Motivic Development
Deriving new music by splitting, transforming and recombining a motive
Related
Motivic development grows new music from a short motive: transposition, inversion, retrograde, augmentation, diminution, fragmentation and sequence are its tools. The motive returns each time in new clothes but keeps a recognisable outline, so that a whole passage seems to grow from one seed.
It is most at home in a sonata development, where the theme is broken into cells, passed through keys and voices, and driven toward a dominant preparation before the recapitulation. Fugue episodes and Beethoven's late quartets use the same procedures.
Motivic development is not variation. Variation keeps a complete theme and its structural frame while changing the surface; motivic development takes the theme apart, keeps one cell and rebuilds from it, so one hears a common source rather than the same passage. Find the small shape that keeps returning.
Sources
- 动机发展的手段及其在展开部与赋格中的用法，参 The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, "Development"；本文为原创表述
Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.