Usually, coming up with the first four or eight bars of music is not so bad.
It's that question of what do I do next that haunts composers and music makers.
The best first step you can take
into writing longer pieces of music is the ABA form, or Small Ternary.
Today we're going to break down the three parts of the Small Ternary Form,
what makes each of them unique, and why you can't just shuffle them around in any order.
And we'll use some of the same examples as previous videos I made with music from Yasunori
Nishiki's 'Octopath Traveler' score because not only is the writing really well crafted and clear
but looking at the same music from different angles can really deepen our understanding.
The first step in an ABA form is of course your first A section. We'll call this our main
section or main theme. It can be any melody type you like but 'sentence' and
'period' are reliable forms to go with. For example the main theme from 'Cyrus,
the Scholar' uses a period form that begins and ends in the home key of f minor.
'Cyrus, the Scholar' ends with a nice perfect authentic cadence which means that if the piece
stopped right there we'd feel satisfied that the music had resolved or returned
home. But you don't have to resolve, for example 'Therion, the Thief' also uses the period form,
this time in e minor, but ends with a half cadence on the B major chord.
The author Cedric Thorpe Davie, who kind of sounds like an Octopath character, in his
book 'Musical Structure and Design' would call 'Cyrus' a closed form and 'Therion' an open form.
Overall, it's a great book but honestly I'm not convinced those terms really help you
decide which one to use when. Just know that you can end the a with an authentic or half cadence,
either way is fine. But there still has to be some sort of cadence which is crucial.
We need that feeling of punctuation that the section has come to some sort of
end in the same way a chapter of a novel or a scene in a movie doesn't just end mid-sentence.
Back in college a teacher looked through one of my pieces and said 'You don't
have any cadences'. Which I thought was ridiculous. How could that be possible?
And it's only more recently that I really fully appreciated that those cadences need to
be crystal clear and even emphasized for your audience to get their bearings in the piece.
I have so many students that are so afraid of inactivity
that they never stop to let the piece breathe. Do not underestimate the cadences.
The only other thing to consider about the first A theme is the structure
which is usually pretty tight. By tight I mean that it's fairly even and balanced
like a nice square four bars plus four bars. 'Ophelia, the Cleric' is an exception to this
where that final 'F' is drawn out with a suspension.
But, overall, I think that just gives us some extra breathing room
and the a section still feels pretty balanced.
Next up we have the B section, or middle part of the form.
The first question of course is where do you get the material for the B theme? You can come up with
something brand new, but I think the best place to get ideas for your B theme is from your A theme.
The basic idea for the B theme in 'Therion, the Thief' is this eighth note rest,
a following scale into a strong beat that moves down by step, and then down by leap.
And if you look at the basic idea of the A theme; it's an eighth note rest,
a rising scale into a strong beat that moves down by step, and then down by leap.
Two minor changes; having the scale fall instead of rise, and shifting the idea
forward two beats and we get what feels like a brand new idea for our B section.
The A theme from 'Cyrus, the Scholar' has this rising arc shape
and so for the B theme he uses a falling arc shape.
The more similar your ideas, the more consistency your piece will have
and even if people can't recognize the similarity, which honestly most people can't,
there will still be a sense that this B theme must go with this A theme.
It wouldn't be as satisfying to just shuffle a handful of themes around
and stick them together. That would be more like a medley. Now a crucial difference between the A
theme and B theme, at least in the way Yasunori Nishiki writes them, is with the opening harmony.
He pretty much always starts his A theme with the nice and safe I chord and his B theme with not
the I chord. For example, 'Therion' starts on the flat six and 'Cyrus' starts on the four minor.
I would say that starting on the IV chord is the most common way to begin a B section,
but of course it's not the only option. The point is that we're trying to use
the harmony to take us away and make it feel like we're going somewhere.
Starting on something other than I makes it feel like we've gone away from home
and it will be the job of the rest of the B theme to bring us back.
Bringing us back is a really important point because if we know that we're going to follow
our B theme with a return to A, we know we'll need a satisfying resolution back into our I chord.
So, you're pretty much guaranteed to end your B theme with a half cadence in the home key.
A half cadence doesn't have to mean the literal classical V chord because in 'Therion' he uses
the flat seven chord, D major, but we still get that same sense of pull back to I.
I mentioned before that the A theme is usually pretty tight
structurally. Your B theme can contrast this by being looser. For example,
in 'Cyrus' the entire B theme is half as long as the A theme which makes it feel more hurried.
In 'Ophelia, the Cleric' the A theme is nine bars long and the B theme is unbalanced against it
by being 16 bars long so the balance of the piece is really emphasizing the later part.
Also, remember what I said about harmonically starting somewhere different?
In the case of 'Ophelia' the A theme modulates to the four
key of b flat then starts the B section on the four chord of that key.
Another way we can have looseness in the B theme again comes back to harmony like
in 'Therion' the A theme is squarely an e minor with e harmonic minor on that cadence
but the B theme gets much more adventurous. The d minor,
g minor, and especially the e flat major chords definitely don't come from e minor and this sense
of being far away from home is part of what helps this section feel like it belongs in the middle.
Even 'Cyrus, the Scholar' reserves its single non-diatonic for the B
section with the secondary dominant of V.
Finally, we have our return to A, or we can call it A prime. And if you've made
it this far into the video there's a very good chance that we're interested in the
same kinds of things. So, please make sure you like and subscribe
so you don't miss out on everything we've got coming up! I appreciate it.
It's important that the return to the A theme is clear. Again, to that point of helping your
audience stay oriented and understand where they are in the piece. So don't be shy about
starting a prime exactly the same way you started A. If your first A theme ended with
an authentic cadence or sense of return to home then you could even copy paste that again here
and be done with it. In the case of some of these video game tracks that's exactly what's happening.
Because the composer is taking advantage of the ABA form to create an endless A-B-A-B-A-B loop.
Very smart for any of those cases where you don't know exactly when the music will end. But,
if you're writing a standalone piece or your small ternary is one section within a bigger form,
I don't recommend just copy and pasting. In the case of 'Cyrus, the Scholar', Nishiki uses the
momentum of that truncated B section and balances it out with a truncated return to the A section.
Instead of playing the entire A theme,
he only uses the consequent phrase or second half of that period form.
We've already heard the A theme so we don't need to go through the entire thing again.
This is especially useful to keep in mind when you have a track that is going to loop indefinitely
to make sure it doesn't get too repetitive.
But I think it's worth pointing out that even though the material is the same
he brings it up an octave so we still do get some sense of development
and progress in the form even if we're ending with the same material we started with.
Another thing you can do with your return to A is push it farther than we've yet heard the
theme go. Which you can do by extending parts of the theme, repeating moments for emphasis,
and a lot of other things that I talk about in this video here
which you really need to watch if you're serious about getting better at your craft!
Thanks for watching, I will see you in the next one.