Free Online Piano Lesson 9: Reading the Roadmap

Source:Internet    Posted by:Learntopianoonline.com   Date:2010-01-03   Click:

Wow, you've made it through nine complete lessons in music theory!  Only two more to go and you should be an expert. Don't forget to keep practicing piano.  The technique is equally important to the theory.  If you haven't already, I strongly recommend either finding a teacher or investing in an inexpensive set of piano method books to help you continue your practice.  If you don't have any in mind here are some I've taught piano out of and consider to be very effective,  Recommendations .  If you'd rather just continue yourself that's find too! Just keep plugging away and find some sheetmusic that you would love to learn.  Want to buy sheet music, songbooks or guitar tabs? Try Sheet Music Plus. They have over a quarter million titles to choose from, and you can order online. And now for lesson 9.  This lesson will cover cadences and form, as well as three very important terms regarding the sections in a piece of music.

Cadences are used at the end of a section, or phrase, of music.  Most cadences are easily recognized as a V chord to the tonic, I.  This is called an authentic cadence.  There are two general kinds of authentic cadences, perfect and imperfect.  In order for the cadence to be considered perfect it must have the tonic as the highest note in the I chord, and neither chord can be inverted.  Since a large portion of music uses the V-I cadence, when the penultimate chord is a V and leads to anything other than I it is considered a deceptive cadence.  A half cadence is when the second chord of the cadence, or last chord of the phrase, is V.  The last basic type of cadence is the plagal cadence.  This cadence ends a phrase with IV-I. 

The next part of this lesson will focus on form.  Form can vary considerably between pieces.  This lesson will take a look at the most common forms found in music.  The first is ABA, often called ternary form.  Sections of music are labeled with letters.  You can see that this form has one section labeled A, then a varying section, B, and then repeats back to the first section, A.  An even simpler form would be AB, which is composed of two different sections with no sections repeated.  Another form is the rondo.  This form has a repeating section, labeled A, that fits between new sections.  Most commonly it is written in either 5-part rondo or 7-part rondo.  5-part rondo is written as ABACA, while 7-part rondo is written as ABACABA.  You can see that A is the recurring section.

Now we come to the three important terms that I mentioned earlier in the lesson.  These three terms are exposition, development, and recapitulation.  These terms can be used in either the fugue or sonata (two other forms commonly composed in classical music).  Although these terms differ slightly between those two forms, the exposition  is the first large section, usually larger than the letter-labeled sections, of a piece of music that introduces the themes of a piece (main melodies, ideas).  The exposition progresses into the development .  This is where the themes are developed through modulation, variation, and other techniques.  The third section is the recapitulation .  This is where the themes return in their original key.  This is basically a repeat of the exposition.  The end of the recapitulation can sometimes end with a coda (an extended ending) to close the piece.