Mondo Knows Facts
The blues runs on twelve bars
Three chords, one per four bar phrase, with the fifth bar turning the corner The form repeats a lyric line twice and answers it the third time, which gave singers room to improvise. Countless rock and jazz tunes borrow the shape. Its harmony is simple enough to hear after one listen. It sits in Mondo's music collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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More facts like this
Sonata form sets two ideas against each otherExposition, development and recapitulation is the usual patternA string quartet is two violins, a viola and a celloFour lines let the parts be heard separately without a conductorThe classical symphony settled on four movementsFast, slow, dance, then a lively finale became the templateThe circle of fifths orders every keyMoving one step adds a sharp or removes a flatSome instruments sound at a different pitch from the notes writtenA written C on a B flat clarinet comes out as B flatA single note already contains a whole chordThe harmonic series stacks octave, fifth, fourth and third above the fundamental
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Tags: blues, forms, theory
The blues runs on twelve bars: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- Three chords, one per four bar phrase, with the fifth bar turning the corner. The figure is taken from Britannica, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a music fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Music shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.