Sonata (music)

Sonata (From Latin and Italian sonare, 'to sound'), in music, literally means a piece "played" as opposed to cantata (Latin cantare, to sing), a piece sung. The term, being vague, naturally evolved through the history of music, designating a variety of forms prior to the Classical era. The term would take on increasing importance in the classical period, and by the early 19th century the word came to be used for a principle of composing large scale works, and be applied to most instrumental genres, regarded alongside the fugue as the fundamental method of organizing, interpreting and analyzing concert music. In the 20th century the term continued to be applied to instrumental works, but the formal principles enunciated and taught through the 19th century were weakened or loosened.

The Sonata in scholarship and musicology

The sonata idea or principle

Research into the practice and meaning of sonata form, style and structure would be the impulse for important theoretical works by Heinrich Schenker, Arnold Schoenberg and Charles Rosen among others, and the pegagogy of music would continue to rest on an understanding and application of the rules of sonata form as almost two centuries of development of practice and theory and codified it.

Related Topics:
Heinrich Schenker - Arnold Schoenberg - Charles Rosen

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The development of the classical style and its norms of composition would form the basis for much of the music theory of the 19th century and 20th century. As a form, it was compared to the baroque fugue as being at the pinnacle of formal organization, and generations of composers, instrumentalists and audiences were guided by the understanding of sonata as an idea. The sonata idea begins before the term had taken its present importance, as the classical era changed its norms of performance practice. The reasons for these changes, and how they relate to the evolving sense of a new formal order in music is a matter of a great deal of research. Some common factors which were pointed to include: the change of music from primarily vocal to being instrumental; the changes in performance practice, including the end of the use of the continuo and the playing of all movements of a work straight through; the shift from the idea that each movement should express one emotion, to one which integrated contrasting themes and sections; the move from polyphonically based composing to homophonically based composing; changes in the availability of instruments; the change in the formal organization of movements away from binary organization; the rise of more dance rhythms; and changes in patronage and presentation.

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Crucial to most interpretations of the sonata form is the idea of a tonal center and, as the Grove Concise dictionary of music puts it: "The main form of the group embodying the 'sonata principle', the most important principle of musical structure from the Classical period to the 20th century: that material first stated in a complementary key be restated in the home key".

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The sonata idea was described by Newman in his monumental three volume work, begun in the 1950's and published in what has become the standard edition of all three volumes in 1972. He notes that according to his research, theorists had generally shown "a hazy recongition of 'sonata form' during the Classical Era and up to the late 1830's" and places particular emphasis on Reicha's 1826 work describing the "fully developed binary form", for its fixing of key relationships, Czerny's 1837 note in preface to his Opus 600, and Adolph Bernhard Marx who in 1845 wrote a long treatise on the "sonata form". Up until this point, Newman argues, the definitions available were quite imprecise, requiring only instrumental character and contrasting character of movements.

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Newman also notes however that these codifications were in response to a growing understanding that the 18th century had a formal organization of music, and that it was important to understand it. Before the publication of Reicha, Czerny or Marx, there are references to the "customary sonata form", and in particular to the organization of its first movement. He documents in his works the evolution of analysis as well, showing that early critical works on sonatas, with some very notable exceptions, dealt with structural and technical details only loosely. Instead, many important works of the sonata genre or sonata form were not analyzed comprehensively in terms of their thematic and harmonic resources until after the beginning of the 20th century.

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20th century theory

Two of the most important theorists in European musicology of the 20th century, Heinrich Schenker and Arnold Schoenberg, both had ideas with tremendous importance to the analysis and general understanding of the sonata. Their ideas were extremely rigorous, and placed tremendous emphasis on the long range influence of tonal materials. Both advanced theories of analysis of works which would be adopted by later theorists. Importantly, while the two men disagreed with each other, eventually their ideas were often used in combination.

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Heinrich Schenker argued that that there was an urlinie or basic tonal melody, and a basic bass figuration. That when these two were present, there was basic structure, and that the sonata represented this basic structure in a whole work with a process known as interruption. Arnold Scheonberg advanced the theory of monotonality, which argued that a single work should be played as if in one key, even if movements were in different keys, that the capable composer would reference everything in a work to a single tonic triad.

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For Schenker tonal function was the essential defining characteristic of comprehensible structure in music, and his definition of the sonata form rested, not on themes groups or sections, but on the basic interplay between the different "layers" of a composition. For Schoenberg, tonality was not necessary to comprehensibility, but the same importance of structural function of notes to "explain" the relationship of chords and counterpoint to an over-arching set of relationships. Both men argued that tonality, and hence sonata structure in tonal form, was essentially hierarchical - that what was immediately audible was subordinate to large scale movements of harmony, that vagrant chords and events were less significant than the movement between chords which asserted their central importance over others.

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As a practical matter, Schenker applied his ideas to the editing of the piano sonatas of Beethoven, using original manuscripts and his own theories to "correct" the available sources, while many of these changes were and are controversial, the basic procedure, of using tonal theory to infer meaning into available sources as part of the critical process, even to completing works left unfinished by their composers, is used today and is an essential part of the theory of sonata structure as taught in most music schools.

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