strophic form

The same music for every verse. Almost all hymns and folk songs.

Through-composed

New music all the way through, with nothing repeated. Schubert's Erlkönig is the standard example.

Minuet and trio

A minuet, a contrasting trio, then the minuet again without its repeats. The third movement of half the classical repertoire.

Scherzo

The joke: the minuet's replacement, faster and rougher. Beethoven made the change and nobody went back.

Episode

The material BETWEEN statements of the main idea, in a rondo or a fugue. It travels; the theme arrives.

Cadenza

A solo flourish, unaccompanied, where the pulse stops and the player shows what they can do. Written out in later music, improvised in earlier.

Ritornello

A returning tutti passage between solo episodes. The Baroque concerto's skeleton.

Ground bass

A short bass line repeated all the way through while everything above it changes. Pachelbel's Canon and Purcell's Dido.

Passacaglia

A set of variations over a repeating bass line or harmonic pattern, usually in triple time and usually serious.

Chaconne

Variations over a repeating harmonic progression. The distinction from a passacaglia is argued over and rarely matters in practice.

Movement

A self-contained section of a larger work, with its own tempo and often its own key. A sonata has three or four.

Suite

A set of dances or short pieces played as one work. Bach's are the model, and the reason a student meets an allemande at all.

Prelude

A short piece that comes before something, or, after Chopin, that comes before nothing at all.

Étude

A study: a piece built around one technical problem, written well enough to be worth performing.

Nocturne

A night piece: singing right hand, spread left hand, pedal holding the harmony. Field invented it and Chopin perfected it.

Bagatelle

A trifle: a short character piece, unpretentious by name and often not by nature.

Codetta

A small coda: a tailpiece rounding off a section rather than the whole piece.

Bridge

A passage whose job is to get from one section to another. In a song, the part that is neither verse nor chorus.

Antecedent and consequent

The two halves of an eight-bar sentence: the first ends open, the second answers and closes. Question, then answer.

Period

A pair of phrases that work as one unit, the second finishing what the first left hanging.

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