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The term musical form is often loosely used to refer to particular musical genres or styles (Scholes 1977), which may be determined by factors such as harmonic language, typical rhythms, types of musical instrument used as well as historical and geographical origins. In the vocabulary of art-music, however, it has a more extended meaning, referring to the type of "architectural" structure on which the music is built. Scholes (1977) explained musical form as a series of strategies designed to find a successful mean between the opposite extremes of unrelieved repetition and unrelieved alteration. Middleton (p.&_160;145) also describes form, presumably after Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968, translated 1994), through repetition and difference. Difference is the distance moved from a repeat, a repeat being the smallest difference. Difference is quantitative and qualitative — how far different and what type of difference. The most basic levels of musical form concern (a) the arrangement of the [pulse] into accented and unaccented beats, the cells of a measure that, when harmonised, may give rise to the "briefest intelligible and self-existent musical unit" (Scholes 1977), called a motif or figure, and (b) the further organisation of such a measure, by repetition and variation, into a true musical phrase having a definite rhythm and duration that may be implied in melody and harmony, defined, for example, by a long final note and a breathing space. This "phrase" may be regarded as the fundamental formal unit of music it may be broken down into measures of two or three beats but its distinctive nature will then be lost. Even at this level we can see the importance of the principles of repetition and contrast, weak and strong, climax and repose. (Macpherson 1930). (See also Metre (music)) Given all this, we may understand the term "form" on three further main levels of organisation that we can roughly designate "passage", "piece", and "cycle" for purposes of exposition The smallest level of construction concerns the way musical phrases are organised into musical "sentences" and "paragraphs" such as the verse of a song. This may be compared to, and is often decided by, the verse-form or metre of the words or the steps of a dance.
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