Conclusion

You now have a sense of how music is organised formally – by means of repetition, variation, and contrast – as well as a number of ways this can be communicated, including through specialist terminology, alphabetic symbols and visual representations. You have also studied the form of several pieces of music in different styles, including ‘Be My Baby’, ‘Midnight Special’, ‘Suspicious Minds’, ‘It’s Only a Paper Moon’ and ‘The Teetotaller’.

This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course A234 Understanding music.