Bar form

Bar form, in music, the structural pattern aab as used by the medieval German minnesingers and meistersingers, who were poet-composers of secular monophonic songs (i.e., those having a single line of melody). The modern term Bar form derives from a medieval verse form, the Bar, consisting of three stanzas, each having the form aab. The musical term thus refers to the melody of a single stanza, the a sections (called Stollen) having the same melody, and the b section (Abgesang) having a different melody.

The Bar form had important precedents in some Gregorian chants, in the canso of the Provençal-speaking troubadours, and in the ballade of the trouvères (their French-speaking counterparts). It was eagerly embraced by the meistersingers, bourgeois successors to the courtly minnesingers, and even exerted an influence on the structure of 15th- and early 16th-century German part-songs. In the 19th century Richard Wagner revived the Bar form in his neo-medieval music dramas (e.g., Tannhäuser and Die Meistersinger), causing Alfred Lorentz in the early part of the 20th century to speculate that it concealed the “secret” of Wagner’s monumental structures at virtually every level.