A. Kori Hill
When you take a music theory class, you’ll hear about sonata form, rondo form, ABA or ternary form, AABA form, 12-bar blues, and verse-chorus form. But one you may not hear about but is just as common is the call-and-response form.
Call-and-response is a dynamic form that’s foundational to many traditions, including African, Afro-Latinx, and African American music. It is also present in a lot of religious practices, used by cantors, rabbis, Islamic teachers, and preachers. Call-and-response exists in two popular manifestations: 1) restatement of a motive and 2) completion of an unfinished motivic idea.
If you’ve sung Naughty by Nature’s “Hip Hop Hooray,” you’ve done call-and-response. If you’ve listened to Stevie Wonder’s life performance of “Ribbon in the Sky” from the 1990s, you’ve heard an ad-libbed section built on call-and-response.
But does call-and-response appear in classical music? Yes! One example is Florence Price’s Concerto in One Movement (1934). On the surface, this concerto is a shortened version of the three-movement form we’ve talked about in the past: fast-slow-fast. But when you look deeper, you start to see and hear how Price uses call-and-response.
Call-and-response appears in two distinct contexts: between orchestral sections and between soloist and orchestra. We hear the first example at the very start of the Moderato section: the trumpet states the first half of the main motive (the call); next, we hear a group of woodwinds state a similar motive (the response). This continues for several more measures, where each group’s call and response changes slightly by the time we get to the trombone, which gives us a half cadence––sort of like a musical semicolon instead of a period.
After the trombone gives us the half cadence, flutes and clarinets keep the phrase going, but the rhythm is a little different: it’s not the dotted eighth-sixteenth of before, but quarter notes and eighth notes. This takes us to the entrance of the solo piano, which is rhapsodic and improvisatory, even though every note was written down by Price. Then, we arrive at the first full statement of the movement’s melody in the orchestra––in measure 93! After the orchestra makes its call, the soloist continues the melody’s journey, providing the response as well as the conclusion of the phrase.
Call-and-response has a lot in common with antiphony: this is the term we come across in a lot of scholarship on medieval sacred music, where choirs would be positioned on either side of the sanctuary dais, and sing in response to each other. Naturally, this also became present in secular classical works.
But what’s the difference between antiphony and call-and-response? Antiphony is often considered a texture, whereas call-and-response doesn’t sit on top of the form; it is the form.
Take a listen to more of Price’s music, and some of her contemporaries like William Grant Still, George Gershwin, and William Levi Dawson. Do they use call-and-response too? How do they use it?
