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Learning to Listen: Sonata Form

Learning to Listen: Sonata Form
Beethoven working on the Missa Solemnis
Ludwig van Beethoven when composing the Missa Solemnis - Joseph Karl Stieler
Courtesy of the Wikimedia Foundation

Musical form is like an outline of a piece. You can think of it like a structure or frame of a house.

Examples of musical form include fugues, chaconnes, minuets, sarabandes — even the concerto has a typical form to it.

In the middle of the 18th century, right around the time Johann Sebastian Bach died, composers started focusing a lot of attention on something called "Sonata form".

Composers started using Sonata form so much that it became expected that you'd hear it used in the first movement of big works like symphonies, concertos and instrumental sonatas.

As a result, it's sometimes called "first-movement form".

There are loose rules to Sonata form. There are three large sections to it: the exposition, the development and the recapitulation. The exposition itself contains two melodies — a primary theme and a secondary theme.

And while Sonata form can become far more complicated, we'll stick to some cut-and-dried examples for the sake of ease.

In today's Learning to Listen, you'll hear examples of Sonata form from Mozart, Beethoven, Clementi and Prokofiev.

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