 Welcome to another daily vlog. I'm John Braningham and today we're going to be talking a little bit about form and formal functions So I had this question a while back just to just to talk about formal functions and what they are So I'm going to go ahead and read the definition directly from William Kaplan's book Analyzing Classical Form which is an excellent book for any composer to have and This is the the definition straight out of the glossary and then I'm going to talk with my own thoughts on it So he says the special the formal function is the specific way a musical passage Expresses a more general Temporal quality such as beginning being in the middle ending before the beginning or after the end Depending on the hierarchical level involved formal functions can be further characterized as idea functions phrase functions thematic functions and section functions, so if this is your first introduction to form a Lot of people have I think an incorrect idea of what form is form is not necessarily the letter the lettering of sections and it's not necessarily something like sonata form where you have What's considered textbook versions of formal plans? While that is a part of it and when we analyze pieces we we tend to name sections and say this is the Exposition or the transition or the development or so on What really form is is an emergent feature of music? It's this feeling of temporality that you are lending to or giving to your music by Using certain kinds of techniques so to give it a less technical feel to those kinds of definitions It's really about how your music interacts with the feeling of time, right? We've got if you if you think about what a story is a story generally has a beginning a middle and an end Often there's back story, right? There's a before the beginning and there's a an afterward or you know There's something that's going to happen after the story, but maybe it's not part of the story Well all of these kinds of feelings and moods and and interactions with time can be expressed with your own music and It's not just something that Mozart did or Beethoven did or Haydn Or you know even later tonal composers like Mahler It's something every composer does every composer has a form Whether they understand that form or not is a totally different issue however If you are talking about You know Mozart or Beethoven often the form is very clear. They have Almost like an agreed upon set of guidelines that they are going to follow or if they're not going to follow it It's for very specific reasons. They're playing with the form. They're playing with time You hear this a lot when when you are opening up something with a basic idea Which is one of the the formal units that we we use when we compose Often it focuses on tonic harmony. It feels very complete within itself And it gives you a very strong feeling of beginning, right? So if I if I were to just play something Right I'm kind of setting the tone here. I'm making things feel like we're beginning We're not in the middle of something. I'm just going straight into a simple C major chord Now that has a very much beginning feeling and it's because it's a very it's got kind of like a static feel it doesn't move very much harmonically It resolves relatively quickly. It focuses on that one chord, which is tonic. It's known as tonic prolongation And that's just me playing around with the feeling of time It's a beginning if if you're in a middle section, right? It could be You Right it usually there's more turmoil. There's more upset There's often frequent modulations things like that that that has more of a middle feel Then just sticking to that one tonic chord even though it wasn't a very complex idea I mean, I'm just doing arpeggios down It was basically one harmony per idea But the way I'm treating it the techniques that I'm using make it feel like a middle and then often with an ending There's big cadences and make things feel like they are resolving very well But the point is is that you need to start thinking about how is your music interacting with time Are you controlling it or is it controlling you? I think often a lot of the problems that we face as composers where we feel like we've maybe Compose ourselves into a corner. We we write an idea down and we don't necessarily know where it needs to go Often if you look at that idea There may be some jumbled up notions of what what the the temporality of the music that you've written is I know that kind of sounds a little bit weird But what I'm saying is you may have written something that while it's the first idea you've had It's the beginning of your piece in terms of how you're composing it It may actually be somewhere in the middle musically it may feel like like an idea that's not That's not been fully Introduced properly and you've got to just take that idea and now compose it in a very beginning feeling way Or maybe it's the ending and the same kind of concept But don't let the form control you you really have to learn to control the form So I think what I'm going to be doing is a couple more videos on this to really unpack and explore this topic I love form I think it's useful for every composer to know and especially film composers and and Before I I finish I'm going to talk about this one point I've heard a lot of film composers say that they don't use form when they write and that the movie itself is the form And I think it's a different concept of form Obviously the movie are the movie is the bounds often for what you have to do You're going to write a cue and the cue has a start point and an end point and that's the form right That's the bounds of your piece However, when you're actually going along with the music you have to ask yourself What is this music supposed to be accomplishing with the control of time? Is it supposed is it a dialogue heavy scene and it's supposed to make things feel like Like you're really just spending a lot of time there. Maybe beginning feeling things are going to work really well If it's a chase scene, you're probably going to want to use developmental techniques Make it feel like it's in the middle You want things to feel like they're moving along the story is moving along If it's the end of the film and things are starting to resolve you may want to treat it More like you have a lot of resolution within your music You may not necessarily want to do that at the beginning or in the middle these are all things that that come up when you're studying form and I think i'm going to be talking about them on the vlog over the next week or so So I hope you tune in and if you haven't already subscribe to my youtube channel And then when you hit the subscribe button on the on the main, you know page There's a little Looks like a little bell icon if you click that you're going to get notified when i'm doing the live symposiums I don't know if you've noticed recently, but i've been doing a lot more of the live impromptu five minute up up to i think some have gone 25 30 minutes These just symposiums that i've just sit down and answering questions or talking about what's going on for my day It's kind of a way for me to still do the vlog and not have to sit down and edit and film and set up my mics and And all that kind of stuff. So if you're enjoying these, just let me know send me some questions subscribe and I will talk to you tomorrow