ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the survival of the post-tonal music and other forms from earlier periods, as well as the appearance of forms unique to post-tonal music. All of the formal structures and procedures found in the tonal era survived in post-tonal music. Tonality is less of an issue in the traditional contrapuntal forms—canon and fugue, especially—which may explain in part their healthy survival in post-tonal music. One of the most obvious examples of ternary form in tonal music is the minuet or scherzo with trio, followed by a da capo, in multimovement sonatas. The interest that some post-tonal composers have in various kinds of symmetry is reflected in their use of arch form, a term for any formal structure that reads the same forwards and backwards. Even more radical is the nonorganic approach to musical form seen in the "moment form" works of Stockhausen and others and in some works composed using chance procedures.
