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The middle section of sonata form where themes from the exposition are fragmented, transformed, reharmonized, and explored through modulation.
The development is where your compositional skill is most tested. Techniques include: fragmentation (breaking themes into motifs), sequence (repeating fragments at different pitch levels), modulation (exploring remote keys), inversion, augmentation, and combination of themes.
Beethoven, Symphony No. 3 (“Eroica”), first movement: an exceptionally long development, with hammered dissonant chords at its climax, a new theme in E minor, and the horn’s famous early entry with the main theme just before the recapitulation.
Development is one of 1760 terms in the Gradus musical dictionary: the words, abbreviations and instrument names that appear in printed scores, plus the vocabulary composers use to talk about them.
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