Development sections (Sonata-form, Part 8)

Is music unpredictable? How about snowflakes?

DAN COREN

Eighth in a series of articles on sonata-form

I’ve spent the past eight months trying to show that while sonata-form expositions are all unique, they differ from each other in the same way that snowflakes do— and, like snowflakes, they’re all fundamentally the same. With a little bit of practice, an inexperienced listener can readily recognize the common features shared by all expositions. With the help of the repeats I discussed in my last article, you can even recognize where the exposition ends and the development section begins.

Is there a similar underlying floor-plan to the development section?

To find out, you might naturally browse the Web, only to find your confusion compounded. Here’s the beginning of Wikipedia’s discussion of the development in sonata-form (the italics are mine):

“The development generally starts in the same key as the exposition ended, and may move through many different keys during its course. It will usually consist of one or more themes from the exposition altered and occasionally juxtaposed and may include new material or themes– though exactly what is acceptable practice is a famous point of contention. Alterations include taking material through distant keys, breaking down of themes and sequencing of motifs, and so forth.”

Aside from the absurdity of worrying about “acceptable practice” at this late date (I have no idea what “famous point of contention” the writer means), and aside from the fact that at least as many expositions begin in a brand new key as don’t, this passage is essentially accurate, if not very useful; all the features and events it describes may indeed occur in a given development section– or not.

Mozart breaks the rules

Consider, for example, the second movement of Mozart’s 35th Symphony, the “Haffner.” Here is its development section, which is short enough to be presented in its entirety.

This passage contradicts just about every generalization you’re likely to encounter about development sections: It uses no material at all from the exposition, nor does it introduce anything that could really be called a new tune. Far from changing key, it starts in the same key in which the development ended (the dominant, of course) and stays there for nearly a minute.

In fact, this particular development section can’t be said to “develop” anything; it really does nothing more than just sit there and luxuriate in its own stasis before doing a slow dissolve back to the original tonic.

(Try grabbing onto the low note that sits there at the bottom of the texture for the entire second half of the example. If you can keep singing it to yourself, you’ll find that it changes its meaning from local home base to its true dominant function as it leads into the return to the movement’s opening material.)

Beethoven’s jarring crisis

At the other extreme is the development section of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony. It’s far too long– more than five minutes- for a single sound clip. It begins by immediately moving out into deep water and expanding at length upon a fragment from the exposition. At about the halfway point, there is a major crisis in a key that shares almost no notes with the key that ended the exposition; it is punctuated by a series of chords that, by the standards of 1803, must have sounded like the famous barbaric chords from Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.

At long last, with a sense of returning from a veritable Odyssey, Beethoven gets back home with this famous passage.

Triumphant return, or sneaking in the back door?

I could go on and on presenting contrasting examples like this— and the more I did, the more obvious would be the answer to the question I posed a while back: No, there is no way of predicting the behavior of a sonata-form development. For now, suffice it to say that the development section is a celebration of the inexhaustible complexities of Classical tonality. This is never truer than at that moment– the moment that all development sections do share— when the music comes home to the material that opened the exposition.

This return may take the form of a triumphant arrival at the city gates. It may involve sneaking in at the back door. You may be able to hear it coming a mile away. You may have to deduce that it must have happened while you weren’t paying attention. No matter how it is executed, this moment is the raison d’être of all sonata-form developments.

As an introduction to my next article in this series, here are three of the greatest examples of this moment:

• Mozart pulling the tonic out of a hat in the last movement of his “Jupiter” Symphony.
• The arrival on a distant planet, which actually turns out to be Earth in the first movement of Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony.
• The cataclysmic end of the development in the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth.

You’re smarter than you think

Dan Rottenberg recently said to me something like, “When you’re done, you’ll have a new kind of Sonata-form for Dummies.” Of course, the whole “…for Dummies” series is really written for people who are anything but (only very confident people dare to describe themselves as dummies). I prefer to think of this series as Sonata-form for Smarty-Pants (who don’t know how smart they really are).

So next time I’ll try to explain the nature of the journey to these moments, to show what it is that makes these particular passages and others like them such great intellectual and artistic achievements. In short, I’m going to try to explain the nature of modulation— how music in the Classical style negotiates the jump from one key to another.

If I succeed— even if you don’t read music, and even if you have no idea what, for example, an augmented sixth is (and don’t believe your life will improve by finding out), you’ll gain some insight into the inner workings of this ravishingly complex and elegant language.

If I fail … well, the effort alone was worthwhile. Ultimately there is no real explanation for these musical miracles.



To read earlier articles in this series, begin here.
To read the next installment, click here.