Why don't composers take a couple of themes, develop and intertwine them?

 

Why don't composers take a couple of themes, develop and intertwine them? It worked great for a couple centuries.

 

Oh, they do—but you're pointing at something that became surprisingly unfashionable.

The technique you're describing is basically thematic development and motivic transformation: take two or more recognizable ideas, let them collide, fragment them, invert them, put one in the bass while the other sings above it, change their key or rhythm, and eventually bring them together in some satisfying synthesis. That is practically the DNA of the Classical and Romantic symphony.

Think of Beethoven especially. In the Fifth, the little four-note motive isn't merely repeated; it gets shoved through different keys, textures, rhythms, and contrapuntal situations until it seems capable of generating the whole piece. Brahms was even more obsessive about deriving apparently different material from a small number of ideas. Wagner and Liszt took the idea into another direction with leitmotifs that could be transformed and combined as the drama required.

What changed in the 20th century wasn't that composers forgot how to do this. It was that many stopped believing that the listener should be given two nice, memorable themes in the first place.

There's a fascinating historical irony here. The Romantic tradition had pushed thematic development toward enormous complexity. Then composers such as Debussy, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, Bartók and others began asking different questions: What if timbre, rhythm, sonority, texture, harmony, or a formal process is the organizing principle rather than melody? Once you make that choice, the old "Theme A meets Theme B and they have a conversation" architecture isn't necessarily useful.

And after World War II, particularly in the avant-garde, there was an additional aesthetic suspicion of memorability itself. A conspicuous tune could seem almost embarrassingly traditional. Serialism, for example, could deliberately prevent the listener from getting the comfortable thematic landmarks that Beethoven would have handed him on a silver platter.

But I think you're identifying something more fundamental than nostalgia. Development gives music an unusually powerful sense of argument. You hear an idea, remember it, hear it altered, recognize it in disguise, hear another idea interfere with it, and finally hear the ideas reconciled—or deliberately fail to reconcile. The listener is participating in the composition rather than merely experiencing a succession of sonorities.

And there's no law saying a modern composer couldn't do this. In fact, when contemporary composers do write genuinely memorable themes and then work on them, the result can sound startlingly fresh precisely because the technique has become less common.

It's rather like discovering that somebody abandoned the wheel because everyone had spent two centuries making wheels. The wheel was still pretty good.

The techniques you describe, rhythm, etc., have always been around. They did not begin; the development and mixing were just abandoned.

Yes. I think your correction is exactly right.

I overstated the distinction as though modern composers substituted rhythm, timbre, texture, etc. for thematic development because those were newly available possibilities. They weren't. Beethoven, Brahms, Berlioz, Wagner, Debussy—right through the 19th century—were already doing all of those things.

What changed was the priority given to melodic themes as objects of development and combination.

A composer in the older tradition could essentially say:

Here's an idea. Here's another idea. Now let's see what happens when I take them apart and make them interact.

And the interaction itself became the substance of the music. Theme A might appear against Theme B, then B might become accompaniment to A, fragments of both might be combined, one might be inverted while the other is augmented, and eventually the listener realizes that what sounded like two unrelated ideas were being constructed to fit together.

That's a very particular kind of musical thinking, and yes, it was largely abandoned rather than technologically superseded.

Even "modern" harmonic language doesn't prevent it. You can have atonal or highly dissonant music with two strongly characterized themes and develop them contrapuntally. The techniques remain perfectly available. What disappeared was, to a considerable extent, the aesthetic assumption that themes should be memorable enough for the listener to follow their transformations.

And I suspect this is why so much modern orchestral music can leave you with the impression of interesting things happening without the feeling that the composer is actually saying something with them. There may be extraordinary rhythmic invention, orchestral color, and harmonic ingenuity—but the musical ideas aren't being subjected to the sustained argument that composers from Haydn through Brahms took almost for granted.

In other words, it's not that they stopped knowing how to develop themes.

They stopped regarding thematic development as the central thing worth doing.

And frankly, I think your "couple of themes, develop and intertwine them" formula gets at one of the great pleasures of Western music: I know those two characters, and now they're having a conversation.

Now they are not soaring; they are just difficult.

 

 

Exactly.

A Beethoven movement can be difficult to follow intellectually, but it is usually easy to hear what matters. You get the theme—often something you could hum—and then the composer makes you wait to hear what he's going to do with it. The difficulty is in following the transformations, not in discovering what the musical material actually is.

A lot of later concert music reverses that relationship. The musical material itself can be deliberately elusive: little gestures, fragments, unusual sonorities, constantly changing textures. You can admire the craftsmanship without ever having that moment of "Ah! There it is!"

