Back in high school I was getting my first real education in classical music. I was listening to Mahler�s First Symphony for the first time when, part way into the first movement a popular klesmer (or Jewish folk) tune asserted itself. I didn�t know what it was until years later when a friend of mine, who is in a klesmer band, happened to be playing it one afternoon and I recognized it from the symphony.

Even though I didn�t recognize the tune, I could tell it was a quotation of a popular folk tune by the way the style of the music changed. I was a little shocked. This was a symphony. Were symphony composers really allowed to do that?

One reason for this attitude was surely the one that I had been cultivating nearly since I had first becoming acquainted with such music. Classical music is supposed to be hermetically sealed off from the other kinds, the more �vulgar� or �popular� musical styles since it would only dirty itself by the association. I imagine I absorbed that attitude by osmosis from the people who were playing the music on the radio or talking about it on record jackets.

Another reason for the separation, besides being too holy to commerce with other styles, is the baggage that popular associations bring into an original composition. There have long been people who believe that music can only be approached as music, and cannot have any meaning apart from the notes that make it. Referring to something outside the piece itself may mean that the piece is trying to position itself in dialogue with some other tradition or ideology, or that it is trying to tell a story or set a scene or say something socially, and that very notion bothers some people to the core.

While it is understandable that the idea of �extra-musical association� should be treated with some caution, since it can certainly be abused, I�ve always found myself bothered by the absolutism in the notion that music means nothing but itself. If it is not to be connected to any other human activity, how much relevance can it have?

Arguments about purity aside, however (and they have existed in regard to everything from music to human beings, often with the ugliest possible results) there is still the thick line which needs to be crossed between high culture and low culture, a line that many disciples are making sure remains indelible.

I don�t mean to suggest I am a fan of the current crop of experiments in fusing hip-hop with opera or making the symphony rap a little to attract customers. Hybridizations like that can be done well, but they usually aren�t. Maybe they are harmless, but they are probably not going to have much of a lasting impact.

But symphonies and sonatas have been doing commerce with folk and popular styles for quite a long time, and most of classical music�s recognized masters have been responsible for at least occasional dabbling, if not a more studied approach.

Particularly in the 20^th century, quotations �from the people�s music� have become part of the symphonic vocabulary, for a variety of reasons, from composer to composer. American composer Charles Ives made it a particular obsession to snatch tunes from the musical world around him, and rarely invented one of his own. But even the champion of absolute music as his defenders thought of him, Johannes Brahms, engaged other musics even in his symphonies. He did it more subtly, so that it was simultaneously part of the musical fabric of his piece, and he usually chose other �art music� to quote from.

Bela Bartok took a more scientific approach, cataloguing and arranging many of the tunes from his native land, capping a popular trend in the 19^th century to take interest in and make �artistic� settings of traditional songs from one�s own country. It was a time when what made your own land unique was no longer something to be embarrassed about. I don�t recall whether Bartok actually used any of the tunes in his symphonic works the way Ives or Copland did.

Use of these tunes can set up a �third dimension� in the music, A way that the artist can use common property, or a shared tradition to comment on it in a new context. Often these songs have a kind of �authenticity� about them, since, whether they really originated from the people en masse or not, nobody knows who wrote them anymore, and thus shorn of any �taint� of having been written or created by a professional, they are now on everybody�s lips and by use and custom and context they have been invested with meaning. Perhaps many meanings, not the least of which may be a national or group pride in being who you are (or think you are). And even though we 21^st century Americans love to exult the individual, we still feel it safer to hide in numbers�Democracy, after all, is about the rule of number, and capitalism is all about catering to that mass. Something that can be sung by everyone will seem to belong to everyone�and a Mahler symphony certainly does not belong to that category, even if a few bars could be made into a hit song, and I don�t know if anyone has tried. Some�probably most, �classical� themes are largely immune to being translated into popular music, since they would have to be tortured beyond recognition to fit into the scheme of the popular song. A few have undergone this surgery anyway. During the middle of the last century it was more fashionable to be a proponent of �good� or �classical� music, which created a demand for �difficult� music that could be �made easy� by stripping it of most of its artistic properties so that it could pass for a valuable antique you could get at Wal-Mart.

Hear that?

