The Craft of Contemporary Commercial Music

Chapter 11

Form and Development

Throughout several previous chapters, you’ve explored fundamental musical structures and the various ways they combine to yield complete musical ideas or phrases. Individual pitches, for example, combine to create intervals, which in turn are joined to generate chords that give rise to both chord progressions and the cadences that “punctuate” musical thoughts. To this point, though, the focus has largely been on the level of the single phrase, with Chapter 9 introducing the idea of the basic phrase (with its constituent areas of tonic, predominant, and dominant) and Chapter 10 discussing several ways to embellish the basic phrase with chromaticism. This chapter instead turns to the ways that musical ideas are developed ...