{"id":35,"date":"2017-12-28T02:27:23","date_gmt":"2017-12-28T02:27:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sharonroffman.com\/bernsteinserenade\/?page_id=35"},"modified":"2018-01-06T22:15:59","modified_gmt":"2018-01-06T22:15:59","slug":"development","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/sharonroffman.com\/bernsteinserenade\/bernsteins-language\/development","title":{"rendered":"Development"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Development in music means taking a group of notes, called a motive, and using those notes as the seed or germ from which other musical ideas grow.\u00a0 Bernstein said, “A composition lives<\/em> in the development.” (Joy of Music, pg. 58)<\/h3>\n

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Listen to Bernstein himself explain development! (Starting around 2:50)<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Bernstein loved anagrams, rearranging the letters in words to make new ones, and essentially thought of musical development as one big anagram, except instead of letters, he uses notes.<\/p>\n

“All music, even the most serious, thrives on its puns and anagrams…One can almost think of a given piece of music as a continuing game of anagrams, in which there are, as it were, twelve “letters” that can be juggled and rejuggled.”\u00a0 (The Unanswered Question pg. 129)<\/p>\n

Speaking about Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, he wrote, \u201cI was amazed when I first studied this work to find how much of the symphony is derived from simple scales. Out of them grow themes, motives, figurations, counterpoint, bass lines and even tunes..\u201d\u00a0 (The Infinite Vareity of Music, pg. 174)<\/p>\n

Speaking about Beethoven’s 6th Symphony, he said, \u201cThese first four bars are the material out of which the whole first movement is going to grow, and it\u2019s not just the main material but the only material. Every bar and phrase to come \u2013 and I mean every one, without exception \u2013 will be some kind of transformation, some metaphorical rendering, of the elements present in these four little bars.\u201d (The Unanswered Question, pg. 157)<\/p>\n

About Brahms: \u201c[he] immediately spots the possibilities in any given group of notes and exploits them to the hilt, just as a great novelist develops the possibilities of his characters through every word they utter.\u201d (The Infinite Variety of Music pg. 241)<\/p>\n

And finally, he writes, “A theme that is fertile will immediately present itself to you as such.\u00a0\u00a0 You know without even trying to fool with it that it\u2019s going to work, upside down and backward, and that it\u2019s going to make marvelous canons and fugues. You may not know what I\u2019m talking about when I say things like \u201cupside down\u2019 and canons;\u201d even if you don\u2019t, it doesn\u2019t matter. The thing I\u2019m trying to point out is the fertility and flexibility of the theme, its inherent possibilities for development.\u201d\u00a0 (The Infinite Variety of Music pg. 270)<\/p>\n

All of the above quotes could be about the Serenade.\u00a0 The Serenade opens with eight notes.\u00a0 These eight notes are extremely “fertile.” Like Brahms, Bernstein “exploits them to the hilt” and like Beethoven, these eight notes are “the material through which” not just the movement but the whole piece “grows.”<\/p>\n

[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row css=”.vc_custom_1514854699333{margin-top: 50px !important;margin-bottom: 50px !important;}”][vc_column width=”2\/3″][vc_column_text]Here are some places you can hear development of those eight notes (timings refer to the recording posted on the Bernstein’s Serenade<\/a> page:<\/p>\n