Form in Music

Form is unconsciously rooted, we don't need to be taught what it is, yet it has culture and tradition. When we wish to make conscious how form is used or to understand a tradition of its use we can bring it to analysis, We do this when we ask about how composers and performers, and often listeners, draw upon the tradition, but we all have innate abilities to understand all forms at a feeling level.

There is considerable evidence that Joseph Haydn, in England at the beginning of the modern era of music in which the composer get more of his income from concert ticket sales than just noble patronage, had an audience that was literally in on the joke every time he does something against the formula. One can, and we will, define the major forms of the Classical era, but only because the exceptions were obvious and entertaining and rather than existing to vex pedantic teachers and students with how they don't adhere, they reveal an amusement that often contains considerable wonderment in the master's hands. More on that.