Compose in Binary or Ternary Form

Project 3 gave you a complete little piece — a melody with an accompaniment. But a single tune, however finished, is not yet a piece in the fullest sense; it is one section. This project builds the next level up: a complete short piece with a real form — a beginning, a contrasting middle, and a return — using the shapes of Part 4. It is the first time you will compose across a span longer than a single melody, and it turns your tune from a fragment into a whole, with the satisfying architecture of departure and homecoming that gives real music its shape.

P4.1Choose your form

The two smallest complete forms are your options (Chapter 23), and for a first piece ternary form (A B A) is the easier and more satisfying door, because you already have most of it: your Project 3 piece is a ready-made A, complete and closed in the tonic, and you need only compose a contrasting B and bring A back. (Binary form is also available and equally valid — its two interdependent halves, moving to the dominant and back, make a slightly subtler shape; try it once you have done a ternary.) Here is the plan for a ternary piece, built on the book’s running tune:

The shape in Figure P4.1 is your target. You have A already; the work of this project is the middle and the return.

P4.2Your A section

Take your Project 3 piece and treat it as the A section. For a ternary form it should be closed — beginning and ending in the tonic, able to stand on its own (Chapter 23) — which a complete little melody-with-accompaniment already is. If yours ends on a half cadence or trails off, tidy it into a firm authentic cadence in the tonic, so that it is a whole, self-contained statement. This is the “home” your piece will depart from and return to.

P4.3Compose the contrasting middle

Now the new material: a B section that contrasts with A, so that A’s return feels like a genuine homecoming. Contrast it in two ways (Chapter 23). Change the key — the relative minor is an excellent choice for a major-key A, giving an immediate darkening; the dominant or subdominant also work (use the modulation of Chapter 22 to get there). And change the character — a different melodic shape, rhythm, register, or texture, so the ear registers B as a real departure. Here is a contrasting middle written for the running tune:

Notice the end of Figure P4.2: it does not simply stop in A minor but turns, in its last bar, onto the dominant of C — the G7 that pulls back home. This little retransition is what makes the return of A land so well; a B section that prepares its own dissolution into the returning A is the mark of a well-joined ternary form.

P4.4Bring back the A

The return is the easiest and most rewarding part: bring the A section back, in the tonic, to close the piece. In its simplest form the return is literal — A again, exactly — and you need not even write it out twice (Chapter 23’s box): end B with a D.C. al Fine, sending the player back to the start and through A a second time to a Fine marked at A’s end. If you want more polish, vary the returning A slightly (a richer accompaniment, an added ornament, per Chapter 24), so the homecoming is familiar but not merely repetitive. Either way, the whole arc — statement, contrast, return — is now complete.

P4.5Connect, refine, and finish

A piece is more than its sections stacked; it is the joins between them that make it flow. Make sure B grows out of A and leads back to it — the retransition of §P4.3 does the second half of that job. Check the whole thing for pacing: play it start to finish and listen for anything that drags or lurches. Then finish it properly (Chapter 10): confirm the tempo and dynamics across all three sections, and consider a small coda — a few bars after the final A to round the piece off — or a ritardando at the very end. Save it under a clear name; it is a real, complete composition, and the longest you have written.

P4.6Going further

Compose a piece in binary form as well, to feel the difference — its two halves, moving out to the dominant and working back, make a subtler arc than ternary’s clear return. And hold onto this piece: in Part 5 you will take music like this and arrange it for an ensemble, and the fuller sense of form you have built here will carry all the way to the Capstone.