Variation (music)

The thirteenth of these stands out in its seemingly wilful eccentricity and determination to reduce the given material to its bare bones: Wilfrid Mellers describes this variation as "comically disruptive...

9, opens with this rather sparse melodic line: Corelli's fellow-composer and former student Francesco Geminiani produced a "playing version"[4] as follows: According to Nicholas Cook, in Geminiani's version "all the notes of Corelli's violin line ... are absorbed into a quite new melodic organization.

At the outset, Evans presents a single variation that repeats five times in subtly differing instrumental combinations.

These create a compelling background, a constantly-changing sonic tapestry over which trumpeter Miles Davis freely improvises his own set of variations.

Wilfrid Mellers (1964) wrote that "[i]t called for an improviser of Davis's kind and quality to explore, through Gil Evans' arrangement, the tender frailty inherent in the 'Summer-time' tune...

[8] This form may in part have derived from the practical inventiveness of musicians; "Court dances were long; the tunes which accompanied them were short.

[11] Both Schubert's Death and the Maiden Quartet and Trout Quintet take their titles from his songs used as variation movements.

Keyboard works in variation form were written by a number of 16th-century English composers, including William Byrd, Hugh Aston and Giles Farnaby.

Outstanding examples of early Baroque variations are the "ciaccone" of Claudio Monteverdi and Heinrich Schütz.

In the Classical era, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote a great number of variations, such as the first movement of his Piano Sonata in A, K. 331, or the finale of his Clarinet Quintet.

Joseph Haydn specialized in sets of double variations, in which two related themes, usually minor and major, are presented and then varied in alternation; outstanding examples are the slow movement of his Symphony No.

Amongst them is the slow movement of his string quartet Death and the Maiden D. 810, an intense set of variations on his somber lied (D. 531) of the same title.

The second movement of the Fantasie in C major comprises a set of variations on Der Wanderer; indeed the work as a whole takes its popular name from the lied.

In 1824, Carl Czerny premiered his Variations for piano and orchestra on the Austrian National Hymn Gott erhalte Franz der Kaiser, Op.

This was commonplace in the Baroque era, when the da capo aria, particularly when in slow tempo, required the singer to be able to improvise a variation during the return of the main material.

During this period, according to Nicholas Cook, it was often the case that "responsibility for the most highly elaborated stage in the compositional process fell not upon the composer but upon the executant.

Cook cites Geminiani's elaboration of Corelli (see above) as an example of an instance "in which the composer, or a performer, wrote down a version of one of these movements as it was meant to be played.

According to Gamble, "Charlie Parker's performance of Embraceable You can be appreciated fully only if we are familiar with the tune, for unlike many jazz performances in which the theme is stated at the beginning, followed by improvisations on the theme, Parker launches almost immediately into improvisation, stating only a fragment of the tune at the end of the piece.

"On 11 October 1939, Coleman Hawkins went into New York's RCA studios with an eight-piece band to record the 1930 composition Body and Soul.