ABSTRACT
The term sonata has no single meaning: that is one reason why Charles Rosen entitled his 1980 book Sonata Forms, in the plural. The sonata is both a genre, originating in the seventeenth century, and a form, crystallized in the latter half of the eighteenth. In purely formalist terms, the nineteenth-century sonata is a received structure no longer inspirited with the original impulse. In the twentieth century, particularly in the hands of the so-called neoclassicists, the sonata has enjoyed a remarkable renaissance. In particular, the sonatas of Debussy and Bartók are true reinventions, and not of the wheel. Ravel, Ives, and Carter have also succeeded, not just in writing sonatas that resemble those of the eighteenth century, but in writing true chamber sonatas.
