One of the trickiest – and coolest – things about sonata form is that it tests your memory in various ways. You’re constantly playing the game, “Do you remember?” which you may know by its more informal name, “I feel like I’ve heard this before, but I’m not sure . . .”
Here’s how it works.
Every sonata form piece includes an exposition – where you hear at least one theme for the first time – and a recapitulation – where the return of the theme signals the definitive end of the development and the beginning of the end of the movement. In Mvt. 1 of Beethoven’s 9th symphony, we hear the first theme at 0:25 and the recapitulation of the first theme at 7:25. Hearing the first theme recapitulated is easy – you only get 1 point for hearing that (although if you don’t hear it, you go back to start, so make sure you hear it every time.) When there’s a second theme, you can also play the memory game to see if you remember what that sounds like after a few minutes of intervening music. For Mvt. 1, that means remembering the second theme in the exposition (at 1:45) when you hear it again in the recapitulation (at 7:59). You get five points for remembering the second theme, since it’s sometimes difficult to figure out what the second theme is in the first place.
What about the stuff in between – the stuff we mark with an “m” for “moving” or “medial” or “(un)memorable” in our sonata form schematic? I’m talking about transition music, the sequences (remember those?) and motives that get us from theme one to theme 2. In Mvt. 1, the transition sounds like this:
First there’s that development of the motive at the end of the theme: out of “feel like I should quit facebook right now,” we hear only “feel like I should quit” repeated at steadily rising pitch levels, creating tension through increasing shrillness, and then Beethoven throws in a rhythmic tightening of that motive so that several “like I should quit” parts follow each other rapidly. When that ends and there’s a pause once again, Beethoven introduces a different kind of tension in the low strings’ ostinato (repeated figured) that oscillates between A and Bb (as Professor Kelly would say, that’s probably an accident). Above that, the high strings and woodwinds play half-scales, outlining a tritone (the most dissonant interval). With all of this tension – rhythmic, melodic, intervallic – we breathe a huge sigh of relief when the second theme enters. It’s in major, it’s far more legato (connected, smooth) than the first theme and any of the intervening transitional material, and it’s played primarily by the woodwinds rather than the strings, lending it additional resolution power.
Now that I’ve said all that, do you remember what the transition actually sounds like? Don’t listen to it again yet – first, listen to the “retransition,” which leads from first theme to second theme in the recapitulation.
Now, play the game – do you feel like you’ve heard that before? You should and you shouldn’t. Listen to the original transition again, then listen to the retransition right after. Notice how the “quit facebook right now” repetition is missing from the retransition, but how the descending scales of the second half of the transition make an appearance in altered form. Why, when there’s so much emphasis on repetition in sonata form, would the retransition deviate from the transition? Isn’t it still going from Theme 1 to Theme 2, from point A to point B? Sure it is – but Theme 2/point B is in D major the second time, rather than C major. One of the rules of the recapitulation is that the second theme has to stay in the home key rather than moving to the dominant or the relative major as it does in the exposition. Beethoven, that devil, keeps the second theme in D but switches up the mode: the second theme should be in D minor (like the first theme) but instead is presented in D major.
And that’s another thing to try to remember – are we in the same key as before, or a different key? Is the music moving somewhere, or is it sitting in one spot? The answers to these questions and more, on our next installment of “Do you remember?”
Inspired Listening 