WHAT IS SONATA FORM | MUSICAL FORM | SONATA FORM IN MUSIC - Online learning king

WHAT IS SONATA FORM | SONATA FORM IN MUSIC

we've now reached a point in our journey where it's time to talk about what Grove dictionary of music describes as the most important principle of musical form or formal type from the Classical period well into the 20th century and so basically what they're saying there is that this is the way of structuring a piece that has been kind of most significant ever since around 1750. 

What we think of as the start of the Classical period right the way through, to be honest, we can even extend that to the 21st century and write the whelps 2014. When I'm writing this post in a way if you look back through all of the greatest composers from the kind of European classical music tradition they were all masters of this form and chose to use it right at the heart of so much of the music they wrote and some of the most well-known music as well that we still listen to today, even though it was written 200 years ago things like symphonies concertos and sonatas and it's after this last form of composition that the thing takes its name and so in this post, we're going to have a look at introducing the idea of Sonata form and asking the question in it's most basic terms what is Sonata form well to answer that we probably need to know what a Sonata is.

WHAT IS A SONATA?

 A Sonata is just simply any piece of music that is written normally for a solo instrument to play. There's a vocal version of this would be cantata artists. A cantata is a piece of people to sing. A sonata is a piece of people to play and even though that's the most basic definition over time the Sonata developed into a kind of way of composing a piece as well as just being a piece that was played by an instrument and so it had certain conventions and things that we might expect and one of the things that became most common is that the first movement of each of these types of the piece whether a symphony a concerto or Sonata would use this special type of form called Sonata form.

SONATA FORM

 While Sonata form can seem very daunting because these are often very long pieces of music that can seem quite complicated. Essentially what we're talking about here is a developed version of the rounded binary form and if you remember rounded binary the form was something that had two sections it had an A section and a B section and the thing that made it rounded binary is that it was completed the B the section was completed by some of the section material coming back at some point towards the endof the B section and that on its most basic level is what Sonata form is and we ultimately think of it in terms of three main sections.

 If you can understand what we would expect a composer to be doing in each of those three sections you can have a good idea as to what you should be listening out for if you ever go and listen to the first movement of a symphony or the first Muller concerto or the first movement of a sonata where the composer has quite explicitly chosen to use this thing called Sonata form. The three main sections that we would most commonly find in a piece composed in Sonata form are as follows.

1.      EXPOSITION.
2.     DEVELOPMENT.
3.     RECAPITULATION.

So the first one is known as the Exposition and this is what we might think of as the section this is where some ideas are introduced and we g

et familiarized with some musical melodies for the first time.

 Then we have this the second section which is known as the development and that is where the composer chooses to vary or play around with some of the things that they've done and transformed some of the musical ideas they introduced in the exposition and this is kind of the beginning of the B section.

Finally, we have this thing called the recapitulation and that's why I said this is most similar to a binary form with that rounded binder really feel to it so recapitulation long words but ultimately very simple ideas. So the recapitulation is this idea that at the end of the B section we get some familiar asexually material coming back and that's the most basic scheme to describe a sonata form. But, I think the best way to get a handle on how a sonata form works and what we should be looking out for is to actually go and have a look at one and explore each of the three sections in turn.

So that in total is our Sonata allegro form and it's one of the most brilliant ways to develop a musical argument which great composers have been using for generations I hope you enjoyed this post and there will definitely be more like this coming up as well as analyses of great pieces of classical and film music so please do subscribe if you want to see more and share this post if you liked it thanks for reading.