In music, a sonata is a piece made up of three or four movements, written for one or more instruments. The term has carried varying meanings across music history, growing in importance through the Classical era, when it came to represent a principle for composing large-scale instrumental works; by the early nineteenth century it was applied to most instrumental genres and, alongside the fugue, was regarded as one of two fundamental methods for organizing, interpreting and analyzing concert music, a structure most sonatas since have continued to maintain even as their musical style has changed.
Facts
MediumOne or more instruments, often a solo keyboard instrument 1 Signature TechniqueSonata form, built from exposition, development and recapitulation 1 Place of Origin Notable ExampleBeethoven's 32 piano sonatas 1 Connections
Associated With
Practitioners
Frederic Chopin, Artists Frederic Chopin wrote three piano sonatas, including the Piano Sonata No. 2 with its famous funeral march movement, a core work of the Romantic sonata repertoire.
Ludwig van Beethovens 32 piano sonatas, spanning his entire career, are among the most influential contributions to the sonata form in Western music.
Sources
1. Sonata (Wikipedia)
WikipediaSonata, Instrumentation section
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 accompanied by a keyboard instrument.
Sonata, Classical period section
It is difficult to overstate the importance of Beethoven's output of sonatas: 32 piano sonatas, plus sonatas for cello and piano or violin and piano, forming a large body of music that would over time increasingly be thought essential for any serious instrumentalist to master.
Sonata, Baroque section
This scheme, however, was not very clearly defined, until the works of Arcangelo Corelli when it became the essential sonata and persisted as a tradition of Italian violin music.
Sonata, Classical period section, movement layout sentence
An allegro, which by this point was in what is called sonata form, complete with exposition, development, and recapitulation.
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