Period (music)
Musical unit of two interdependent phrases / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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For eras in classical music, see Dates of classical music eras. For the inverse of frequency, see Period (physics).
In music, the term period refers to certain types of recurrence in small-scale formal structure. In twentieth-century music scholarship, the term is usually used as defined by the Oxford Companion to Music: "a period consists of two phrases, antecedent and consequent, each of which begins with the same basic motif."[3] Earlier usage varied somewhat, but usually referred to similar notions of symmetry, recurrence, and closure. The concept of a musical period originates in comparisons between music structure and rhetoric at least as early as the 16th century.[4]