Period (music)

In music theory, the term period refers to forms of repetition and contrast between adjacent small-scale formal structures such as phrases. In twentieth-century music scholarship, the term is usually used similarly to the definition in 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 and later usages vary somewhat, but usually refer to notions of symmetry, difference, and an open section followed by a closure. The concept of a musical period originates in comparisons between music structure and rhetoric at least as early as the 16th century.^[4]