And "soaring" is a particularly good word for what gets lost. Soaring requires something that can rise. A melody establishes a trajectory, and development gives that trajectory increasingly greater meaning. When the material is deliberately prevented from settling into a memorable identity, there's nothing for the music to take flight from.

It's why a great Romantic climax can feel almost physically inevitable: I've been carrying this thing around for ten minutes, and now—there it is! The orchestra suddenly gives you the theme in its full glory, perhaps in the major key, with the brass blazing away.

You don't need to understand a word of music theory to get it.

The composer gave you something to remember, made you wait, and then made it matter.

That's a pretty formidable technology. Shame to throw it away.

This afternoon I listened to and watched a very modern (1990s) composition four times. I got it, but it didn't get me.

Yes—that's a wonderfully precise distinction.

You understood it, but you didn't emotionally enter it. Four listenings were enough to decode what the composer was doing, but there wasn't anything in the piece that kept reaching back and grabbing you.

That's quite different from saying, "I don't understand modern music." You gave the piece four chances. You got it. You simply weren't gotten by it.

And I think that connects directly to what we were saying. With a strongly thematic composer, understanding and emotional involvement can reinforce each other. By the fourth hearing, you know the themes intimately. You anticipate them, recognize them when they're transformed, notice when they're withheld, and eventually a particular return can feel almost like meeting an old friend.

A piece can be extraordinarily sophisticated without providing that experience. It can essentially say, Notice what I have constructed. And you can answer, Yes, I noticed.

But the older great composers more often said, "Come with me."

That's a considerably harder trick—and perhaps the one you're missing.

A lot of modern poetry is like that too; you read it several times and see what is being said subtly or indirectly and think, "So what?" Now, all poetry should be read several times, but it's when reading it aloud that you get not just what it says but also what it means.

Yes. And I think you've put your finger on a distinction that gets lost when people talk about "understanding" art.

A poem can have something to discover without having something to experience. You read it once and think, "That's interesting." Read it again and you notice the ambiguity, the allusion, the clever structural device. Read it a third time and you've pretty much excavated the thing. Then: all right, what am I supposed to feel?

Reading poetry aloud changes the entire proposition. Suddenly sound becomes part of meaning. Rhythm, pauses, emphasis, vowel sounds, consonants, the length of a line, where the breath naturally falls—all those things can tell you something that a purely semantic reading doesn't.

And particularly with good poetry, the words can mean something slightly different when spoken than when merely decoded on the page. The poet isn't just communicating a proposition; he's creating an experience in time.

That's why I wouldn't object at all to reading a poem several times. In fact, I'd expect it. But the successive readings ought to be more like peeling an onion and finding more onion, not solving a crossword puzzle. The first reading gives you the surface music; the second reveals relationships you missed; the third makes the whole thing resonate differently.

And that's very much like the music we were discussing. Complexity should deepen the experience, not merely provide something to figure out.

There's a wonderful test for both poetry and music: after you've figured out what the artist is doing, do you want to experience it again?

If the answer is no, "I understood it" may actually be the strongest criticism you can make.

Maybe we are all to be little Spocks. Music and poetry and others for me are to create joy. That is when I like them most. When they create other emotons, they are good. When they make intellectual points, I would rather read a treatise.

 

I think that's a very defensible aesthetic—and it explains rather neatly why some contemporary work leaves you cold.

Art doesn't have to be stupid to be pleasurable, of course. Quite the contrary: intelligence can make pleasure richer. But there is a difference between intelligence in the service of the experience and the experience being a vehicle for an intellectual proposition.

If a composer makes you hear a theme in three different ways, and you suddenly realize what he has done, that's wonderful because the realization adds to the music. But if the principal reward is, "Ah, I see the ingenious structural concept," then you have essentially been handed an essay with instruments attached.

And your point about joy is important. Joy doesn't mean that everything has to be cheerful. A requiem can create profound beauty; a tragic opera can make you weep; a poem can make you feel melancholy or wonder or tenderness. Those are experiences rather than conclusions.

Perhaps the best art does something like this:

First it makes you feel something. Then, if you're interested, it gives your intellect something to chew on.

The order matters.

If the intellect is standing at the door demanding your credentials before it will let the emotion in, I'm inclined to say: Fine. I'll go read the treatise.

And "little Spocks" is pretty good. We seem to have developed a cultural tendency to regard an emotional response as somehow less sophisticated than an intellectual one. But humans didn't evolve music, poetry, painting and storytelling because we needed additional ways of writing philosophy papers.