theme and variation

The tradition & historical record

In music, variation is a formal technique where material is repeated in an altered form. The changes may involve melody, rhythm, harmony, counterpoint, timbre, orchestration or any combination of these. Variation is often contrasted with musical development, which is a slightly different means to the same end. Variation depends upon one type of presentation at a time, while development is carried out upon portions of material treated in many different presentations and combinations at a time. ¹

Mozart's Twelve Variations on "Ah vous dirai-je, Maman" (1785), a French folk song known in the English-speaking world as "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star", exemplifies a number of common variation techniques. Here are the first eight bars of the theme: ¹

Mozart's first variation decorates and elaborates the plain melodic line: ¹

The fifth variation breaks up the steady pulse and creates syncopated off-beats: ¹

The seventh variation introduces powerful new chords, which replace the simple harmonies originally implied by the theme with a prolongational series of descending fifths: ¹

In the elaborate eighth variation, Mozart changes from the major to the parallel minor mode, while combining three techniques: counterpoint, suspensions and imitation: ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Variation (music)”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

theme and variation is musical form, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 19 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ²