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Most works designated as sonatas are performed by a solo instrument (most often a keyboard instrument) or by a solo instrument together with a keyboard instrument.
As various scholars have remarked, this makes the term rather arbitrary: the musical characteristics of the sonata (at any particular time) tend to be carried over to works composed for larger forces. It would be perfectly sensible to speak of symphonies as being sonatas for orchestra, string quartets as being sonatas for string quartet, and so on; but by custom these usages are avoided.
By the time of Arcangelo Corelli two polyphonic types of sonata were established, the sonata da chiesa and the sonata da camera .
The sonata da chiesa, generally for one or more violins and bass, consisted normally of a slow introduction, a loosely fugued allegro, a cantabile slow movement and a lively finale in some such binary form as suggests affinity with the dance-tunes of the suite. This scheme, however, is not very clearly defined, until the works of Johann Sebastian Bach and George Friderich Handel, when it becomes the sonata par excellence and persists as a tradition of Italian violin music even into the early 19th century in the works of Boccherini.
The sonata da camera consisted almost entirely of idealized dance-tunes. By the time of Bach and Handel it had, on the one hand, become entirely separate from the sonata, and was known as the suite, partita, ordre or (when it had a prelude in the form of a French opera-overture) the overture. On the other hand, the features of sonata da chiesa and sonata da camera became freely intermixed. But Bach, who does not use those titles, yet keeps the two types so distinct that they can be recognized by style and form. Thus, in his six solo violin sonatas, Nos. 1, 3 and 5 are sonate de chiesa, and Nos. 2, 4 and 6 are called partitas, but are admissible among the sonatas as being sonate da camera.
The term sonata is also applied to the series of over 500 works for harpsichord solo written by Domenico ScarlattiDomenico Scarlatti ( October 26, 1685 July 23, 1757) was an Italian composer of the Baroque era. He was extremely influential in the development of keyboard music, especially in Spain, Portugal and England, through his highly idiosyncratic and individual. These pieces are in one movement only, comprising two parts that are in the same tempo and use the same thematic material. They frequently involve virtuosity and are admired for their great variety and invention.
The sonatas of Domenico Paradies are mild and elongated works of this type with a graceful and melodious little second movement added. The manuscript on which Longo bases his edition of Scarlatti frequently shows a similar juxtaposition of movements, though without definite indication of their connection. The style is still traceable in the sonatas of the later classics, whenever a first movement is in a uniform rush of rapid motion, as in Mozart's violin sonata in F (Kochel's Catalogue, No. 377), and in several of ClementiMuzio Clementi ( January 24, 1752 March 10, 1832) was a classical composer, and acknowledged as the first to write specifically for the piano. Clementi is best known for his collection of piano studies, Gradus ad Parnassum to which Debussy's piece "Doctor's best works.