Brass Tacks: The Symphony and Sonata Form

“Faerie’s Aire and Death Waltz"
(from ‘A Tribute to Zdenko G. Fibich’) by John Stump.
© the composer.

Sonata Allegro and other mysteries.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

The other night, a friend said to me: "I love your writing but a lot of what you write about goes whoosh right over my head. So I thought I'd address that with some articles talking about basic musical structure and compositional techniques. Maybe they'll make the reviews make more sense and the whole site be more entertaining. Hope you like it.

Working as a music writer one spends a lot of time grappling with words like Adagio, Allegro and Scherzo. These terms are usually used as the abstract titles of movements of large-scale pieces of classical music, usually symphonies or concertos.

With that in mind, here's a short fast guide to the shape of a symphony, and some of the tempos and modifiers that you encounter in the course of listening to a piece. (These forms can also apply to works like three-movement sonatas and concertos, but we'll get to that later.

I'm going to use the Mozart Symphony No. 40 in G Minor as an example, because it follows form fairly closely and just about everybody knows it.