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!
Rondeau
A French round dance, the chorus (or rondeau) being sung by the dancers, in between solos (or couplets). Used as a form in later compositions, there are two variants:
old rondo form
modern rondo form
Old rondo form
Very close to the old rondeau dance and heard throughout Western musical history since. Especially important in the writing of Corelli, Scarlatti, Handel and Bach. The design is:
Subject - Episode - Subject - Episode - Subject.
It is an extension of the simple ternary outline.
And just as the example of ternary form was the minuet and trio, a minuet with two trios (for example the scherzo and trio in Schumann's First Symphony) is an excellent example of the modern rondo form.
Modern rondo form
A more complex structure, involving as for sonata form:
- exposition
- middle section/episode
- recapitulation
Exposition
- First subject (tonic)
- Bridge
- Second subject (related)
- First subject (tonic)
Episode/Middle section
- new subject, or
- development, or
- a bit of both
Recapitulation
- first subject (tonic)
- bridge
- second subject (tonic)
- first subject (tonic)
Play through the second movement of Beethoven's Pathétique Sonata No 8 (Adagio Cantabile). Are you able to identify the different episodes? What do you notice about their tonality?
Play through the final movement of the Pathétique. What do you notice when you try to identify the episodes?
Hear Vladimir Horowitz's interpretation here:
