Janáček relies heavily on motives to build and unify his music. From his early compositions to his last, motives dominate, appearing frequently in various textural functions and at different structural levels. His later music in particular reveals an almost unprecedented motivic concentration; Janáček constructs the music from these atomic components in mosaiclike fashion to create a montage unified by the use of numerous variants of few main ideas. Motives function as melodies, harmonies, ostinatos, and larger organizing patterns. Example 1.1 illustrates this motivic saturation with an excerpt from Nursery Rhymes (1926), the opening measures of “I am preaching” (Dělám, dělám kázání). It sets typical nursery-rhyme nonsense verse: “I am preaching, I am preaching, four cats and the fifth a dog that into an oven crawled, where he filched a toast,” picking up on its trochaic-to-dactylic meter shift (in Czech) to establish a 2:3 rhythmic foundation. The setting encapsulates Janáček's technique as we shall see it throughout the book: a highly unified repetitive pitch structure enlivened through continual motivic transformations and distinct rhythms.

The excerpt is saturated by motive d: a descending third, ascending second, and descending tritone (the first appearance in each part is circled). Initially it appears on two rhythmic levels, as eighth notes in the right hand of the piano and as quarter notes in the clarinet and voice. The pitches are identical in all three parts. The bass harmonizes the first three notes of the motive a sixth lower—with an octave displacement of the last two notes—and initially omits the fourth note. The motive then undergoes various transformations in both rhythm and pitch.

This passage demonstrates Janáček's motivic technique at the height of its development. How and why did his musical language become so motivically concentrated? And how is it organized? These are questions I will be considering throughout the book, while examining other aspects of structure that give the music its characteristic sound. To begin, this chapter reviews motives from Janáček's point of view, including his often-discussed motives known as “speech melodies.”