This article is a draft. You can help by editing it or discussing in the comments
A form of a piece is its overall structure in time. Many musical traditions stick to a fixed set of available forms of clearly distinguished parts, and this approach is still somewhat important, even for us.
When thinking or writing about form, we can ask a few helpful questions:
- Can we distinguish parts in the piece? (We will mark parts with capital letters from the beginning of the alphabet).
- Are there some repeating parts? (The letters may appear many times to mark repetition).
- Are there parts in clear familiar relation to each other? (Variants of parts may be marked with apostrophes by the same letter).
This way, forms are noted down as sequences of letters, ABC, ABA'CAB'CAD, or ABBA.
Talking about musical form may not always be hard science (at least for our purposes here, some hardcore musicologists could argue). Repetitive fragments may be split in parts of different sizes (AA? AAAA?). Or, if we imagine a seamless non-repetitive evolution of sound, it usually won't be treated as "formless", but different people may arrive at subjective divisions with smooth transitions between the parts (be it AB, ABC, or ABCD). Individual sensitivities and conventions within a given genre matter a lot.
Form in music
At the start we avoided the term "genre" to mention "musical traditions", because the form may be a distinguishing factor of "genre" when it's used within a specific tradition. But the form is rarely the only such factor, and exactly how the parts relate to one other will be equally important.
In the Western classical music, relation between the parts was most often achieved by shaping melodies and the harmony. Famous "sonata form" (exposition — development — recapitulation), signals a very specific relation of parts' material, not only "three parts". In contemporary composition, timbres and textures are at least equally appreciated as form-building parameters.
In contemporary music, composers may also define "modular forms" when parts are not in a set order but there is some freedom for performer (to different extents, maybe e.g. like a difference between ABCDE and "ABDCE"). Another frequent composition technique may be ad libitum repetition, resulting in ranges e.g. from AABBCC through AAAABBCCC etc. Such options were naturally occurring in many traditional genres for ages, but for the Western classical music, they were considered 20th century "innovations".
An especially fleeting theoretical approach to form was presented by Edgard Varèse, when doing an inspirational comparison to crystals (Varèse and Weng-chung 1966, 16):
There is an idea, the basis of an internal structure, expanded and split into different shapes or groups of sound constantly changing in shape, direction, and speed, attracted and repulsed by various forces. The form of the work is the consequence of this interaction.
Varèse worked with fixed music, but such an emergence-based approach is also fitting to indeterminate compositions, moreover, one could argue that this is a natural state for the form of games.
Form of games
In many classic board games there are no parts set by the rules. Still, in many such cases players distinguish three stages of their games: opening, middle game, and end game. This "ternary" division is, interestingly, tied to the replayability of games. After repeated playing, practitioners of many games may notice that at the start there is a clear closed set of useful moves and responses to those moves, then the game becomes too complex to be that predictable, until finally some recognizable patterns show up again before the very end.
Different games follow that to a different extent. There is a huge theory of Chess openings, but the game only sometimes reaches an "end game". In Chess there is also a fitting dynamics of "possible moves" (those allowed by the rules); the first move may be done in exactly 20 ways, then the number (generally) grows with consecutive moves in the middle game, and is again quite limited closer to the end. But the availability of options is not a good overall metric for game forms, because in Go, which also shows its three emergent stages clearly, the amount of possible moves (generally) falls down with each turn as the 361 available spots on the board fill up.
Still there are classic games with a more marked form, like, if we use apostrophes to mark "same but different stage" we could have Backgammon as AA'A"… if we choose to mark parts together with consecutive "doubling" of the points1. With that we have clear stages (following a possible escalation of stakes) with the game nevertheless being played very similarly at each stage.
For comparison, Bridge (four players in pairs, with traditional playing cards) may have many forms with a clear "refrain", possibly like: ABABACABAC etc. If we mark A for bidding, B — for dummy play, and C — for no-trumps. Again, not a hard science — dummy play is done with different cards suits, so then: ABACADABAE… or if you care a lot about shuffling and dealing, you would also set them as separate phases, resulting in something like ABCD ABCE ABCE etc.
Modern board games still are into setting clear repeating phases, because it lowers cognitive load, but now designers may be more dedicated to limiting the total number of turns, or trigger the "endgame" at a limited but not fully predictable moments. It's connected to design trends of controlling the overall length of the game and not letting players "overthink" every detail.
Notation summary and extensions
So far we introduced just letters and apostrophes to mark the form, but you don't have to constrain yourself to a single form matching exactly the specific diagram. For open forms, we can add options of notation to mark a few possibilities at once.
This is not a common convention, but here at the wiki, if there's possible repetition of unspecified amount, we'll mark it by parentheses, like (A)(B)(C), for the minimalist-style AAABCCCCC or AAAAABC etc. Larger section can be in parentheses too, like A(BC)D. Such a string doesn't require repetition, so if that's what you want, add letters and mark your form as e.g. A(A)BB(B)CCC(C) — depending on necessary minimal amount.
In general, for working in specific genre context, you may use specific letters to mark parts with specific functions (like a "P" for "prechorus" or "O" for "outro"). With vocal music, you may have a need for upper and lower case to mark if the words are repeating or if the new words are added to repeated music at its each occurrence (e.g. "aBaBa"). On the wiki these options won't be of use, but some extensions are still possible, but in another article.
Using form in music game design
As designers/composers we should be very careful with form of our games, but we can also use musical forms within our games.
First and foremost forms may be tasks for players, who are to fill a given structure with their improvisation. This is a recurring proposal e.g. in Improvisation Games for Classical Musicians or on the cards of the Tonic deck. In the context of a game some approximation is to be expected, note for note repetition is hard.
Simple forms deck
Form cards is a reusable wiki deck with forms popular in the wild. The full list of items is below:
- (AABA) — '32-bar' form (but not necessarily)
- AB — Binary
- A AB ABC ABCD — Cumulative (horizontal stacking)
- (AABB) — Folk
- (AA'BB') — Folk fancier
- (AABBCC) — Folk threeparter
- (AB AB AC AC) — Folky AABB but parts begin the same
- (AB AB CB CB) — Folky AABB but parts end the same
- (ABAC ABAC DBDC DBDC) — Folky AABB but parts interrelate
- AABBA — Limerick form
- ABCCBA — Palindromic
- ABABCB — Pop with a bridge
- ABACABA — Rondo (peak)
- ABBA — Sandwich form
- AA(A) — Strophic
- ABA — Ternary/Song
- ABCDE — Throughcomposed
- AA'A''A'''A — Variational framed
- AB(AB) — Verse/Chorus
- ABC(ABC) — With a prechorus
All forms deck
All 3-letter forms deck lets you print cards for all possible three-part forms. The cards are small because there are 156 of them, and some pairs may have exactly the same structural result. The similarity between some forms may be either useful or risky for some gaming mechanics so you may need to make a selection for your game.
If you think anything should be added to this subpage, please drop a hint or a link for future editors.