Lesson plans for activities, appropriate for a large range of ages and experience, that can be used to teach students to recognize, by listening, simple musical forms.
Introduction
The overall structure of a piece of music is one of its most basic and most revealing aspects. Music majors at the university level study the form of important works in great depth and detail. Yet even young children with little musical experience can begin to grasp the basic principles of form in music. This can be part of a music class, but it can also be related to identifying form in other areas such as math, literature, and the visual arts.
Described below are some activities introducing the concepts of
Verses ,
Refrains ,
AB Forms , and
Form in the Arts . You can find the basic concepts necessary at
Form in Music . The course
Sound Reasoning is a good introduction to musical form, and you may also want to adapt some of the exercises in that course for your students.
Goals and assessment
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Goals - The student will learn to identify simple music forms presented aurally.
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Grade Level - K-12 (adaptable)
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Student Prerequisites - Students should be able to recognize and remember repetitions and large changes in basic elements (
texture ,
timbre ,
rhythm , or
melody , for example) as they listen to music. If necessary, simply practice recognizing repeated and new material, before doing these exercises. (The course
Sound Reasoning is recommended for this.)
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Teacher Expertise - The teacher should be familiar and comfortable with the terms and concepts regarding musical
form , and confident and accurate in recognizing the forms presented.
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Music Standards Addressed -
National Standards for Music Education music standard 6 (listening to, analyzing, and describing music). If
Form in the Arts is included, music standard 8 (understanding relationships between music, the other arts, and disciplines outside the arts) is also addressed.
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Other Subjects Addressed - You may use the suggestions in
Form in the Arts to design a cross-disciplinary lesson that also addresses
visual arts ,
language arts , or
mathematics .
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Evaluation - For formal assessment, test the students following these activities by playing music that you have not yet analyzed as a class, and have the students identify on paper: whether each selection includes verses and/or refrains, repeated sections or theme with variations, and/or large AB sections, and how many of each. For testing purposes, keep selections short and similar in form to the selections analyzed in class, and play each selection at least twice.
Activity 1: verses
Objectives and extensions
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Time Requirements - One (approximately 45-minute) class period
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Objectives - The student will listen to or perform several examples of vocal music consisting of either a single main section or multiple verses. The student will identify the form of the music and the beginning of each verse.
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Extensions - For older or advanced students, include examples from instrumental music that are also simple A or multiple-A form. The student will listen to examples of instrumental music, recognizing whether the form is a single section or (exact or changed) multiple repeats of a section, and will identify the form of the music using the standard A/B method.
