First Movement Form (Sonata-Allegro Form)

Hi, everybody. I thought I'd greet everyone before I lost all my friends for ever!

Writing about form is difficult, without a blackboard, a piano, music examples, anything like that, but I'm going to do it. I want to add the examples somehow, someday, but I'm going to get started right away, or this will never get done.

'Form' is the word used to describe the relationship between the parts and the whole of a piece of music, or a movement of a piece of music. The first movement of a conventional symphony, for example by Haydn or Mozart, has a particularly interesting form, and this is what I'm going to try and describe. Conventional music, say of the centuries preceding the 20th, is usually written in movements, and each movement is usually written in a key, such as B Flat major. The word key stands for a set of seven notes, which form a sort of musical home scale for the movement. The music can, and usually will, travel away from this home key, and the further it goes, using different notes (called accidentals, for no good reason,) the more a listener gets a feeling of being far from home. For instance, think of the theme from Jeopardy. It's a simple little ditty, and comes to a close with hardly any departure from its home key. Then, the same tune is repeated, but most definitely in a different key. (In fact, the choice of key is startlingly unconventional, presumably a deliberate choice, to point up the intellectual atmosphere of the show.) And then, the tune is repeated once again, in yet another key! So, all the repetitions of that tune constitute a kind of 'form' for that theme, a rather unusual one (but anticipated by Wagner in his Tannhauser overture; we'll talk about that another time...) Let's start with some major key; it doesn't matter which. There are two related major keys with the same notes except for just one each. One of them is only different because the fourth note up from the home note is replaced with a note one semitone higher. This new set is called the key of the dominant. Almost any tune worth its salt (and certainly its accompanying harmony) will take a brief trip to the key of the dominant. (Example: in the Star Spangled Banner, by the time you get to "dawn's early light?" you've already gone to the dominant. The second syllable of "early" is on the raised fourth note that signals the arrival at the new major key. Soon afterwards, however, the tune hurries back to the home key. But the same little sortie out to the dominant key happens in the third line. Then, towards the end, the words "...that our flag was still there!" goes into the dominant yet again. This time it is the word "still" that hosts the raised fourth note. (The official description of that note is 'the fourth degree of the scale.') Another major key very closely related to the home key is the subdominant. This one has all the same notes as the home key, except that instead of the seventh note, it has the note one semitone below it. Let's illustrate with C major. C major has all the white notes: C,D,E,F,G,A,B,C. Its dominant major key is G major: GABCDE F# G. Notice the new note F#. Notice that it replaces the note F, which was the fourth degree of the scale of C major. The subdominant major key (of C, of course) is F major: F, G, A, Bflat, C, D, E, F. Notice the new note Bflat, which replaces B, which was the seventh degree of C.

Sonata-Allegro Form

This form is very likely to have been inspired by literary notions, because the basis of the form is a choice of two themes, or motifs. These are brief musical phrases that are highly recognizable. For example, there is the famous "da-da-da-DUM!" of Beethoven's Fifth, or the obsessive tune of Mozart's G minor symphony, or the famous unison theme of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Listen to a clip of the beginning of this movement. You first hear Theme No. 1, and then it fades away, and we hear Theme No. 2. The first theme is vigorous and energetic, and the second softly falling, sweet and consoling. Traditionally the themes have been masculine and feminine, respectively, but obviously the choice of attributes was vague and subjective. In this movement, Mozart gives us two themes that are sufficiently masculine on one instance and feminine in the other to satisfy anybody. This first musical example simply shows the two themes being "announced". If you have a fairly sensitive ear, you could tell that the Second Theme is actually in a slightly different key (D major) than the First Theme was (G major). It's almost impossible to notice the key changing, because Mozart was so smooth and clever in how he managed the transition! Exposition

After the two themes have been announced (in this example; if you have your own recording to listen to, the exposition is repeated in its entirely, to provide everyone a clear shot at recognizing the two themes), the central part of the movement consists of a development section. The themes are used in various ways, combined, strung together, turned upside-down, separated into bits and put back together, etc etc. (It sounds a lot more exciting in theory than it is in practice. Mozart gave this piece only a modest development here, only a few seconds.)

After the development, there is a restatement of the two main themes, called the recapitulation. The themes are re-announced, in their usual order, but this time, they are both in the same key. This is the exciting problem that the composer has to solve. If the recapitulation is simply the exposition, the second theme would be in the wrong key, according to The Rules. So things have to be changed around just a tiny little bit to set the Second Theme also in G major! Here are the two themes as they appear in the recapitulation of this particular recording, with the intervening stuff taken out for easy comparison: Recapitulation 

Well, that almost completes the most interesting form that has come down to us in classical music: First Movement, or Sonata-Allegro Form.  All that remains is a grand ending for the movement, called a coda (which simply means "tail" in Italian).  Often the coda is just a number of loud chords, a sort of punctuation to finish off the movement.

The rest of the Symphony (or sonata, or whatever) usually consists of a beautiful, slow, quiet, second movement, and then the structure varies a little, as follows.

In symphonies, there is a third movement, which used to be a minuet, which reveals the origins of the symphony in dance suites of the seventeenth century.  It was usually a minuet, then a contrasting minuet for a reduced number of parts, possibly even just three parts, called the Trio; followed by the first minuet again.  Later on, Beethoven substituted a movement called a scherzo, which means a joke.  They were essentially a movement in triple time, with surprising and humorous elements in them.

Then, all compositions in this general category: Sonatas, Concertos, Symphonies, have a last movement--a finale, as they are called--which is usually a rollicking, highly rhythmic movement to finish off the work.  They are sometimes built on the same model as the first movement (Sonata-Allegro form), or sometimes a rondo form, where it begins with a tune, which is followed by a different tune, then the first tune again, then another tune, and so on.  Very rarely, the finale is a hybrid of the Sonata-Allegro form and the Rondo, where there is a little development section as well.

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