All Students preparing for Grade exams are recommended to use the Hofnotes on-line training pages to practise for the aural tests. 

At higher grades  you must be able to discuss with the examiner musical features such as texture, form, style, and period of a piece of music.  My own  web pages to help with these parts of the test at Grade 5+ and at GCSE are available here!

Elements of musical form

The elements of a musical work are:

•    themes: its musical motifs and melodies
•    tonality or key
•    rhythm, time signature and tempo
•    development: how these themes are varied and extended throughout
•    repetition: how some sections or ideas recur in order to frame and punctuate the work
•    proportion: the relative space given to certain ideas or sections of the work

Themes

A musical idea or extended melodic motif.  A theme has a structure in itself, as well as tonality and rhythm.  It is built out of:

    sentences... and within them...

        phrases.... and within those...

            sections or strains... and smaller even than these...

                motives

Think of a piece you know well.  Can you break it into sentences, phrases, strains and motives?

How small an element is the motif?

Play the piece: you may notice other phrases especially in the left hand part.  Notice how playing a piece through adds to the experience of analysing the printed page or aural memory.

Tonality

Look at the score of a piece you know well.  Can you identify blocks of music in different keys?  Can you identify the point at which the key changes?  Does it happen all at once, or is it more of a gradual process?

Play the piece, and listen as you play for how the key change - or modulation - sounds.  Try to find examples in pieces you know of the following very common key changes:

•    into relative minor (a mood shift - more reflective, more sad, more ominous)
•    into tonic minor (a shift to a more contemplative mood; a momentary 'wrong note' sensation if the original theme is repeated with the flattened third)
•    into dominant major (a feeling of new confidence and 'lift', from the sharpened fourth in the original key turning into the leading note of the new key)
•    up a tone (a very obvious stepwise move, almost 'cheesily' common in musicals and popular songs)

Time signature and tempo

The classical symphony uses tempo and metre to delineate different movements.

Development

Here the previously heard themes and ideas are treated in new ways, often modulating through different keys, so that they sound new.  As symphonies and the orchestras performing them became larger, the development became longer, more complex and more adventurous, with Beethoven so far departing from convention as to introduce new themes in this section in his Eroica Symphony.

See Sonata form pages

Repetition

Proportion

Especially in Classical music, the different structural parts of a musical work often vary in length according to a fairly strict pattern. 

In this Ecossaise by Hummel, the first section is 16 bars long (8 bars repeated).  The second section, starting at 00:13, balances this exactly, ending at 00:26.  The third section has no new material, and instead repeats material from the first two sections with out their internal repeats so ends at 00:39.

In the Trio to Beethoven's Sonata in C# minor Opus 27 No 2 ('Moonlight'), the first section runs for around half the time as the second part.

Last updated on: 10/10/2011