Facts About Sonata Form

Over the years I have written a blog post each month with Facts about either a particular musical instrument, or musical ensembles that your children may find themselves joining or listening to (from the perspective of someone who lives in the UK, so if you live elsewhere in the world your most common ensembles or most familiar musical instruments may be very different).

This year with my Facts About…. series I am writing about different musical forms, or structures that can be used for music composition. As human beings we are primed to like patterns, and to like to recognise those patterns. And the structure that you give to your music helps a listener to recognise where they are within your music, to give them a chance to spot the pattern in your music. The structures are always a guide. They don’t have to be slavishly followed, but they may well help you to write, especially when you are starting out with composition and trying to learn how to turn your musical ideas into a piece of music.

My blog posts aim to give you an introduction to these musical structures letting you know a little about how they work, a little about their history, and a suggested playlist of pieces composed in that particular form for you to listen to. For previous months’ posts please click on the link immediately below

Facts About Theme and Variations Structure

Facts About Binary Form

Facts About Rondo Form

This month’s musical structure is Sonata Form.

What is Sonata Form anyway?

• As my series of posts on musical forms continues I am starting to include slightly more complicated forms, So far we have seen musical structures where there is one or more musical themes that appear one after the other and complement each other.
• If I were to describe Sonata form using terms borrowed from story writing or essay writing (which would hopefully be more familiar), Sonata form is made up of an introduction, or beginning, a development of the themes from the introduction, or middle, and a conclusion to the piece, or end. In Sonata Form these are called the Exposition, the Development and the Recapitulation.
• The Exposition in Sonata form is where a composer will set out their main musical idea or ideas.
• What do I mean by your musical ideas? Well, in this context it would be a passage of music, say a 16 bar phrase (though in many compositions in Sonata form the musical ideas will be much longer than 16 bars, the length of your idea is very much up to the composer).
• In the Development section, the main musical idea or ideas will be developed, as the name suggests. The ways a composer can develop their idea include:
  • Moving to a related key
  • Breaking up passages in the main theme and maybe rearranging them
  • Changing the rhythmic patterns used in the main theme
  • Slowing the tempo or even speeding it up
  • Repeating the main theme, but giving it different harmony
• The musical world is the composer’s oyster, to borrow another phrase, in deciding exactly how they will develop their theme. And this development section can be as long as the composer wants it to be.
• Towards the end of the piece, as it is coming towards its conclusion, it will end with a Recapitulation- or restatement of that main theme from the beginning of the piece. The theme will generally be back in its original key, with the rhythm pattern from the start of the piece and the original harmony. The piece will have come full circle and will end pretty much where it started from.

History of Sonata Form

• In the Baroque Period of Music History (roughly between 1600 and 1750) many composers wrote sonatas. These were instrumental pieces of music which would often have a solo instrumentalist playing together with a larger ensemble. A sonata would be a larger piece of music with more than one movement (a self-contained section, or piece of music that is part of a larger musical work). These pieces were often written for violin and continuo (instrumentalists, generally string players who would provide the bass line and accompanying harmony for the solo violinist who played the melody of the piece).
• But it was in the Classical Period of Music History (roughy between 1750 and 1820) that composers started to play around with Sonata form as a structure for a movement of a larger work. Many of his predecessors had written contrasting musical ideas one after the other, or in rotation, CPE Bach (one of JS Bach’s sons) took on board lessons he had learned from listening to his father’s music. If you think k about music that the elder Bach had written, things like his fugues, where he would have a musical phrase appear in one voice, one register of a keyboard for example, and then write music that made it sound d like that one musical phrase was being chased up and down the keyboard or from one voice to another. So CPE Bach learned that instead of presenting one idea after another, a shorter musical phrase could be developed, changed as a piece of music continued.
• Other Classical composers explored these ideas further as the period progressed, including Haydn and Mozart.
• Joseph Haydn has been given a number of titles- “Father of the Symphony”, “Father of the String Quartet” and, importantly for this particular post “Father of the Sonata”.
• Why was Haydn considered “Father of Sonata form”? Well one reason is that he wrote a lot of pieces of music which used this form. He played around with ways that composers could move from stating their main theme, to developing that theme and once that main theme had been developed as much as he could and the piece had got to its most dramatic point, resolving that dramatic tension he created into a restatement, or recapitulation of the main theme of the piece.
• Sonata form caught on and many composers used this form for at least one of the movements in their works. Mozart, a contemporary and friend of Haydn’s, often used sonata form within his works and you can find examples of it in his operas, his piano concertos and even some Symphonies.
• As the Classical Period came to an end and the Romantic Period in Music History (roughly between 1800 and 1910) took off, Beethoven also took advantage of sonata form in many of his compositions, as did many other composers who followed on after him.
• Sonata form became a common choice of musical structure for composers to use for the first movement in a larger work, in symphonies, in concertos, in string quartets for example. And if you are looking for it, you will find many examples of movements within larger works that have been written using sonata form.
• Today, sonata form is still a good choice for composers who write larger musical works like symphonies.

Suggested Playlist

If you want to learn about a musical form and how it works, the best thing you can do is listen to it. And as you may have gathered from the History section of this post above, there are many pieces you could listen to particularly from the Classical and Romantic periods. To get you started, though, I would suggest some, or all it is up to you, of the following pieces of music, and then explore your own taste from there:

• Haydn Symphony No. 104 in D Major “London”, 1st movement
• Haydn Piano Sonata in C Major, 1st movement
• Mozart Symphony No. 40 in G Minor, 1st movement
• Mozart Piano Sonata No. 16 in C Major, 1st movement
• Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 8 “Pathétique”, 1st movement
• Beethoven Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, 1st movement
• Brahms, Symphony No. 4 in E Minor, 1st movement
• Grieg, Piano Concerto in A Minor, 1st movement
• Prokofiev Piano Sonata No. 7 “Stalingrad”, 1st movement
• Barber Piano Sonata in E-flat Minor, 1st movement
• Bernstein Symphony No. 2 “The Age of Anxiety”, 1st movement
• Thomas Ades Piano Sonata No. 1, 1st movement
• Jenifer Higdon Sonata for viola and piano
• Caroline Shaw, Piano Concerto “Watermark”
• Sondheim, Introduction to “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd”

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