Sonata

Sonata (/səˈnɑːtə/; Italian: [soˈnaːta], pl. sonate; from Latin and Italian: sonare, "to sound"), in music, literally means a piece played as opposed to a cantata (Latin and Italian cantare, "to sing"), a piece sung. The term evolved through the history of music, designating a variety of forms until the Classical era, when it took on increasing importance, and is vague. By the early 19th century it came to represent a principle of composing large-scale works. It was applied to most instrumental genres and regarded—alongside the fugue—as one of two fundamental methods of organizing, interpreting and analyzing concert music. Though the musical style of sonatas has changed since the Classical era, most 20th- and 21st-century sonatas still maintain the same structure.

The term sonatina, pl. sonatine, the diminutive form of sonata, is often used for a short or technically easy sonata.

Instrumentation

In the Baroque period, a sonata was for one or more instruments almost always with continuo. After the Baroque period most works designated as sonatas specifically are performed by a solo instrument, most often a keyboard instrument, or by a solo instrument accompanied by a keyboard instrument.

Sonata in B minor (Liszt)

The Sonata in B minor (German: Klaviersonate h-moll), S.178, is a sonata for solo piano by Franz Liszt. It was completed in 1853 and published in 1854 with a dedication to Robert Schumann.

History

Liszt noted on the sonata's manuscript that it was completed on February 2, 1853, but he had composed an earlier version by 1849. At this point in his life, Liszt's career as a traveling virtuoso had almost entirely subsided, as he had been influenced towards leading the life of a composer rather than a performer by Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein almost five years earlier. Liszt's life was established in Weimar and he was living a comfortable lifestyle, composing, and occasionally performing, entirely by choice rather than necessity.

The sonata was dedicated to Robert Schumann, in return for Schumann's dedication of his Fantasie in C major, Op. 17 (published 1839) to Liszt. A copy of the sonata arrived at Schumann's house in May 1854, after he had entered Endenich sanatorium. His wife Clara Schumann did not perform the sonata; according to scholar Alan Walker she found it "merely a blind noise".

Sonata (building design software)

Sonata was a 3D building design software application developed in the early 1980s and now regarded as a forerunner to today's building information modelling applications.

Sonata was commercially released in 1986, having been developed by Jonathan Ingram of T2 Solutions (renamed from GMW Computers in 1987 - which was eventually bought by Alias|Wavefront), and was a successor to GMW's RUCAPS. Like RUCAPS it was expensive to purchase and required substantial investment in suitable workstation computer hardware (by contrast, other 2D CAD systems could run on personal computers), which limited its use to large architectural and engineering practices. However, as a BIM application, in addition to geometric modelling, it could model complete buildings, including costs and staging of the construction process.

US-based architect HKS used the software in 1992 to design a horse racing facility (Lone Star Park in Grand Prairie, Texas) and subsequently purchased a successor product, Reflex.