My mother, an ordinarily sage woman who has given me plenty of good advice over the years, also threw out this adage on occasion: know your limits. I�ve always thought that this was the worst piece of advice she ever gave me. The reason for it had a lot to do with the context. Whenever I wanted to try something I hadn�t done before, particularly if it was in addition to what must have seemed to her like an already full schedule (this was before everybody was on 8 soccer teams and judo and ballet and piano and a travelling baseball team or two or three and the debate team and the swim team simultaneously; I was probably in marching band and the tennis team and that was it�besides piano lessons, of course) she would trot out this bit of advice and I would invariably grumble �well, how am I going to know my limits if I don�t get to test them?�

In other situations, this advance bit of caution would be a good idea. But it is seldom allowed to really interfere with our decision making process. So often in life we don�t really get to know what it will be like to have the job, the house, the marriage, the career path, the kids, until we�ve already taken them on. It would be helpful to have something besides a little bit of advertising to go on before we commit to something that we can�t really know until we are in the thick of it. It would be helpful if people gave us more of a clue. I remember thinking that a lot when I was young. "So, what do you want to do when you grow up?" the adults would ask glibly, and I was supposed to just know without really having much in the way of role models, real life examples, data�I couldn�t even go to a web chat room to see what people were saying about the things I didn�t know anything about. I suppose in the absence of real data a certain amount of blanket caution isn�t all bad. But there is another reason we don�t always need to worry so much about what our limits are. Other people will tell us!

I have a bad habit of reading biographies of musicians. In some respect this is useful, because I am getting real information about different responses to circumstance in the real life choices that some of the greatest musicians in history have made. In contrast to those gee-whiz thumbnail biographies of �the great composers� that get foisted on kids, where some incredibly talented fellow springs from nowhere and his life is an uninterrupted succession of triumphs which is why we are exhorted to practically worship our hero, real biographies written for grownups that explore their subject with depth and subtlety can reveal all kinds of fascinating things about the lives and circumstances of some very different people. But they are, invariably, depressing.

One reason they are so depressing is that there is always a great deal of failure in the subject�s life. It could be that the public just isn�t that interested in what they are doing, and if they depend on their vocation for money there is inevitably a lot of fiscal anxiety. It could be their critics, rivals, their own internal struggles, failing relationships�sound like any human beings you know of? Most recently, my reading list included the pick-me-up story of Frederic Chopin, often called the �poet of the piano,� one of the most played 19^th century pianists in concerts today.

In the case of a biography sometimes the same issues, chapter after chapter, can seem almost as hectoring as they would have living through them. In the case of Chopin, what I remembered as something that was registered as a complaint in the few public concerts he gave began to seem like a faucet that wouldn�t stop dripping. This was because Chopin gave more public concerts than I had realized.

The incessant refrain was that Chopin�s tone production was lacking. In other words, he just couldn�t play loud enough. In an age when cataracts of sound were the piece de resistance, this was a problem. But not one Chopin didn�t struggle to overcome, apparently. Throughout the early part of his career, at intervals, he would appear on the concert stage. Every time, his reviewers would complain that he couldn�t command the oceans of sound necessary to volley an impressive squadron of same to the far corners of a large concert hall. So he would try again. Same result. After a while, he stopped trying.

Chopin had another problem too, which was that he was not interested in writing pieces that were simple enough for amateur pianists to play, or to understand. Despite his late-developed Polish patriotism, he didn�t write any works that were obviously nationalist, which would have also made him a big star, at least in his native land. As a transplanted Polish national living in Paris, he didn�t capitalize on the latest dance craze to rake in the cash (look at the word "capitalize"�the word�s very origins must have meant turning a situation into money!). Between his temperament, ideology, and limitations, he basically cut himself off from the concert hall and the role of popular composer. What did he have left?

What he had left were small, intimate gatherings of friends and music lovers who could appreciate his strange effusions. In a small room where his 31 flavors of pianissimo could be quite effective, and his horror of large crowds need not interfere with his muse. This was known as the salon, and it was also a rather popular movement in Paris at the time. Critics of the concert stage looked down on this music; it was considered a rather vulgar thing in comparison to the high art to which it ran parallel. But Chopin gave to it his best works, which classical pianists are still playing in droves and calling masterpieces. We play them most often in the concert hall, which begs the question of authenticity, but we still play them.

Chopin wasn�t like the extroverted, larger-than-life Liszt, or the bizarre Berlioz�he didn�t champion the Romantic gesture writ large with a huge orchestra and long, dramatic tone poems or tragic narratives. Despite what so many have written since about great composers touching every genre with their genius he wrote almost entirely for the piano. Rarely is anything more than ten minutes in length. There are shattering fortissimos (could he play them?) but there are many intimate moments that cannot be found in the music of anyone else.

