Bridge (music)

Bridge (music)

In music, especially western popular music, a bridge is a contrasting section which also prepares for the return of the original material section. The bridge may be the third eight-bar phrase in a thirty-two-bar form (the B in AABA), or it may be used more loosely in verse-chorus form, or, in a compound AABA form, used as a contrast to a full AABA section.

The term comes from a German word for bridge, "Steg", used by the Meistersingers of the 15th to 18th century to describe a transitional section in medieval bar form. The German term became widely known in 1920's Germany through musicologist Alfred Lorentz and his exhaustive studies of Richard Wagner's adaptations of bar form in his popular 19th century neo-medieval operas. The term entered the English lexicon in the 1930's as its translated guise "bridge" via composers fleeing Nazi Germany who, finding employment in Hollywood and on Broadway, used the term to describe similarly transitional sections in the American popular music they were now writing.