Motives and Themes

Tunes are relatively short; longer pieces, such as symphonies, may have tunes embedded in them, but they also contain other musical material. Two terms are frequently encountered in connection with melody in longer pieces of music: motive and theme.

A motive is a distinctive fragment of melody, distinctive enough so that it will be easily recognized when it returns again and again within a long composition. Motives are shorter than tunes, shorter even than phrases of tunes; they can be as short as two notes. Probably the most famous motive in all music is the four-note DA-DA-DA-DAAA motive in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. It is heard literally hundreds of times in the symphony, sometimes up front and sometimes as a restless element in the background.

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The second term, theme, is the most general term for the basic subject matter of longer pieces of music. Theme is another name for “topic”: The themes or topics of an essay you might write are the main points you announce, repeat, develop, and hammer home. A composer treats musical themes in much the same way. The theme of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony consists of the brief DA-DA-DA-DAAA motive repeated over and over at different pitches — that is, played in sequence (see the key term on page 26). The famous theme of the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is a full tune, which we will hear several times in the music recordings (see page 30).