63: Ternary or rounded binary

As promised, our next form will be one very similar to what we discussed yesterday, but with a crucial difference. Yesterday’s article covered binary form— A(A)B(B): Some idea, maybe a repeat, something different, maybe a repeat.

That is very similar to, but nevertheless distinct from today’s form, which we call ternary (or sometimes “rounded” binary—showing that they are in fact closely related). In this form, you have an A theme, then a B theme, and then either the A theme returns verbatim (and we still call it A), or it returns very minimally altered and we call it A’ (A “prime”)—but it is crucial that A returns.

The simplest example out there is the first thing any kid learns to play when they walk into a Suzuki teacher’s studio:

 

Note the key distinction here between yesterday’s binary and today’s ternary/rounded binary: in strict binary, A does not return after B comes; but the fact that A does return is what makes ternary (rounded binary) ternary (rounded binary).

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

35: Figured Bass

Image
  There’s a system of notating harmonies that’s rather unique to the Baroque era, but which is so frequently used there, and so important to it, that no discussion of theory would ever be complete if we did not cover it. This is the notation of figured bass: “figured,” in the sense of using figures (numbers) to notate the bass. Figured bass was, in a sense, its own notation completely separate from the five lines and four spaces of the staff, which was nearly exclusively the purview of cellists, bassists, harpsichords, and organists.  Figured bass, fair warning, can be intimidating at first. But, just as with anything else we’ve covered so far, the more you practice reading it, the better you’ll get.  In this system, we use numbers to indicate intervals above the bass. We stack them, and this is how we build chords. If you can’t stack them, nowadays, it’s perfectly fine to use slashes and write the numbers horizontally.  Let’s start with the easiest figured bass nota...
Read more

58: Swell pedals and swell shades

There’s one pedal that we haven’t discussed on the organ because it isn’t one of the “note” pedals—in fact, it’s the only one that doesn’t have a pitch. Instead, the missing pedal is the swell pedal. Look at the body of the organ (the assembly of where all the pipes are, as opposed to the “console”, where the organist sits and plays the instrument—these may or may not be physically close to each other), and you’ll probably see what kind of look like plantation shutters. (If you know where my parish is, then this feature of the organ is very clearly visible on ours. Your local organ might not be so obvious.) These shutters, called “swell shutters/shades,” show or hide the pipes of the organ. Organs have instantaneous dynamic control—the amount of pressure you put on a key dictates how much air flows through the pipes, just like a piano allows you to adjust dynamics on the fly by changing the amount of pressure with which the hammer hits the string(s) given the pressure on the key. Thes...
Read more

54: Trills in the Baroque vs. Classical Periods

Image
Baroque music is known for its incredibly technical and ornamented style. The most common and fundamental of those ornaments is our focus today: the trill. Most simply, a trill is a very fast, repeated alternation of two notes. In the vast majority of cases, those notes are adjacent, but that is not a requirement. Given how fast and common they are, regardless of what you play—whether it’s a string, wind, or keyboard instrument, or your voice—they have a reputation for being quite tiring to play. The period matters when considering a trill. Classical and later composers treat trills, in a sense, in the opposite manner than Baroque composers do. Let me show you two examples: First, the Baroque way of thinking. This is a PAC:   and especially in the Baroque era, when the plucked harpsichord dominated over the hammered piano, it was hard to sustain sounds for long since the sound of the plucking decays quickly. The trill was developed in response, out of a need both to ornam...
Read more