Sonata-allegro Form

Hello and welcome back. I'm Joseph Hoffman and today we're going to take a closer look at the form of "Sonatina" in C major. "Sonatina" in C was written using a special form called sonata-allegro form. Sonata-allegro form was used extensively back in the Classical period. The time of Mozart, Clementi, and Beethoven. If you keep studying piano to an advanced level, which I hope you do, someday you'll be able to play a Beethoven sonata. The music we're listening to now is Beethoven's famous "Moonlight Sonata" third movement. Beethoven sonatas are some of the greatest piano works ever written. So fun to play. And knowing Sonata Allegro form will help you understand how these sonatas are built. Let's check out Clementi's "Sonatina" in C to start our form analysis. Now you've been hearing me use the term sonata today, but this is a sonatina. What's the difference? Well, a sonatina is simply a short sonata. And you might think: wait, this sonatina is really long. It's three movements. Well, sonatas can actually be more like twenty pages long, but sonatinas and sonatas both generally have three movements, a fast movement, a slow movement, then a fast movement. And in movement number one, generally it's always going to be allegro and it will be in sonata allegro form called such because this first movement is allegro. So, sonata allegro form starts with an exposition, which I will color green today. This whole section is called the exposition. In the exposition, the composer is setting out the main themes of this movement. A theme is basically an easy to recognize melody. Like here we have our theme one. Let's listen. That's easy to recognize, right? It's a theme or melody that you could hum to yourself. So a good theme, easy to recognize, easy to hum. Now, what happens next? We're still in our theme number one, but then something happens. We transition to a new theme now here's something new. So we could call this theme number two. So mark with the number two in a triangle, and then theme number two continues All the way to the end of the exposition. We have a cadence here. A cadence is a resting point where it sounds like the piece comes to a stop momentarily. Now, let's look at the key that we're in for each theme. Theme number one is in the key of C major. We start on a C, we have no sharps or flats. That tells us we're in C major, but we don't stay in C major. Starting here, we start to transition or modulate to a new key. How do I know we're modulating? Well notice all of these F sharps start to appear, and then starting here, What kind of major scale do we have here? It's a G major scale. We have all these F-sharps, we have a G major scale, and then we cadence on a G with a G major arpeggio in the left hand. All these are big clues to us that we are no longer in the key of C we are now in the key of G major. Now this is part of sonata allegro form. The first theme will be in the original key, which we call tonic. Tonic is just a fancy music theory word for your original home base key. As we start in the tonic key of C major, then in sonata allegro form. Composers want to take us on a journey through different keys, so we modulate up a fifth: one, two, three, four, five, to the dominant key. The dominant key is the fifth note of your scale, which is G. Since we're starting in C major, the dominant is G. So here theme group 2 is in the key of the dominant G major, and that's a pattern we see throughout other sonatas and sonatinas in sonata allegro form. The composer is taking us on a journey. We start in the tonic, a familiar key we go on a journey to the dominant. We cadence, and then that all repeats. See if you can hear all of those things as I play it. Feel the stability of this first theme group, and then notice see if your ears can hear when it starts to transition taking us on a journey to some new place to a new key of the dominant. See if you can hear all of that. Here's the stable first theme. Now listen. Now we're somewhere new. We end in G then back to home base. Here comes a transition again. Now you can feel that we're in a new place. So, let's review the exposition one more time. We start with theme one in the tonic key, which is usually represented with a Roman numeral I, then we modulate to the key of the dominant for theme two. Since the dominant is built on the fifth note of the scale, we represent dominant with a Roman numeral V, then the whole thing repeats. Back to theme one in the tonic key, modulate, then on to theme two in the dominant key, and then on to the next section which is called the development. The development is a rather unpredictable section. During the development, a composer takes the two main themes from the exposition and then has some fun with them. Those themes can get chopped up, mixed up, stretched out, and even flipped upside down, and expect to modulate to all kinds of different keys too. So here's our development and let's mark it pink. Pinkish purple. Let's see what's happening here. Does this sound familiar at all? Well, it's very similar to this: To our theme number one, but now Clementi has put it in a new key and made it piano. Now we have a G major triad, and a C minor triad, which is going to make thi ...