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!

Rondo form

A Rondeau was a French round dance, the chorus (or rondeau) being sung by the dancers, in between solos (or couplets).

Couperin's Barricades Mysterieuses is in rondo form

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

or Rondo Sonata 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?

Vladimir Horowitz's interpretation of the Beethoven Pathétique Sonata No 8 (Adagio Cantabile)