# Sonata Form Analyses.



## RogerWaters

Hi all,

I'm looking for books/articles/youtube videos that go through a significant number of classical pieces explicitly highlighting which parts of the piece correspond to parts of the sonata form.

Any resources much appreciated.


----------



## BabyGiraffe

Well, musical forms are not quite simplistic as the idealised forms taught in the musical composition classes.

Sometimes is debatable what exactly are certain parts of a musical piece - a sentence, period etc and there are completely different approaches to analysis. There are famous pieces analysed in different ways by the theoretists...

But try this:

https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Sonata-Theory-Deformations-Late-Eighteenth-Century/dp/0199773912

https://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-History-Western-Music-Theory/dp/0521686989

This is recommended to learn more about various musical theories (form, harmony, counterpoint, meter etc).


----------



## newyorkconversation

Interesting video about Sonata form:

Yale Open Courses
MUSI 112: Listening to Music
Professor Craig Wright 
Lecture 9 - Sonata-Allegro Form: Mozart and Beethoven (49 mins)






On a lighter note, the awesome Sonata Form Song by Joycelyn Swigger:


----------



## pkoi

I would also strongly recommend Hepokoski & Darcy, as it's the most thorough presentation of the late 18th century sonata form right now. Perhaps it could have had more examples from other 18th-century composers than Haydn, Beethoven & Mozart but nevertheless an excellent book if a bit confusing an unmusical in some of it's tools, if used very strictly.

Easier but good book discussing the 18th century sonata form (Hepokoski & Darcy's book is almost 700 pages long...) in my opinion is Charles Rosen's Sonata forms.

Leonard Ratner's "Classic Music - Expression, Form, And Style" is a bit older and discusses the 18th century music more broadly, but it has interesting points on how form was perceived in the 18th century. He shows lots of examples from composer handbooks of the time, such as Johann Christoph Koch's "Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition".


----------

