¿Cómo sabes por dónde vas en una música que oyes por primera vez?

We ask ourselves

• How do you know the chorus is coming back before it comes back?
• If you hear a piece once in your life, what do you need in order not to get lost?
• Why does almost everything you listen to repeat something?
• Who paid for music before tickets existed?
• How many people were actually listening in an eighteenth-century room?
• If the harpsichord already worked, why did the piano eat it?

Don't answer yet. We come back to these at the end.

The fragment

Before any piece is played, the class learns eight bars. They come from the second movement of Haydn's Symphony No. 94, they run two notes to the bar, and they use nothing but notes of the chord.

• The first half goes up: do, do, mi, mi, sol, sol, mi.
• The second half comes down and closes: fa, fa, re, re, si, si, sol.

Sing the whole thing twice through. Notice what the first half does: it leaves you hanging. The second half answers and shuts the door. It is a question and its answer, which is why it stands up with no accompaniment at all.

Now listen to the movement. The same eight bars come round again, quieter, and at the end of that repeat the whole orchestra lands on one chord at full power. After that the theme returns several times, changed. Spotting the return is the entire job of this unit.

What changed

For centuries music happened in places where the listener already knew what was coming: church, palace, ballroom. In 1725 Paris gets the Concert Spirituel, putting on concerts on the days the theatres were shut, attended by comfortable middle classes, minor nobility and travellers. In 1774 the Hanover Square Rooms open in London. Nobody is obliged to attend. There is a ticket.

That creates a very concrete new problem. The room is full of strangers who paid, who will hear this piece exactly once, and to whom nobody is going to explain anything. The piece has to explain itself. The answer was not to make it simpler. It was to give it a shape you can hear.

Shape is built from three gestures. Repeat, so you recognise. Contrast, so you notice you have moved. Return, so you know it is closing. Combine them and you get three floors of the same building:

• Binary form — A A B B. Two parts, each repeated. It is the shape of dances, and it is exactly what you just sang: Haydn's eight bars are two halves, and each half plays twice.
• Ternary form — A B A. You leave and you come back. A symphony minuet is in 3/4 and has a middle section that used to be scored for a trio of instruments, which is why it is still called the trio when three people are nowhere in sight. Then the whole minuet plays again. It is the standard third movement of a classical symphony.
• Rondo — A B A C A. A main theme alternating with contrasting ones, always coming back. It was the fashionable form of the late eighteenth century and the typical finale of a concerto or a quartet.

Above all three sits the idea holding them up: the theme that returns. It can return unchanged, and then it tells you where you are. It can return changed — ornamented, on another instrument, louder — and then it still tells you where you are, and on top of that it shows you how far something can be stretched while staying itself.

And the payer changes. Haydn was an employee: until 1779 everything he wrote belonged to the Esterházy family, and that year his contract was renegotiated and he could sell his music to publishers. Writing for a lord and writing for a market are not the same job. The lord receives; the market has to like it first time. Haydn wrote at least 106 symphonies in 36 years and 68 quartets; Mozart at least 47 symphonies in 24 years.

The string quartet runs the other way, which is why it is worth hearing. Two violins, a viola and a cello, four more-or-less equal partners, no conductor and no box office. You do not play that in a hall. You play it in a room, for the people inside it. The forms are the same; the audience fits on a sofa.

Foto: Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0, vía Wikimedia Commons

The instrument changes too, for the same reason. The 1700 Medici inventory lists an "arpicembalo… che fa' il piano, e il forte": a harpsichord that does soft and loud. Bartolomeo Cristofori had built it; by 1711 he had made three, and three survive today, from 1720, 1722 and 1726.

The difference is mechanical. A harpsichord plucks the string with a quill and always sounds the same. A piano strikes it with a hammer, so your finger is audible.

That is why the piano wins. If you can play the return of a theme softer than its first appearance, you have marked the form without saying a word. A harpsichord cannot do that with the fingers. Harpsichord continuo drops out of the orchestra between 1750 and 1775, and by the early 1800s it is gone.

Hard facts: Concert Spirituel, Paris, 1725-1790. Hanover Square Rooms, London, 1774, main room 24.1 by 9.8 metres — measure your classroom and compare. Symphony No. 94 premiered 23 March 1792 in that room. Cristofori's piano, around 1700, three instruments surviving.

The same device elsewhere

The theme that returns is not an eighteenth-century idea and not a European one. These three do it two hundred years and ten thousand kilometres apart:

• La Gozadera, Gente de Zona — the verses keep swapping the list of countries and the chorus comes back identical every time. Verse and chorus are A and B: a rondo under another name.
• Handel's Lascia ch'io pianga — a da capo aria from the early eighteenth century. A plays, a contrasting B plays, then A comes back from the top with the singer decorating it. Pure ternary.
• The saz semai, from Ottoman classical music — four sections called hane, each followed by the same refrain, the teslim. The first three hane and the teslim are in 10/8; the fourth changes metre. It is A-refrain, B-refrain, C-refrain, D-refrain.

