Kara-Moon Forum

It's a form of composition where one verse can be performed repeatedly, each instance starting at the beginning of the second line of the previous...with harmonius results. A classic example is the song "Row, Row, Row Your Boat".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round_(music)


Thanks Oren for giving the definition. Here is another explanation which talks of
counterpoint. I am not mentioning this in defense of my work. Nor can I claim to know
exactly what this means.  ??? Just another detail of academic interest.
I have taken it from here.:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpoint

Given the way terminology in music history has evolved, such music created
from the Baroque period on is described as contrapuntal, while music from before
Baroque times is called polyphonic. Hence, the earlier composer Josquin des Prez
is said to have written polyphonic music.

Homophony, by contrast with polyphony, features music in which chords or vertical
intervals work with a single melody without much consideration of the melodic
character of the added accompanying elements, or of their melodic interactions
with the melody they accompany. As suggested above, most popular music written
today is predominantly homophonic, its composition governed mainly by considerations
of chord and harmony; but, while general tendencies can often be fairly strong one
way or another, rather than describing a musical work in absolute terms as either
polyphonic or homophonic, it is a question of degree.

The form or compositional genre known as fugue is perhaps the most complex contrapuntal
convention. Other examples include the round (familiar in folk traditions) and the canon.

In musical composition, contrapuntal techniques are important for enabling composers
to generate musical ironies that serve not only to intrigue listeners into listening more
intently to the spinning out of complexities found within the texture of a polyphonic
composition, but also to draw them all the more into hearing the working out of these
figures and interactions of musical dialogue. A melodic fragment, heard alone, makes
a particular impression; but when the fragment is heard simultaneously with other
melodic ideas, or combined in unexpected ways with itself (as in a canon or fugue),
greater depths of affective meaning are revealed. Through development of a musical idea,
the fragments undergo a working out into something musically greater than the sum of the
parts, something conceptually more profound than a single pleasing melody.