Logseq/Entity/Music/Form/Discussion
Musical Form Discussion
- Why musical forms get pages of their own, why one
Music/Form/ namespace holds both kinds of piece and structures, and why the garden does not model genre. Forms get their own pages, linked from works
- A form page gathers every work in that form across composers. Music/Form/Prelude lists every prelude in the garden in its linked references, and filtering those references by a composer's page narrows the list to that composer's preludes.
- Each work page links its form with
music-form::, defined at Logseq/Entity/Music/Work/Frontmatter/music-form. The filter works because music-form:: and created-by:: sit in the same frontmatter block, so no query is needed. - The pattern follows Logseq/Entity/Music/Scale: concept pages under
Music/<Concept>/<Name> with an index page above them.
One namespace for kinds of piece and structures
- "Sonata" names two related things. A sonata is a kind of piece, usually in several movements. Sonata form is the plan of a single movement: exposition, development, recapitulation. The second movement of Beethoven's Pathétique Sonata belongs to a sonata and is a rondo; the first movement of Mozart's Symphony No. 40 is in sonata form and belongs to a symphony.
- The two get sibling pages,
Music/Form/Sonata and Music/Form/Sonata Form. Musicians already tell them apart that way in speech: "a sonata" and "sonata form." - A name that means one thing in both senses, such as fugue, gets one page.
- codekiln finds splitting the sonata from sonata form uncomfortable, and chose the sibling pages because they match how musicians talk.
- Alternative:
Music/Shape/. "Form" is overloaded and "shape" is not, so Music/Shape/Sonata and Music/Shape/Sonata Form keep the kind of piece apart from the music-theory sense. No one in music uses "shape" this way, so every reader would learn the term from the garden. A nested Music/Shape/Sonata/Form would also imply that sonata form is part of a sonata, which the Mozart example contradicts. - Alternative:
Music/Genre/ for kinds of piece, Music/Form/ for structures. Musicologists use "genre" for the symphony, sonata and nocturne: Jim Samson's "Genre" article in Grove Music Online, Jeffrey Kallberg's "The Rhetoric of Genre: Chopin's Nocturne in G Minor" (1988), and Carl Dahlhaus on Gattung. The Library of Congress files "Preludes (Music)" and "Sonatas" among its Genre/Form Terms without choosing between the words. Working musicians call a sonata a form, not a genre, so the split reads as academic jargon.
Genre is not modeled yet
- Genre means different things to different readers: a kind of piece to a musicologist, a style such as rock or ambient to most listeners.
- codekiln would model a grouping like genre only if it worked the same way across literature, music and other disciplines of expression, and would prefer a neutral word such as "category." Form may face the same question across disciplines.
- Works that organize music history by kinds of piece could change this. Dahlhaus's Nineteenth-Century Music and the Samson article are the places to start.
History
Open questions
- A cross-discipline grouping word for kinds of works, and whether form belongs in it.