User:Opus33/Secondary development

A secondary development, in music, is a section that appears in certain musical movements written in sonata form. The secondary development resembles a development section in its musical texture, but is shorter and occurs as a kind of excursion within the recapitulation section.

As described by Rosen
The term was invented by the musical scholar and pianist Charles Rosen, who describes the secondary development as follows:


 * 'The Secondary Development section appears in the great majority of late eighteenth century works soon after the beginning of the recapitulation and often with the second phrase. Sometimes it is only a few bars long, sometimes very extensive indeed.

Rosen also attributes a purpose to the secondary development:


 * The purpose of this section is to lower harmonic tension without sacrificing interest: it introduces an allusion to the subdominant or to the related "flat" keys.''

The "lowering of tension" by means of reference to the subdominant key is related to Rosen's general views on sonata form, in which the exposition section creates a sense of musical tension by moving to the dominant key (which lies upward from the home key by one on the circle of fifths). This tension which is "resolved" in the recapitulation by the return to the tonic. The use of the subdominant in secondary developments, a downward move from the tonic on the circle, provides a sort of balance. The same is true for the "related 'flat' keys" mentioned in the quotation above, which lie even lower on the circle than the subdominant (Rosen 1997, 24). Rosen suggests that "it is the restoration of harmonic equilibrium as well as the need for variation that gives the Secondary Development its function."

The term is widely used in analytic discussions of movements written in sonata form.

Other views
Hepakoski and Darcy (2006, 235-237) offer a different view of why so many sonata form movements include secondary developments, based on the purely mechanical function that secondary developments serve. Sonata form expositions always include a modulation, which in major-key works normally moves from the tonic key to the dominant. The later recapitulation section restates the musical material of the exposition, but this time entirely (or almost so) in the tonic key. Thus the passage of the exposition (often quite extensive) that originally carried out the change of key usually cannot remain unaltered in the recapitulation; it must be rewritten in some way that keeps the music in the tonic. Given that the required key shift is downward by a fifth (from dominant to tonic), it is natural that the rewritten material will include reference to the subdominant key (a fifth down from the tonic).

Hepakoski and Darcy's explanation continues: given that the transition zone in question was the only part of the recapitulation that actually required re-composition, it was only natural that it would become established among composers as the "freest available spot for compositional craft and modification within a recapitulation"; particularly "in large-scale or more ambitious works", composers could "take the opportunity for a substantial reshaping of the entire section" For these authors, the substantial character of the secondary development and its use of the subdominant key do not reflect any sort of large-scale need for balance, as in Rosen's view, but emerge as a by-product of the structure and history of sonata form.

Secondary developments elsewhere in the recapitulation
Rosen's original work acknowledged the purely mechanical function of the secondary development in permitting the music to continue in the tonic key, but asserts that this is not the reason why composers included extensive secondary developments. For Rosen, the better explanation is the one given above, involving considerations of balance and tension. In support of this, Rosen notes that when the subdominant key does not appear in the secondary development, it tends to show up elsewhere, such as the development or coda. Moreover, even within the recapitulation, secondary developments are not always located at the place where the key change must be "undone", but comes earlier: "the Secondary Development as often as not returns to one of the themes of the first group, which necessitates a still further change later in the section in order to bring the second group into the tonic." As an example Rosen cites Beethoven's "Waldstein" sonata, op. 53.

Rosen's comments gave rise to a dispute over the facts. Hepakoski and Darcy judge that examples like the "Waldstein" sonata are rare, "from a famously deformational stucture composed in the high-middle period of a composer obsessed with conceptually 'difficult' modifications of standard sonata practice." Their general claim is that Rosen's case for tonal balance is "overstated", being based on unrepresentative works.

Nomenclature
Hepakoski and Darcy suggest (p. 237) that "recapitulatory transition" would be a better term than "secondary development". Caplin (2000, 277) likewise objects to the term: it is "useful as an informal description but potentially misleading:  the new sequential passage does not usually resemble the way in which sequences are organized in a real development ... the model of a secondary development is generally short, and sequential activity is rarely modulatory."