When I listen to a piece of music in several movements, I have trouble understanding what holds the movements together. … and I would appreciate any insight from the many insightful people on this forum.
I know I've pondered this very issue on occasion -- like every time I listen to a multi-movement sonata, symphony, or concerto. As you've already been told, there is no one easy answer. Yet, I wonder what Forum members might make of analyzing one of the works of your choice which you find seemingly disparate in movement integration. (Does that make sense?) In other words, can you select one work with several movements where you do not hear (or see) any obvious connective threads -- key, theme, rhythm, orchestration, style, tone-row use...? Perhaps there will be insights available from readers.
But this is a great issue to pursue when listening. I tend to suspect that most great music is rather integrated from movement to movement and that movements from separate works are not willy-nilly interchangeable. Such is perhaps more evident, as was suggested already, in post Classical-era works, and that one might more easily fool the ear by interchanging Haydn movements than, say, Beethoven or Brahms or Tchaikovsky movements.
I would suggest that the greatest elemental tie is motif or theme, and that a theme can bear a disguise that may need a bit of decoding before one recognizes it as related to the "theme" of one movement vs. another. All that retrograde and inversion stuff comes into play. I even suspect that the two themes of classical sonata form often tend to have a close relation, if we tear them apart closely enough. Great compositional minds tend not to think in random terms (except for maybe John Cage) when assigning thematic subjects to a work. Integration proves a valuable asset of form.
Speaking in literary terms, one can look at a Shakespeare play, say,
Macbeth, and see that images repeat. You have items such as "blood" and "darkness", clothing and birds and supernatural elements repeating in all manner of ways throughout the script. This gives the
Macbeth play a certain texture lacking in other Shakespeare plays where the texture differs due to the change of imagery elements. (And in Shakespeare, the chosen images always link closely to the plot line of the story. -- For example, the clothing images in
Macbeth often relate to stolen robes and ill-fitting garments, in a play about a man who steals the robes of the King through murder, in a play written for a new English King, James, who had come from Scotland and taken over the English throne of Elizabeth, literally "stealing" the robes of the King.
Macbeth is a commentary against the Scottish King James, and so many of the images in the play refer to James and his nature and habits.) Within this "texture" the story-line can still develop, even in a total opposite shifting (as it does in
Macbeth), from a man of goodness becoming a man of evil. In fact, imagery of opposites is powerful in the play, too. So, this keeps the fabric of the play unified even though one may be in Act One or Act Three or Act Five, where the plot is greatly different. Characters such as Macbeth can be dynamic (changing) even while maintaining a unity by design.
Such happens in music, too. There are images of color (orchestral tones, instrumental sounds and effects) that lead to unity. Motifs and themes (linear note combinations) and their various transmogrifications that tie things together. Harmonies (the specific manner in which chords are built differ greatly from one composer to another) also add unities.
Good question, much to think about here.
And now I have an urge to re-read
Macbeth on top of everything else. Who'd have thought?
What familiar work of some renowned composer features multiple movements in which you fail to see relationships from one to another? Perhaps someone here could help enlighten us to what the unity might be? I would be interested in that.