Chopin carved out his own unique role in the history of music. Part of this was his own free will, and part of it was his choice, apparently, to accept what his critics were telling him, and to recognize that just because everyone else thought music had taken up residence in large halls with marrow-shattering orchestras and pianists of steel, didn�t mean there weren�t other ways of doing things�as if to suggest that the dominant trend need not tyrannize where it could not be used to advantage.

In other words, Chopin was formed both by his successes and his failures.

Aren�t we all?

There is a Christian pianist whose online lessons I was reading the other day who had some unflattering things to say about the importance of structure in a piece of music. He pointed out that there were in fact musicians who believed form to be the most important thing about a composition. This was in their eyes what made a piece 'good.' He was offended by this.

Well, he should be. [Would it help if I put sarcasm in italics from now on?] A fluent understanding of the problems of Form isn't exactly second nature to the majority of our Christian pianist hymn-arrangers these days. It is a difficult thing to master for anyone, and it requires much more than moment-to-moment attention to a piece of music. Most people don't know how to listen for it, either. If you are creating a piece of music, it is much simpler to try to make each moment as pretty as you can, and not worry about whether it really adds up to something in the long run. When this same strategy becomes a philosophy of life we call it hedonism. At least, when applied to a musical composition, it doesn't hurt anybody.

My mission here is not to give this gentleman a unilaterally hard time. In fact, if we give his remarks a little more context, I have a good deal of sympathy for his position. Between the two sentences I've already quoted was the characterization that these form-judging musicians think that if you don't like their music it is your problem because you wouldn't know good music if it hit you with a two by four. I've 'adapted' his comments a bit, actually. They weren't so colorful in the original.

But the reason I want to start out with a bit of sympathy is because there are indeed many people who feel that it is their job to sort out the ones who know from the rest of you bozos, the exalted initiates from the boorish mob. This musical Phariseeism is hardly limited to matters of form, but it is a considerable plank in their platform--or their own eyes. This topic is so depressing to me that it deserves its own article.

It was almost a given that a new piece of music during the 20th century would be criticized for its structure. Critics, who had one opportunity to hear something on the night it premiered, loved to savage a piece that they couldn't follow from beginning to end in the manner in which they were accustomed. If the piece had any surprises, the logical argument that they were expecting to be dispatched in so many notes would seem to be suffering, in their august opinions, from a poor treatment of form. To put it in a nutshell, anything new tended to throw these critics a curve. If that originality extended to the way the piece unfolded from moment to moment, or in terms of its long-term plan, these guys wanted you to know that their superior musicality could pick up on it. And more often than not, they did not appreciate these innovations. This is an illustration of a mindset which worships at the shrine of what was great in the past and does not welcome change. It is an outlook that can be found in people of all levels of intellect. But it also shows just how difficult it is to understand form.

Before I get too carried away I should define a few terms. First of all, every piece of music unfolds in time. It is not present to our senses in its entirety, but only as one part of the whole. That whole, therefore, it has some kind of relation between its parts, a structure. It might be a pretty poor one; if it were a house, the roof might fall in. But it is a piece of music and so nobody dies.

This essay is also unfolding to your consciousness in time. If you are asking yourself questions like: what is the main point here? or I wonder were he is going with this? you are asking questions which are related to the form (as well as the content) of this sea of words. Most people do not read essays to see how well the author connects what he says at the beginning with what he says at the end, just as they are not paying close attention to the form of the music as a separate element. But if I were to just start off talking about baseball right here, and in a few sentences get bored and talk about the weather, or just start typing gibberish, your mind would probably get very confused and your attention would wander. If the topic itself interests you and my writing is sufficiently interesting, you'll probably stay with me, as long as I seem to be going somewhere with this. My treatment of form does have something important to contribute to the success of this essay.

Indeed, some of my points are taking longer to develop than others. Some of the sentences you've read are key to getting the drift of the whole piece. Others are providing support for those sentences. Others seem to digress a bit and provide some local interest but could probably be taken out and you'd still get the idea. All of those things have to do with how well the words and the thoughts they express cohere. And they all have to do with form.

For some people form is essentially a recipe. If you put the right musical moments in the right order, you have an instant piece of music, and there is no need to worry yourself over whether the content or character of a particular piece might seem to require that its structure be approached in a different way. This formulaic approach to form is what you learned in music class. Remember the old letters: ABA? Some music happens, then some contrasting music happens, then we return to the first part and do it again. A formal approach no subtler than that means I probably could talk about baseball here if I wanted to, so long as I eventually wandered back to the idea of form again. This is called ternary (or three-part) form and its various cousins, like ABACA and ABACADA, are not variations on the killing curse from Harry Potter but types of Rondo form, which is a way of vivifying the idea that you can take a musical thought, wander away from it, come back to it for an encore, wander away from it again, locate it a third time--it is still there! and do this as many times as you think you can sustain interest (and if you want to challenge our attention spans do it one more time!).

There is a whole other, more complex, family of forms, which are closer to an essay. In these, the theme or themes, which are obviously groups of musical notes in this case, are presented, and then developed--transformed in a whole variety of ways which can either show off the composer's cleverness or reveal a whole range of emotional and intellectual possibilities for what may have seemed a trifling little tune at first. Usually these forms (referred to as Sonata forms) are also symmetrical, meaning they return to business as usual after the developmental section, a form of ABA in which B is not a contrast but a taking of A and running with it. This notion also gives rise to variation forms, which are usually self-contained sections featuring transformations of a common theme, one after another. I've never seen this done with prose, but it might be fun to try.

Even given this rather impressive menu, some composers are not happy. This is because we are creative troublemakers, although I repeat myself. While a symmetrical form suggests architecture (walls on both sides supporting equal weight from the roof), narrative or dramatic forms can also translate themselves into music, and these forms do not like symmetry. How would you like to read a novel in which the last chapter was an exact copy of the first, as though what had transpired in between had no lasting effect on what came at the end? This is why there is often vociferous disagreement about formal design even among people who very much know what they are doing. The vast difference in philosophy between forms which evolve and forms which are essentially static also, I hope, gives you a window into the near limitless variety of formal structures and ideas about how to create these musical blueprints, to say nothing of the immense challenges involved in satisfactorily molding a piece so that the form seems to come alive, rather than being imposed on it separately. If I were to do that, I might dispense with this paragraph after I had reached a certain quota of words, say the same number as in the last paragraph, whether I had concluded my thought or not.

The next paragraph may or may not pick up where the last one left off. Isn't this fun? Continuity, discipline, resisting a thousand temptations to just spew every remotely connected thought I have while I write this onto this page while I select the ones that are most likely to make my points and take me to where I want to go--but then this sort of architecture is probably of more interest to writers and composers than it is to the general public. I do think, however, that if people knew something about the ways in which music was put together it would at the very least keep them from getting bored so easily during a long piece. It helps to know where you are in the plot. Which is why, in my brave insanity I plan to devote several pages to various musical forms and what makes them interesting. I don't know anyone who has made the attempt successfully to talk form to the general public, at least beyond a few rudiments that make the whole inquiry seem as exciting as boiling water.

All of which brings me back around to the pianist I was paraphrasing at the beginning. While there were enough assumptions on his page to discuss in several more articles, the one most germane to the subject of form was when he advised pianists learning to improvise not to worry themselves about it. He seems to think that form is something that leads to imitation, something that is done out of a sense of duty--good music is supposed to follow certain rules, and therefore we must worry about such things even though we haven't a clue why. I quite agree that there is a danger in this kind of thinking. Either the result is in fact a lifeless concoction, not because the performer was worried about formal decisions in the first place but because he didn't really understand how formal design can be a living, vital part of a piece of music, or the piece seems inappropriate in its context (in this case, for worship) because the performer is under the impression that in order for his efforts to pass muster with the right people he must choose a formal plan that is wrong for the materials. He can't let his inspiration breathe because he thinks that the 'imposition' of form is supposed to reign inspiration in, and form is the master, the contents merely slaves, or at least dutiful servants. And he thinks that rules are something you get out of a book and do what it says to do. In such a world there is no creativity because there are no decisions to be made when the demands of form and content seem to be at odds. There is only one 'perfect' model, rather than thousands of uniquely interesting ways in which the various large-scale structures are used by a composer who is brave enough to experiment with traditions, not by ignoring them, but by assuming them to be living breathing things to which his contribution is yet another adventure in risk and reward. It is to this world, not the world of formality or formalism or the formulaic (all words that show a negative, and I would say, skewed, idea of how lifeless attention to form is), that I would invite the intrepid composer. I should note here that one of our dear pianist's colleagues once asked English composer John Rutter what was important in a piece of music, to which he replied "form, form form." I will assume he did not mean this as a way to kill musical interest, and neither did the person to whom it was addressed, who considered it an interesting remark, and part of his musical journey.