Tutorial No 6
Create a piece in rondo form, from 3 multi-track theme
fragments
Music written in rondo
form involves a main theme (called theme A) which comes round and round again.
There are 3 sections, usually labeled A, B and C , arranged in
various patterns, of which a typical one is A B A C A B A.
This tutorial shows how assemble a rondo from 3 constituent themes,
each of which is stored as a two-part fragment of 8 bars, written for oboe
and bassoon, in a baroque
style.
- Open the Musical Discovery Composing Board from the main MENU :-
Create -> Compositions -> Composing Board.
- Click the drop-down box labeled Fragment Lists at the top of the
screen, and select Tutorial 6 - Rondo.
- A total of 3 fragment icons should appear at the foot of the screen,
labeled Theme A, Theme B and Theme C..
Right-click on each in turn, and click the green
Play Fragment button to listen to them.
- Click the option button at top right of the screen, labeled Multiple
tracks per fragment, one row only on composing board for assembly.
This is required because each fragment already contains two tracks, the vertical
layer. All rows after the first will disappear from the grid.
- Drag the fragment icons up to the top row in the order A B
A C A B A
- Click the orange button Assemble
fragments. Notice on the play-bar at the foot of the screen
that it shows there are now 56 bars, because we have assembled 7 icons, each
of which is 8 bars long.
- Listen to the piece by clicking the Play button on the
play-bar. Did you feel there is insufficient contrast between the
sections? We need to add some expression by varying the tempo, because
at present, every theme is played at the same steady tempo of 150 crotchets
per minute. We need to slow down the tempo of the B sections a
little, and slow down the melancholic G minor C section quite
considerably.
- From the main MENU select Edit -> Expression (Tempo and
dynamics) to bring up the expression screen. Click the Forward
button repeatedly till you reach bar 9, the beginning of the first appearance
of theme B. There should be a thick vertical red line at the bar line beginning
bar 9, which represents a tempo change to 150 (the same as before). Right
click on this to delete it, then left click a bit lower down, but at the
same horizontal position. This will draw a new red line with a lower tempo, around
100 crotchets per minute..
- At bar 17, reset the tempo to about 150 for the 2nd appearance of
theme A, then at at bar 25 set a much slower tempo, say about 85, for theme
C. Then adjust the tempo respectively for each subsequent
reappearance of themes A and B.
- If you wish, you may save the resulting finished piece onto the database.
Firstly, set up the cataloguing information by MENU Edit -> Melody
Data, and filling in the title, filename, and other
data. Then click the green
button Save to Disk (database).
.