mr dave

This brings up a situation I've pondered on quite a bit over the years in regards to Verse / Chorus / Verse songs.

If ABABA is Ternary
and ABABAC is a Rondo

How many other 'standard' variations are there? What would something like ABABCBAB become?

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KJones

Always a pattern in musical form will start with A.
Then there's a B.
Followed by an A.
Followed by a B or a C.
Followed by an A.

It's a pattern, so there will always be an A after the next sequence.

So usually Rondo examples will look like this:
ABACABAD or
ABABABAC or
ABABACADAE or anything else.

There are musical forms called Compound Ternaries, which are composed of A's and B's but with bits of the others in between. For example:

ABABA can be AbBAbBaA
*so, we can say that the first A is divided into two parts: The A and the b.

The form you have given me is ABABCBAB.

Now, this is definitely a Rondo, but in a different taste. Usually, a rondo will follow a pattern of A's, but as you can see, the BCB is very much together. You have seen me talk about compound ternaries, but I am not very sure if there is a such thing as a "compound rondo". But I'm sure you can write it as ABABcbAB (the only reason I lowercased the cb is for understanding that there is a pattern of A's) . There really is no limit to what you can create with musical forms, you can make one and name one.

Other standard music forms:

Progressive/Alternative:
ABCDEFGH
ABACADAEAF
ABACADEFG
ABCBCDCECFC
(listen to Coheed and Cambria, Mastodon, Periphery, Tesseract, or any other form of Prog for info.)

Rock:
ABABAC
ABABA
ABABc

*it doesn't really matter what the letters represent, but usually A will represent verse and B will represent Chorus. But in some songs like in Progressive and Alternative, the A's can represent choruses and B's verses. Or ABCDEFG = verse and H = chorus, this is especially true in MAAAANNNY of Coheed and Cambria's songs.

NOTE: This is not the only way you can write musical forms, this is MY way and there really is no RIGHT WAY to do it. (Just as you can write Major chords with a triangle hmmm?)