All You Have to Do is Listen by Rob Kapilow

Author:Rob Kapilow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Published: 2010-05-10T16:00:00+00:00

Two Parts or Three Parts?

Embedded within all of the fantastic detail in this minuet is a new approach to two-repeat form. In both the Playford and Handel examples, the core of the listening experience was hearing two portions of music, each symmetrically repeated. Musical flow was continuous and pushed toward the cadence points at the end of each section. No event in the middle of either section came close to the structural significance of the cadences that ended each section, and no complete segments of music from the A section were repeated in any wholesale way in the B section. In Haydn’s minuet, however, as in nearly all Classical-period minuets, the return of the opening music in the middle of the B section is a central defining fact of the form. The B section is no longer a single unit of music; it is now divided at the return of A. Instead of, we now have(A’ is the symbol for variation, here referring to A). A two-part form—two portions of music, both repeated—now contains a three-part ABA form within it. This is far more than just a shift of diagrams and letters. The fundamental listening experience of “home-away- home” that we saw in the thirty-two-bar song form is now a component of our two-part form. From the moment the second, or B, section of Haydn’s minuet starts, in measure 11, we are, in a sense, preparing to come “home”; not only to the opening theme at measure 23 but to the opening key as well. To return to the opening key and music at the same time makes for a highly articulated moment of structural arrival, and this moment of return becomes more and more dramatic as the classical period progresses.

Three-part ABA form affects not only the form of the minuet itself but also the form of its accompanying trio (the minuet’s middle section) and the overall shape of the entire movement as well. The trio is customarily in the same two-partform as the minuet, though it tends to be simpler in texture and content. The term trio as the name for the middle section of a Classical-period minuet actually comes from “the seventeenth-century custom of writing minuets and other dances in three parts, frequently for two oboes and bassoon, a treatment that was used particularly for the second of two dances played alternately, resulting in the arrangement Menuet, Menuet en trio, Menuet” (Harvard Dictionary of Music). In a complete Classical-period minuet-and-trio, the minuet is played once with both sections repeated, followed by the trio played once, also with both sections repeated, followed by a return to the minuet played through without repeats. “Home-away-home” operates on every structural level. The minuet’s form is, the trio’s form is, and the complete overall form—minuet-trio-minuet—is ABA. A fundamental new listening principle has entered the world of the minuet because the fundamental purpose the minuet serves has changed. “Dance-to” music has become “listen-to” music as part of a seismic cultural shift affecting every aspect of musical life, a shift symbolized by the central form at the heart of the period: sonata form.

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