nikolaus d asked 8 years ago
Hey Jon,
I started to write my Main Theme of the Sonata Form and got a few questions arising:
- I got the first two measures of my sentence: the first measure in Tonic and the second measure in Dominant.Now i want to make a statement resonse repitition. In the examples of the course there is only one harmony in the first two measures, that makes it easy to just go to the dominant for repetition. How can i solve the problem of having the first two measures: I-V, ? It sound a liitle bit weird if i go V- V/V for the second two measures. The whole presentation would then look like: I-V-V-V/V.? Hope u can help me there.
- Secondly i just wanted to make sure that there is no special length or form required in the Main Theme of Sonata Form.For example the Main Theme can be etiher Sentence, Period, or a hybrid form, right? And i can use any cadence at the end of my Main Theme? thx a lot, best regards, Nik
Jon Brantingham Staff answered 8 years ago
1. There are a lot of options that you can do harmonically. One I’ve seen is I-V | V-I. The goal is to make it feel like you are opening up a musical question in the statement, and then answering it in the response. Remember that your initial harmony doesn’t have to be very complex to be effective. Often limiting the harmonic choices at the beginning leads to more interesting melodic choices, and new ideas harmonically later on in the piece.
2. You can do anything you want length wise. Stating your theme in a tight-knit way will force you to focus on clarity and compactness. But this, once again, will make later loosening of the thematic ideas more interesting. Sentence, period, hybrids all work. And any cadence works as well, unless it’s a period, which then it matters that the final cadence in the main theme is stronger than the cadence at the end of the antecedent.