A Practical Approach to the Study of Form in Music

Book excerpt: Learning musics organizing principles . . . Approaching the study of form as an exercise in perceiving the interaction of a number of discrete musical events, Spencer and Temkos book embodies much more than a search for visual clues. Students of form develop perceptual tools that allow them to proceed from the aural experience to an understanding of the arch-principles upon which music is organized. The authors hold that the organizing principles of a given piece of music may be gleaned from studying the internal attributes that give a section its specific identity, the functional relations between sections, and the ordering of those sections.