Song structure is a strange music theory topic, because there is not much “theory” beyond just describing it. Why are some patterns of song sections so broadly appealing? The answer has something to do with the balancing of surprise and familiarity, of predictability and unpredictability, but if someone has a systematic theory of why some structures work so much better than others, I am not aware of it. The best approach I can recommend is to examine the most widely used structures across styles and eras and try to internalize them. Transcribing songs at the structural level is a great way to do that. Staff notation is not the right tool for the job, because you can’t easily zoom out and see the big picture. I like to use Ableton Live to annotate and color-code audio and MIDI. Here’s “Burning Down The House” by Talking Heads.
I also like the bubble diagrams you can make with Audio Timeliner, because it lets you group sections together at multiple levels. The downside is that you can’t easily zoom into the bars and beats level, or show meter and hypermeter.
In this post, I’ll talk through examples of three common structures: strophic form, AABA form, and verse-chorus form (the one that “Burning Down The House” uses). Then I’ll get into the difficult question of form in groove-based music.
Strophic form
The simplest song form is a single section repeated over and over. Each of these repeated sections is called a strophe, a term that originally referred to a stanza in poetry. You hear strophic form in a lot of American folk and traditional songs. For example, here’s Tim Eriksen singing “A Thousand Times Adieu” – each verse is a strophe.
Strophic songs don’t have to be simply repeated AAA… to infinity. Elizabeth Cotten’s “Freight Train” is strophic, but some of the instrumentals are only the second half of the form.
Strophic tunes can also include intros, outros and other auxiliary sections, as in Patsy Cline’s recording of “Faded Love”.
It’s common for strophes to end in a refrain. The word comes from the Latin refringere, “to repeat”. A refrain is like a miniature chorus, but rather than standing on its own as a distinct section, the refrain is part of the strophe itself. Refrains also usually include the title of the song, as in “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” by Bob Dylan.
The refrain can come at the beginning of each strophe too, as in “Somewhere Over The Rainbow”.
But wait, “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” isn’t just a string of strophes, it has a bridge too. This tune is really an example of…
AABA form
You could think of typical pre-rock popular songs as being strophic, but the unit that’s being repeated is longer and divided into subsections. There are various forms that these subsections could take: simple AB, twelve bar blues (AAB), ABCD, and so on. The most common one is AABA form, also known as the 32-bar song form because it’s (usually) 32 bars long. The form consists of two strophes (AA), a contrasting bridge (B), and a final reiteration of the main strophe (A). The three A sections don’t have to be completely identical; they might all end a little differently depending on what they are leading into. Here’s a standard tune with a classic AABA form, “The Way You Look Tonight” as sung by Fred Astaire.
And here’s the same tune played way more energetically by Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins.
The Beatles learned and performed lots of standards early in their lives, and their songwriting is full of AABA form. “I Want To Hold Your Hand” is a good example; notice how similar it is to “The Way You Look Tonight” structurally, including the refrain on the end of each A section.
The Beatles kept using AABA in their later, weirder, druggier songs too, like “She Said She Said”. After the first AABA cycle, the song repeats B and A again, as is common for AABA songs.
Verse-chorus form
If you listen to the radio in the United States, 98% of the songs you hear will use some version of verse-chorus form. “Penny Lane” is a simple and straightforward example, literally just verses alternating with choruses. (The second half of the second verse is a trumpet solo, but the basic form holds.)
“Strawberry Fields Forever” is a much weirder song than “Penny Lane”, but it has the same basic verse-chorus structure.
Most verse-chorus songs have other sections too. “Strawberry Fields Forever” includes an intro and a long psychedelic outtro. Verse-chorus songs can have bridges, prechoruses, postchoruses, instrumental breaks, rap verses, codas, and all kinds of other material. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell what to call a given section. Consider “Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It) by Beyoncé. What is the chorus? Is it “All the single ladies” or “If you like it then you should’ve put a ring on it” or “Woah-oh-oh” or all of the above?
These kinds of ambiguities are more common than you might think in the pop mainstream.
What about grooves?
How should we describe the structure of a James Brown song like “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine”? They famously take it to the bridge, so I guess there’s a bridge, but what is the rest of the song? A strophe? A long verse? An endless chorus?
“Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone” by the Temptations poses similar problems. It has verses and a chorus, but what about the rest of it? I guess you could say that it starts with an “intro”, but that is an inadequate word for a four minute groove. Calling the other instrumental parts “interludes” or whatever seems equally inappropriate.
I said at the top of the post that there is not much theorizing of song form. There are theories of form in “art” music, though. Daniel Grimley‘s chapter on form in The Oxford Handbook of Critical Concepts in Music Theory is mostly about classical compositions, but he also talks about form in Miles Davis’ ambient groove masterpiece In A Silent Way. Grimley points out that the concept of form is related to conforming, to submission and obedience. Formlessness, by contrast, is scary and chaotic. If form is “an instrument of discipline, regulation, and containment” (p. 349), as Grimley puts it, then form is political as much as it aesthetic. In A Silent Way’s second side is built from “entirely independent temporal planes that coexist without ever entirely coinciding. Each plane suggests a different rate of motion as well as a different mood or affect, but it is their simultaneity, the productive friction between their individual rhythmic layers, which creates a new sense of formal logic or cohesiveness, and which lends the track its feeling of openness” (p. 364).
Grimley compares “In A Silent Way/It’s About That Time” to Machaut’s Rondeau 14, a crab canon over a palindrome. Both Miles and Machaut test the limits and boundaries of form, question the idea of beginnings and endings, and destabilize the listener’s orientation in musical time. Finally, Grimley points out that the title “It’s About That Time” can be taken as a play on the track’s own unusual sense of time structure. This is far beyond the scope of a pop aural skills class, but it’s intriguing to consider.