64: Sonata Form

The next form we need to discuss, one that is still quite simple, is “sonata(-allegro)” form. A note about the name: it need not be used in a sonata (but very often is) and it need not be as fast as an Allegro (but it very often is).


Recall from a few weeks ago that while introducing the Alberti bass, I pointed to the first movement of Mozart’s 16th piano sonata (“for beginners”). That first movement will again be my reference, but I won’t transcribe it, since the whole thing would take too long. I do, however, strongly encourage you to go listen to the first movement, several times if need be—it’s about 3 minutes long, plus or minus a few seconds depending on the exact performance.

The movement starts with the theme that I used in the Alberti bass article, which is basically Mozart’s way of saying “Hi! I’m here to play a piano sonata for you, and it’s in C major, enjoy!”—it’s very simple, it introduces the key and the character, it starts grounded in I, but very seamlessly moves by the end of the 12 bars into V. We’ll call this theme “A”.

Theme “B” is 16 bars, and it starts in V, but very quickly moves into V’s dominant (there is a special name for this “dominant of the dominant”-type analysis, which we’ll get to in a few articles). A few broken chords and arpeggios later, and we’re done with B, firmly grounded in V of the original key. The material in (AB) then repeats.

We’ve just heard about 2 minutes of music: ABAB. This 1) established the key early 2) gave us a sense of the material and 3) moved into the dominant by the end of B, whether there was a repeat or not. This, in the context of sonata form, is the “exposition.”

Take a moment to pause here. We’ve just finished the “exposition”—kind of like the introductory paragraph of an essay in school. Now, we’re about to move to the development. This, continuing the essay analogy, is the middle 3 or 4 paragraphs, where you take the argument you laid out in the intro, and flesh it out.

In this case, Mozart begins the development by bringing back and fleshing out what we literally just heard—expanding the end of the exposition into its own little moment. Notice how similar the broken chords early in the development are, compared to the end of the exposition, only the development starts in G minor, where the exposition ended in G major. These kinds of modulations from major to minor or vice versa entering the development are very common. It’s also very common to see what has happened here: that the last part of the exposition is explored first in the development, then the beginning of the exposition is explored later. This is often—but not here—the longest, most complex part of a movement in sonata form.

What always follows the development is the “recapitulation”—a return of the exposition’s material, sometimes in BA order (when the exposition was, of course, AB). Most of the time—but not here, and the fact that this happens and works so well is one of the reasons Mozart is rightly regarded as a genius—the development returns in the tonic. Mozart, however, chooses to bring back the material, at least initially, in F rather than C. But here’s why that works so well. Recall that the overall arc of the exposition took us from C to G. If Mozart had done so again in the recapitulation, we’d start the recapitulation in C and end in G, which isn’t “home,” so it’s not where we want to end up. So Mozart started the recap in F, so that the corresponding modulation would take him to F’s dominant, which is C, which is home, which is exactly where we want to end up. What appears to be just the exposition all over again (but in F) is in fact the perfect bridge back home to C on the first beat of the bar 3 before the end.  

But the movement doesn’t end there—the last almost-3 bars are a sort of “ending after the ending”, since we’ve already made it back to C major thanks to Mozart’s trick in the recap. Those almost-3 bars are a fourth, final, and optional section in sonata form (which must always go here if it’s present at all—never earlier) called a “coda”, from the Italian for “tail”, which exists to tie up loose ends, maybe restate a theme one more time, reaffirm the tonic key, and say goodbye to the movement.

Listen to the movement (or the whole sonata) here: Mitsuko Uchida - Piano Sonata No. 16 in C Major K. 545 (W.A. Mozart) Full (1984)—Mitsuko Uchida has long been one of my favorite interpreters of Mozart’s piano repertoire.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

35: Figured Bass

Image
  There’s a system of notating harmonies that’s rather unique to the Baroque era, but which is so frequently used there, and so important to it, that no discussion of theory would ever be complete if we did not cover it. This is the notation of figured bass: “figured,” in the sense of using figures (numbers) to notate the bass. Figured bass was, in a sense, its own notation completely separate from the five lines and four spaces of the staff, which was nearly exclusively the purview of cellists, bassists, harpsichords, and organists.  Figured bass, fair warning, can be intimidating at first. But, just as with anything else we’ve covered so far, the more you practice reading it, the better you’ll get.  In this system, we use numbers to indicate intervals above the bass. We stack them, and this is how we build chords. If you can’t stack them, nowadays, it’s perfectly fine to use slashes and write the numbers horizontally.  Let’s start with the easiest figured bass nota...
Read more

58: Swell pedals and swell shades

There’s one pedal that we haven’t discussed on the organ because it isn’t one of the “note” pedals—in fact, it’s the only one that doesn’t have a pitch. Instead, the missing pedal is the swell pedal. Look at the body of the organ (the assembly of where all the pipes are, as opposed to the “console”, where the organist sits and plays the instrument—these may or may not be physically close to each other), and you’ll probably see what kind of look like plantation shutters. (If you know where my parish is, then this feature of the organ is very clearly visible on ours. Your local organ might not be so obvious.) These shutters, called “swell shutters/shades,” show or hide the pipes of the organ. Organs have instantaneous dynamic control—the amount of pressure you put on a key dictates how much air flows through the pipes, just like a piano allows you to adjust dynamics on the fly by changing the amount of pressure with which the hammer hits the string(s) given the pressure on the key. Thes...
Read more

54: Trills in the Baroque vs. Classical Periods

Image
Baroque music is known for its incredibly technical and ornamented style. The most common and fundamental of those ornaments is our focus today: the trill. Most simply, a trill is a very fast, repeated alternation of two notes. In the vast majority of cases, those notes are adjacent, but that is not a requirement. Given how fast and common they are, regardless of what you play—whether it’s a string, wind, or keyboard instrument, or your voice—they have a reputation for being quite tiring to play. The period matters when considering a trill. Classical and later composers treat trills, in a sense, in the opposite manner than Baroque composers do. Let me show you two examples: First, the Baroque way of thinking. This is a PAC:   and especially in the Baroque era, when the plucked harpsichord dominated over the hammered piano, it was hard to sustain sounds for long since the sound of the plucking decays quickly. The trill was developed in response, out of a need both to ornam...
Read more