"Air for Band" by Frank Erickson

• Introduction
• Task
• Process
• Evaluation
• Conclusion
• Credits


• Teacher Page

by Reagan Engleman, Kansas State University

Using poetry as a method to depict the form of a musical work.

Introduction

Form and Structure are an important part of all musical works. They help organize the piece so that is makes sense to the performers and listeners. The concepts of form and structure are not limited just to music. In fact, they are important parts of many things such as poems, stories, sculptures, paintings, buildings, molecules, equations and the list goes on!

Form and Structure may be as simple as a reoccurring theme in a piece of music or a rhyming scheme in a poem or as complex as the framework for a skyscraper. Air for Band by Frank Erickson was designed to have a poem-like melody and is also made up of sections that create the following formula: a, a, b, a1, b1, a. For this assignment you will be taking the formula of the piece Air for Band and turning it into a poem.