The peculiar technique involves forceful accent and release of one or more bass notes beneath a sustained chord in the right hand. Examples may be found in all four movements in various approximations. A provisional answer to such a conjecture might first consider the expressive role of the idea, which is projected in the opening theme of the first movement. The determined will of a persona is clearly implied and gesturally projected. But when the theme returns in the coda, up an octave, pianissimo, and the overtone effect is more clearly pronounced, then the effect, though still requiring accurate gestural performance, no longer appears to have the same immediacy of human agency.
Composers often represent aspects of the inanimate world.
For Beethoven and Schubert, gestural developing variation can help generate the structure and motivate the expressive meaning of major works in sonata form. In the next lecture I will demonstrate how gestural shapes interact with pitch-structural strategies in the creation and working out of the thematic premise for a work. In the first and second lectures I claimed that physical movement must be marked to be gestural, and here I have observed that gestures must be marked thematically to be fully relevant as embodied meaning. Thus, the highly gesturally-conceived motives examined in this lecture are special cases of a more general phenomenon with respect to the interpretation of thematic discourses. Back to where you left off.