Cyclic form.

Music in which a later movement reintroduces thematic material of an earlier movement is said to be in ‘cyclic form’. In its strict meaning such music returns at its end to the point whence it set out at the beginning, in the manner of the song There’s a hole in my bucket, to produce an endlessly rotating cycle; but in practice the simplest examples have been works like Haydn’s Symphony no.31 in D (Hornsignal), Beethoven’s Serenade op.8, Brahms’s Third Symphony and Elgar’s Second Symphony, whose finales all close with the material of the beginning of the work. More generally the term ‘cyclic’ describes those works where thematic links bind more than one movement; it is not properly applied to mere thematic resemblances. Examples may be found in many instrumental sonatas, suites and canzonas of the early 17th century (see Variations) and can be cited in a large number of sacred works, like Bach’s B minor Mass and Mozart’s Mass in C k317. But they are rare (except in Boccherini’s music) in the 18th century. Beethoven (An die ferne Geliebte, Piano Sonata in A op.101), Schubert (Piano Trio in E; Fantasie in C for violin and piano) and Berlioz (Symphonie fantastique) laid the foundations on which Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt and Franck elevated cyclic principles to great importance, associated with the widespread application of Thematic transformation and the desire for greater continuity between separate movements, all methods of establishing a tighter cohesion in multi-movement forms. Since the 19th century cyclic form has been adopted as a regular stock-in-trade of musical structure.

HUGH MACDONALD