FORM IN MUSIC

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 431, 26 September 1947, Page 19

FORM IN MUSIC

| THE fifth of a series of briet articles by

BESSIE

POLLARD

Mus. Bac ,

on "Form in Music." These articles are closely related to a series of programmes on the same topic now being heard from 2YC on Friday evenings. Each ef our articles is illustrated by a few bars of the music under discussion,

5. The Scherzo CHERZO is derived from the S Italian for "joke" or "jest." The 17th Century Italian composer Monteverdi. gave the title "Scherzi Musicali" to two embryo cycles of light fanciful songs for two and three voices. In the 18th Century, composers tagged certain

movements "scherzando" to specify a sportive vivacious style. The form evolved from, and eventually superseded, the courtly old Minuet. Although Bach named one of the movements of his No. 3 Partita, a Scherzo, Haydn was the first of the classical composers to employ the deé signation for an actual Sonata movement. Later, Beethoven made this type

-- 4 sl | of movement ‘one of the most distinctive facets of his skill. In nearly all his large-scale works-symphonic creations, piano sonatas, chamber works — Beethoven inserted Scherzos that appear to be the ingenuous declaration of his seemingly inexhaustible fund of droll humour. But his mirth is not always that of mere man, for one has only to think of the Gargantuan laughter in the immense. Scherzo of his ninth Symphony. From its immediate ancestor, the Minuet, the Scherzo took over the balancing middlé section called the "trio," the standard progression being: Scherzo-trio-then Scherzo repeated. Sometimes composers extended this basic formula \by introducing a second trio: Scherzotrio (1)-Scherzo again-trio (2)Scherzo again repeated. Mendelssohn’s were truly ligh: and airy, often omitting the trio altogether, but by comparison his seem to miss out somewhere on that genuine ingredient of fun that we find, for instance, in those of Schubert. Chopin’s first three Scherzos are imposing and funereal, sad and tumultuous by turn, yet tinged with romantic fireonly the fourth has that dash of volatile gaiety which we always associate with the form. Brahms, too, thought of the Scherzo as a heavier medium, but he revealed considerably larger scope in content and formal design. Two outstanding examples of his spring readily to mind-the suggestion’ of combined Minuet and Scherzo in his 2nd Symphony; and from the 4th Symphony the "Allegro giocoso" which suggests Scherzo combined with "first-movement" form. Dukas’s The Sorcerer's Apprentice is an interesting quasi-modern work in Scherzo form, showing the application of its great capabilities and adaptability. THE SCHERZO -the fitth of the series, FORM IN MUSIC---will be heard from Station 2YC at 9.30 p.m, on Friday, October 3,