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form

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necessary when discussing the effect of music

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people hear form or analysis in a musical context and they tend to think of something dry

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form is indeed about rules

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and about the grammar and construction of music

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it is ultimately all about psychology

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not just the way the music is put together or works

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but the way it works on the listener

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to study the musical structure is to create a map of the emotional content of a piece of music

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it's no accident that work on harmony and form is called analysis

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Charles Rosen

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books

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Sonata Forms

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The Classical Style

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better to understand the sonata culture

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explains the sources of the power in classical music

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"the sonata is not a definite form like a minuet, a da capo aria, or a French overture, it is, like the fugue, a way of writing, a feeling for proportion, direction and texture, rather than a pattern. This is why it was able to encompass such a wide variety of music and why it is so difficult to speak about clearly. It was also difficult to create. Bach's music, while it involves certain harmonic relationships which become crucial in the classical style, is in very clear cut ways different, pre-classical. And after he died, there was a period of at least fifteen years before the new style asserted itself. It's not a coincidence that after Bach's death, well over a decade passed before Haydn, the next great composer, started writing great music. And from that point on, with Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, there's always significant overlap and a non-stop stream of masterpieces being written. The classic style was slow to come into focus, but once it did it almost immediately became the basis for much of the most extraordinary music ever. Many people, and not just hopelessly conservative ones, feel that the classical era, a.k.a. the heyday of sonata form, is the pinnacle of Western music.

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so sonata form was difficult to invent

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was also in a constant state of evolution

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even before Beethoven, composers were constantly testing the limits of the form, seeing if it could accommodate more material, different harmonic centers, tinkering with order of events

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rare animal

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neither primarily a pianist or an academic

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perhaps the most well-rounded and most seen musicians ever

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sonata form

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does not refer to the shape of an entire sonata

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but to a single movement

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it is the first movement on which this structural attention is usually lavish

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the story of two oppositions

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the opposition of two themes

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the opposition of the tonic and the dominant

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these are harmonic terms

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tonic

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the fundamental chord of whatever key we happen to be in

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if we are in the key of B-flat major, the tonic is a B-flat major chord

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dominant

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the chord that begins on the 5th scale degree

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for the key of B-flat major, this is the F-chord

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it is the central fact of tonal music that the dominant chord always wants to resolve to the tonic chord

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it may sound prosaic but that is really what all classical tonality is about

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everything else is an embellishment of that tonic relationship

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we start at home, the tonic, then we move away from home, traditionally always the dominant, and the tension in the work from that point on involves our emotional need for a return home