Practical Approach to the Study of Form in Music

Learning music's organizing principles . . . Approaching the study of form as an exercise in perceiving the interaction of a number of discrete musical events, Spencer and Temko's 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; the ordering of those sections.

Title of related interest from Waveland Press: Spring-Hutcheson, Musical Form and Analysis: Time, Pattern, Proportion (ISBN 9781478607229).

"I have long been searching for a book of this type. It covers the important points of structural analysis without the pedantic ramblings found in many texts." -- Michael Levi, College of St. Rose