From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishsonataso‧na‧ta /səˈnɑːtə/ noun [countable] APMa piece of music with three or four parts that is written for a piano, or for a piano and another instrument a piano sonata
Examples from the Corpus
sonata• He ate lamb chops to the strains of one of Rossini's pre-adolescent sonatas.• The Marcello is an arrangement of a cello sonata.• The earliest music Hewitt-Jones acknowledged was a cello sonata written in 1951.• He exploited the space in an echo sonata for three violins by Marini, a charming interlude, adroitly dispatched.• A gentle Mozart sonata drifted round the room.• In the eighteenth century, with the Stamitz family, the sonata form was already treated symphonically.• Eighteenth-century products though they were, Beethoven's three sonatas of Op. 10 all pre-echo things to come in the nineteenth.• a violin sonata• These are not violin sonatas as we know them, rather sonatas for piano with violin accompaniment.Origin sonata (1600-1700) Italian sonare “to sound”, from Latin 