Motivic-thematic work
Working-out of a theme through motifs.
What it means
Motivic-thematic work designates a compositional procedure in which a theme is broken down into its smallest building blocks, the motifs, and these are individually continued, changed, and newly combined. The movement thus arises not through the stringing together of new ideas but through the unfolding of a limited material.
Musical use
The procedures are numerous. A motif can be repeated or sequenced on another degree; it can be changed in its intervals, inverted, augmented, or diminished; it can be split off, so that only a part is continued, which then becomes ever shorter; it can be combined with other motifs or set contrapuntally against itself. Every one of these procedures preserves the kinship to the original material while at the same time changing its shape.
Its most important place is the development section of sonata form, in which the material of the exposition is worked out in this way. The Viennese Classical period counts as the time in which the procedure received its defining shape; but it acted far beyond that and determines large parts of the music of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From it also developed the idea that a whole work could arise from a single germ cell.
The gain of the procedure is coherence: since everything stems from the same material, even widely separated sections hang together, even when they sound different.
Motivic-thematic work is to be distinguished from variation, which changes a theme as a whole instead of breaking it down, and from the Baroque Fortspinnung, which continues an idea in even motion.
The procedure is associated especially with Haydn and Beethoven, later with Brahms, whose technique Schoenberg described as developing variation. The goal is to develop a whole movement from a few germ cells.
Performance practice
When studying, look for which motif a passage stems from — that gives it direction and coherence. Shape splittings-off as intensification. And use the recognition of the motifs when memorizing; whoever knows what a movement is made of retains it more securely.