Listening for Form

What is musical form?

• An organising principle for music composition and comprehension

• Musical structure and compositional templates

• Indicator/determiner of genre

• Compositional structures of self-sufficiency and unity in music

Who wrote that 'theory of form [is] a description of genres'?

• Carl Dahlhaus

• Arnold Whittall

• Arnold Schoenberg

• Susanne K. Langer

What year was A.B. Marx's Die Lehre von der musikalischen Kompositions published?

• 1817

• 1827

• 1837

• 1847

According to Marx, what makes sonata form superior to other musical forms?

• Facilitates dramatic contrast

• Highest example of musical organicism

• Adherence to narrative structures

• Favours development over contrast

Which anti-Formenlehre scholar wrote that sonata form was 'dominated by active sense of movement, not architectural nor cosmically epic but dramatic’'

• Donald Francis Tovey

• Hugo Riemann

• Ernst Kurth

• Edward T. Cone

According to Ernst Kurth, what is Erformung?

• The mental formation of form's spatial parameters

• The process of understanding form through multiple temporal strands or 'multi-track listening'

• The idea that music is only intelligible via formal processes

Which two movement-based concepts did Kurth employ in his Erformung analyses?

• Bewegung (motion)

• Schwellung (swelling)

• Wellen (waves)

• Zurückweichend (receding)

This piece of music is which movement from which Bruckner symphony?

• Symphony No. 7, Movement 1: Allegro Moderato

• Symphony No. 6, Movement 4: Bewegt, doch nicht zu schnell

• Symphony No. 3, Movement 4: Ziemlich schnell

• Symphony No. 8, Movement 4: Feierlich, nicht schnell

Alban Berg's 1925 opera Wozzeck is organised under which tonal system?

• Atonality/free atonality

• Twelve-tone serialism

Answer explanation

Though some certain sections in Wozzeck are structured under a twelve tone system (e.g. Act 1, Scene IV), the opera is primarily atonal while his 1935 opera Lulu is composed under a wholly twelve-tone schematic rubric.

Act 2, Scene I of Wozzeck (Marie sings her to child) is structured via which of these 'archaic' musical forms?

• Passacaglia

• Theme and Variations

• Sonata Form

• Fugue and Fantastia