None of them copies the others. All three solve the same problem: somebody has to know where they are without being told.

And here at home?

In Spain the answer is not in the concert hall, it is in the theatre. The tonadilla escénica starts in 1757 with Luis Misón's Una mesonera y un arriero, runs about twenty minutes and is wedged between the acts of a play.

It was sung to a standing, noisy audience walking in and out, which is why it repeats so much. Around two thousand have been catalogued, largely thanks to the musicologist José Subirá, and by about 1820 no authors were left alive to write them.

Madrid also gets an Italian who stays. Luigi Boccherini travels to Spain in the spring of 1768 and by 1770 is cellist and composer to the chapel of the Infante Luis Antonio de Borbón; from 1786 he serves the Duchess of Osuna, and he dies in Madrid on 28 May 1805. He wrote 124 string quintets with two cellos: room music, patron music, not box-office music.

One of them, La musica notturna delle strade di Madrid, does something you understand with no training at all. It copies what you could hear at night in the street and names each chunk after it, like the pasacalle or the soldiers' retreat, which arrives from far off, passes, and goes. The form is literally a thing approaching and receding.

Foto: Ecelan, CC BY-SA 4.0, vía Wikimedia Commons

Aragón supplies two facts and both are dated. First: Francisco Javier García Fajer, nicknamed el Españoleto, born in Nalda on 2 December 1730, was maestro de capilla of La Seo in Zaragoza from 1756 until his death on 9 April 1809. Fifty-three years in the same post, pushing Italian style into cathedral music. He was not Aragonese by birth; he was Aragonese by trade, which in that century is what counted.

Second: the Teatro Principal in Zaragoza opened on 25 August 1799, designed by the Zaragozan architect Agustín Sanz. It seats 834 today. While Haydn was playing to paying strangers in London, Zaragoza was building its own paying room. For once, we were not late.

Classroom activities

• While the second movement of Symphony No. 94 plays: we sing the eight bars once, then go quiet. Everyone raises a hand at the moment the theme returns. Afterwards we count the hands and check whether we agreed.

• While the minuet of Mozart's Symphony No. 40 plays: half the class stands during the minuet and sits when the trio enters; the other half does the opposite. When the minuet returns, A-B-A is standing up in the room.

• While the finale of Haydn's "Joke" quartet plays: we raise a hand every time the main theme comes back. At the end it comes back one time more than you expect, with silences in between. Most of the class will clap too early. That is the joke, and it only lands if you heard the form.

• Play: we build the eight bars on whatever instruments are in the room and perform them as a rondo. Group A plays the theme, group B improvises four bars, A returns, group C does something else, A returns. Then we map the form of We Will Rock You, which has its article, chart and tab in the library.

• Create: in pairs, write a five-section rondo on paper using letters, and decide what changes on each return of A. You do not need to write notes. You need to decide.

Key vocabulary

• Form — forma: el plan de una pieza, qué partes tiene y en qué orden
• Theme — tema: la melodía de referencia; cuando vuelve cambiada es una variación
• Binary form — forma binaria: A A B B, dos partes con repetición
• Ternary form — forma ternaria: A B A, se va y se vuelve
• Rondo — rondó: A B A C A, un tema que vuelve entre secciones distintas

Resources

The songs in this unit are in the library, each with its own article, full-band chart and tab: We Will Rock You, Uptown Funk, La Gozadera.

Songs in the library with the form in plain sight, each with its article, chart and tab: La Gozadera, We Will Rock You, Uptown Funk.

The work of the unit — Haydn's Symphony No. 94, premiered at the Hanover Square Rooms on 23 March 1792. The second movement holds the theme; the third is the minuet with its trio.

The minuet and its trio, A-B-A in the open — third movement of Mozart's Symphony No. 40, by the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra. This is the listening for the second activity.

The rondo, and a room instead of a hall — Haydn's Quartet Op. 33 No. 2, "The Joke", by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Four people, no conductor.

Why the piano wins — the difference between harpsichord and piano, explained and played by the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra.

Ternary form before the Classical period — Handel's Lascia ch'io pianga, by Voices of Music. Listen to how the voice decorates A on its return.

The same device in another tradition — an Ottoman Pençgâh Saz Semâî, by Kudsi Erguner and the Bîrûn Ensemble at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini. Listen for the refrain closing each section.

The first tonadilla escénica — a seguidilla from Luis Misón's Una mesonera y un arriero, around 1757.

Three tonadillas in a row — Blas de Laserna, at the Fundación Juan March.

Madrid at night, in a quintet — Boccherini's La musica notturna delle strade di Madrid, by the Bremer Barockorchester.

El Españoleto — music by Francisco Javier García Fajer, maestro de capilla at La Seo in Zaragoza from 1756 to 1809, by the Burgos Baroque Ensemble.

• The opposite case, in the Year 10 book — "Why don't songs make you wait any more?", on what happens when form is compressed until no waiting is left: in the library.