A sonata is a piece of music that is meant to be played by an instrument. The name comes from the Italian word "sonare" which means “ to play”.
Sonata – a musical piece that is played by one or more instruments and usually has 3 or 4 movements.
Form - the basic plan or design for a musical piece.
Sonata form – the structure of a movement of a piece. This form is often used in the first movement of a sonata, but is also used in symphonies and string quartets.
Sonatas became a popular type of composition for instruments during the Baroque period in the 1600s.
Before then composers mostly wrote works for singers, but at that time people became interested in music for instruments.
During the Classical period Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven wrote many sonatas and came up with some ideas for how a sonata should be written.
One of the ideas that became common was the sonata form. This was a way of organizing musical ideas and was usually used for structure of the first movement of a sonata.
The form of a piece is the plan or design that a composer uses. When you write a story, you create a beginning, middle, and end, and in each part something happens – a character is introduced, a problem arises, or happy solution is found.
Musical pieces have the same kind of structure.
A movement composed in sonata form has three parts:
¤ 1. Exposition
¤ 2. Development
¤ 3. Recapitulation