 Welcome back to another daily vlog. I'm John Braningham and today we're gonna be continuing our talk of musical form or my series What I call music and time and today we're gonna be talking about the sentence and the period So I'm not gonna necessarily read from the book here The the textbook definitions of these forms because they're actually very you should be very comfortable With the idea of a sentence or a period because you've heard it probably over and over again And you just don't even realize it So a sentence and a period are the main theme types that that classical composers use As usually their main theme. So let me unpack that a little bit within a piece you often have something called the main theme and it's it's the first like full theme that's given prominence in the piece of music so it's kind of separated from an introduction or it's separated from a Transitional period where maybe you're modulating to another key the main theme tends to be at the beginning in the exposition and It's often a tight knit theme either a sentence a period or a hybrid which kind of mixes Some of the elements of sentences and periods and a couple other things. We won't get into hybrids in this video However with a sentence and a period they they kind of have different goals. So you've probably heard me talk about Beethoven piano sonata number one movement number one and The the opening to that is a sentence So that sentence is a very clear version of a sentence I mean, it's about as textbook as it gets you have a basic idea in tonic And then you have two really core motives to it. So you've got this big arpeggio And then that little turn right there and that features throughout the rest of the sentence Now one of the things that's cool about the sentence is it's got this forward drive to it And the reason it does is because you've got this idea You've got a repetition of the idea often in a statement response type repetition where one focuses on on tonic the other one focuses on dominant But then it's Fragmented a little bit later on and you get more forward Momentum or forward movement with the harmony and just all the aspects in general. Let's see You can see he's adding in basically little bits of all the elements from the basic idea you got the turn And you got the turn using a different way at the end Right, you've got this kind of descending Idea that brings things a little more feeling of closure at the end of the thing Now if you are to contrast this against a period the period itself has two phrases the anti-senate phrase and the consequent phrase and What it feels more like is that your it's like a large-scale Statement response or question answer. You've probably heard that term question and answer used quite a bit with music Now I don't actually have a particular period That is Prepared right now, so we'll just improvise one But you can see kind of how how simple this can be and we'll use some of the same tools that we would see With the sentence so why don't we keep it in the same key too? So we'll do F minor So now I Changed some melodic ideas from the first, you know basic idea to the second basic idea when I repeated it And that's simply because I'm improvising and it's kind of hard to keep track exactly what I play But you could see the feel of things was very different from the sentence Which had this real drive to that end cadence with the with the Period often it feels like you kind of have a complete idea here And then at the end of the antecedent for it or so the consequent phrase You have this idea kind of wrapped up in a nice little gift box with a bow tie on top And they give you totally different feels for your main themes one feels like it's got to keep on going And it's going to keep on going in a specific direction That's the sentence at the end of the period it feels like maybe things can keep going But there's probably going to be some kind of drastic change So often when I'm writing I may plan to write a sentence or I may plan to write a period But you know as you go through you realize so this is kind of feeling more Sentential or more periodic and you adjust from there But when you get to the end of one of those things it really has big consequences for the music that you write from that point on I mean if we if we you know end our Period like this I Post-credential material you know we could We could have a big drastic change in texture dynamics tempo whatever And it feels like that is a totally natural thing because things were kind of summed up If on the other hand where we're ending our sentence, you know Let's see It feels like we were taken to this point and we don't want to necessarily Mess up the flow that he's coming up with and if we look at what Beethoven actually does he keep things He keeps things quiet. He keeps things with the same kind of momentum So That kind of sums up the the basics of how I think about the sentence in the period Often it's not necessarily the details on how to put together a sentence or how to put together a period that are most important It's it's how you're thinking about the momentum the trajectory Where it needs to go? How does it sum up and kind of solve the musical problems that you're you're putting out there at the beginning? Versus how what what does it leave open for you to explore musically? So hopefully you enjoyed this daily vlog, and I know it's kind of pseudo daily. Sometimes I like to take a couple days off So but I'm gonna be continuing this whole week Probably still talking about form all week and just let me know if you've got more questions Be sure to subscribe hit the little subscribe button and then the little bell icon to make sure you get notifications about symposiums