Sonata

Sonata

What is sonata?

Sonata in music, literally mean a piece played as opposed to a cantata piece sung. The term, being vague, naturally evolved through the history of music, designating a variety of forms prior to the Classical era.e visitors tips for navigating my site--what's located under each button.

Usage of Sonata

The Baroque applied the term sonata to a variety of works, though most works in the Baroque Period were fugues and toccatas, including works for solo instruments such as keyboard or violin, and for groups of instruments.


In the transition from the Baroque to the Classical period, the term sonata  undergoes a change in usage, from being applied to many different kinds of small instrumental work to being more specifically applied to chamber music genres with either a solo instrument, or a solo instrument with piano.

Instrumentation

In the Baroque period, a sonata was for one or more instruments almost always with continuo. After the Baroque period most works designated as sonatas specifically are performed by a solo instrument, most often a keyboard instrument, or by a solo instrument together with a keyboard instrument. In the late Baroque and early Classical period, a work with instrument and written-out keyboard part was referred to as having an obbligato  keyboard part, in order to distinguish this from use of an instrument or instruments as continuo, though this fell out of usage by the early 1800s.

The sonata idea or principle

Research into the practice and meaning of sonata form, style, and structure has been the motivation for important theoretical works by Heinrich Schenker, Arnold Schoenberg, and Charles Rosen among others; and the pedagogy of music continued to rest on an understanding and application of the rules of sonata form as almost two centuries of development in practice and theory had codified it.

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