Tutorial No 6        Create a piece in rondo form,  from 3 multi-track theme fragments

Music written in  rondo form involves a main theme (called theme A) which comes round and round again. There are 3 sections, usually labeled A, B and C , arranged in various patterns, of which a typical one is A B A C A B A. 

This tutorial shows how assemble a rondo from  3 constituent themes, each of which is stored as a two-part fragment of 8 bars, written for oboe and  bassoon, in a baroque style.

  1. Open the Musical Discovery Composing Board from the main MENU :-
    Create ->  Compositions -> Composing Board.
  2. Click the drop-down box labeled Fragment Lists at the top of the screen, and select Tutorial 6 - Rondo.
  3. A total of 3 fragment icons should appear at the foot of the screen, labeled Theme A, Theme B and Theme C.. Right-click on each in turn, and click the green Play Fragment button to listen to them.
  4. Click the option button at top right of the screen, labeled Multiple tracks per fragment, one row only on composing board for assembly.  This is required because each fragment already contains two tracks, the vertical layer.  All rows after the first will disappear from the grid.
  5. Drag the fragment icons up to the top row in the order A  B  A  C  A  B  A
  6. Click the orange button Assemble fragments.  Notice on the play-bar at the foot of the screen that it shows there are now 56 bars, because we have assembled 7 icons, each of which is 8 bars long.
  7. Listen to the piece by clicking the Play button on the play-bar.  Did you feel there is insufficient contrast between the sections?  We need to add some expression by varying the tempo, because at present, every theme is played at the same steady tempo of 150 crotchets per minute. We need to slow down the tempo of the B sections a little, and slow down the melancholic G minor C section quite considerably.
  8. From the main MENU select  Edit -> Expression (Tempo and dynamics) to bring up the expression screen. Click the Forward button repeatedly till you reach bar 9, the beginning of the first appearance of theme B. There should be a thick vertical  red line at the bar line beginning bar 9, which represents a tempo change to 150 (the same as before). Right click on this to delete it, then left click a bit lower down, but at the same horizontal position. This will draw a new red line with a lower tempo, around 100 crotchets per minute.. 
  9. At bar 17, reset the tempo to about 150 for  the 2nd appearance of theme A, then at at bar 25 set a much slower tempo, say about 85, for theme C.  Then adjust the tempo respectively for each subsequent reappearance of themes A and B.
  10. If you wish, you may save the resulting finished piece onto the database. Firstly, set up the cataloguing information by MENU Edit -> Melody Data,  and filling in the title, filename, and other data. Then click the green button Save to Disk (database).

.