The 32-bar AABA song form

Understanding a building block of the Great American Songbook

I am approaching my New School songwriting class differently this semester: rather than having students write songs in particular styles, I am having them write using particular forms and structures. For example, for the blues unit, they don't have to write in a blues style, but they do have to use the twelve-bar blues form. When we cover the Great American Songbook, the students will write 32-bar AABA tunes. But what does that mean?

The first thing to understand about the Great American Songbook is that it's not a literal book (though there are many books collecting these kinds of songs.) It's more of a loose canon of early-to-mid-20th-century standard tunes by composers like the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, Dorothy Fields, and Duke Ellington. Before I got deep into popular musicology, I tended to think of these standards as "jazz", but that is not accurate. The songs do sometimes draw on jazz vocabulary, but really, they are pop songs that jazz musicians like to use as launchpads for improvisation.

There are a lot of differences between the Songbook standards and the present-day Anglo-American mainstream: melody and harmony, lyrical content, vocal styles, instrumental timbres. For the purposes of my class, the most important difference is below the surface, at the level of song form. When you listen to standards, the familiar signposts of verses and choruses are absent. (When jazz musicians talk about "choruses", they mean something different from the chorus of a current rock or pop song.) The most common structure in Songbook standards is the AABA form, also known as the 32-bar song form because it’s (you guessed it) 32 bars long.