Aaba, Refrain, Chorus, Bridge, Prechorus — 1 Song Forms and Their Historical Development
Online-Publikationen der Gesellschaft für Popularmusikforschung / German Society for Popular Music Studies e. V. Ed. by Ralf von Appen, André Doehring and Thomas Phleps www.gfpm- samples.de/Samples13/appenfrei.pdf Jahrgang 13 (2015) – Version vom 10.3.2015 AABA, REFRAIN, CHORUS, BRIDGE, PRECHORUS — 1 SONG FORMS AND THEIR HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT Ralf von Appen and Markus Frei-Hauenschild 1. Introduction 1.1 Why form analysis? Most literature that analyzes popular music deals with song forms only pe- ripherally. The few essays and chapters that have been written on the form of pop songs exist largely in isolation, without making reference to one an- other. Songwriting guides aimed at musicians (e.g. Perricone 2000, Braheny 2006, Citron 2008, Blanton 2010, Murphy 2011) often include their own chapter on song forms, but just as the scholarly literature are by and large limited to categorical overviews of three or four common formal models, listing them without differentiation according to historical or stylistic crite- ria. We are not aware of studies that examine the historical development and dissemination of various song forms in greater depth, which gives the impression that popular music is limited to a few conventional standard forms. This might lead some to view the analysis of form as banal and irrel- evant to interpretations of musical meaning. 1 An earlier version of this study was published in German in Black Box Pop. Analysen populärer Musik, ed. by Dietrich Helms and Thomas Phleps (Beiträge zur Popularmusikforschung 38, Bielefeld: transcript 2012). For this publication it has been extended and revised considerably. Chapter 3.2 has been newly written.
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