With the increasing institutionalization of British musicology in the early twentieth century, a common narrative concretized by which musical fantasy was historicized as a distinctly English practice (Grove, ed.1878; Pulver 1922). Demonstratively, the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910) by Ralph Vaughan Williams, a major proponent of national music (Bohlman 2010), was received by critic Alexander Fuller Maitland (1910) as a fantasy of a timeless Englishness and more recently by Anthony Pople (1996) as an evolutionary history of English musical pasts. Yet as Pople beckons, the piece betrays an “aporia” between fantasy as based on a developmental principle (Macpherson 1915; Prout 1895) and a single-movement work without a development section (Fuller Maitland 1904; Stanford 1911). The former line of thinking deployed Germanic repertoire to theorize the fantasy form while the latter claimed a simple formal order without providing musical examples. While music historians traced fantasy’s English roots to Tudor polyphony, analysts lacked demonstrative repertoire to describe the compositional form as English in present practice. In other words, music theory divulged divergent notions of fantasy, troubling the sweeping historical claims over fantasy’s longstanding Englishness.

In my paper, I examine philanthropist Walter Willson Cobbett’s interventions on this issue. By instituting composition competitions and scholarly volumes that asserted nationalist narratives, Cobbett arguably helped to materialize a substantial corpus of fantasies by British composers that fulfilled British mandates of fantasy. To demonstrate, I analyze Benjamin Britten’s Phantasy in F minor (1932) and Phantasy Quartet (1932)—products of Cobbett’s investments—to show how the compositional parameters forwarded by Cobbett, and realized by Britten, rectified the aforementioned problem of the development. As Cobbett defined, “[S]hort ‘Phantas[ies]’…[by] British subjects…consist of different sections varying in tempi and rhythms” (1905) and emphasize “continuity of flow throughout the varying moods” (1929)—aspects neatly pursued by Britten but not Vaughan Williams, who worked outside of Cobbett’s purview. A developmental momentum organized Britten’s fantasy forms without formalizing a development section per se. Ultimately, I conclude that Britten's compositional successes helped to legitimate a lasting Englishness about musical fantasies which reinforced Cobbett’s personal interests as well as the broader nationalist imperative.

What does it mean for music built on repetition to have form? In much of Western music, form is understood as contrast and motion between distinct sections; yet, many musical traditions around the world generate coherence and development without sectional contrast. This presentation explores how large-scale form can arise from repetition itself, showing how cyclical patterns create a sense of forward momentum. Using examples from the music of the Aka people of Central Africa, I propose a new model, the layered single-block form, to describe how Aka musicians shape form through repetition, layering, and variation.

The layered single-block form consists of one recurring musical block that serves as the foundation for a performance. This block is defined by a central melody functioning as a cantus firmus (Arom), to which additional voices are gradually added. Each singer contributes independently while the shared pentatonic scale maintains harmonic consonance.

My first case study, “Anduwa,” a return-from-hunting celebration song, illustrates how the layered single-block form operates within a single performance. Beginning with one melodic line, the music gradually attracts new layers of interlocking voices. Each layer follows a limited set of repeating formulas that complement the core melody while continuously reshaping rhythmic and harmonic perception. The resulting effect resembles a slot machine: each repetition produces a new combination of familiar elements.

My second case study examines two recordings of “Nzombi,” both made by Simha Arom in the 1970s. One recording presents a duet in which two musicians alternate between singing and whistling, exemplifying what I term a single-block form: a piece built entirely from repetitions of one musical cycle. In the other recording, the same song expands into a larger group performance, with countermelodies layered onto the original cycle, producing a layered single-block form. This transformation reveals how one becomes many: how a single block can generate large-scale form through accumulation.

Form in popular vocal music is a rich subfield of scholarship, with researchers exploring influences of factors such as teleology (Nobile 2022), expectation (Osborn 2013), production team (Lavengood 2021), and other popular genres (e.g., EDM) (Adams 2019, Barna 2020, Osborn 2023). Michael Buchler’s (2023) classifications of “argumentative” and “consecutive” duet structures suggest that the number of vocalists featured individually—in this case, two—can likewise shape vocal forms. Following Buchler, I argue that three soloists hold weight over form in musical theater and popular music and that these unique forms deserve dedicated investigation.

I advance a formal structure that I call “Three-Singer Feature and Finale Form” (3SFF form) in which 1) three singers are featured individually in consecutive verse-chorus units (VCUs) (Temperley 2011), 2) each singer’s featured section is of the same formal type and similar length (i.e., every singer gets a verse or VCU), and 3) the songs conclude with a “finale” section featuring all three singers and/or new material. Three variants of 3SFF form are possible: Dissolving, Trifold, and Condensed. In Dissolving 3SFF form (after Matthew BaileyShea’s (2004) “Sentence with a Dissolving Third Statement,” which it resembles), the third VCU is noticeably different from the first two. In Trifold 3SFF form (after Mark Richards’s (2011) “Trifold Sentence”), the third VCU is basically equivalent to the preceding VCUs. In Condensed 3SFF form, the third VCU’s chorus functions as the song’s finale. Unlike standard verse-chorus form, 3SFF form lacks the bridge or instrumental that typically follows the second VCU (Covach 2005, Temperley 2018). This contrast is instead provided by the changing soloists and the finale section. Consequently, 3SFF form distributes the spotlight, allows singers (or characters) to express their individual perspectives, balances repetition and variety, and builds energy toward the end (the finale).

This paper contributes to conversations not only about form in musical theater and popular music but also about sentential expectations. The similarity of Dissolving and Trifold 3SFF forms to sentence forms suggests that if the sentence-defining “single operative cadence” (Schmalfeldt 1991, 24) is substituted with the broader term “closure,” large-scale formal structures may evoke sentence-like expectations.