Musical Narrative with Sonatina in G Major (Clementi)

In my course with the RCM Elementary Specialist program, I learned to teach pieces with a clear musical narrative. I feel as a music teacher, we often take this as granted and assume our students know what we mean by “feeling” the tone and the pitch of the notes to elaborate and express our intentions. Understandably, that’s not often the case. For one of my assignments, I learned to articulate myself in a piece of instruction on how I can explain what musical narrative is, and how to apply it to a piece - namely, Sonatina in G Major by Muzio Clementi.

The recurring theme and elaboration provide a great opportunity for me to develop the characters in a meaningful way that ties the articulation and dynamics to a memorable yet imaginative story. Because the piece now links to a creative story, it makes learning the piece “by heart” much simpler for my students because rather than memorizing individual measures, they would be following along the narrative as they play the piece. Before I begin narrating the story, I’d ask my student to look at the music and provide some adjectives they see on the page, such as: sweetly (dolce), smooth (legato), soft (piano), and we’d create a character that fit these words.

A sweet, young girl with soft curly locks of hair is joyously skip-dancing through a forest, being very careful to not to cause too much “ruckus” with her free-spirited movements. Her light steps are captured in the legato LH notes until mm. 8. The RH notes represent her singing softly as she skips along the trail. Then at mm. 9, she notices a friendly squirrel who effortlessly climbs up a tree, as demonstrated in the scale of the RH passage. The repeating second and third beat notes in both hands for mm. 9 and 11 represents her trying to jump up to catch the squirrel in a playful manner. The squirrel, now noticing that she means no harm and is actually trying to be playful, bounces between tree branches to reciprocate the fun, as seen in mm. 13 with the leaping intervals in the RH. Finally, in mm. 15, we see the squirrel escapes into the high tree tops (RH scale passage), but not without dipping down to say goodbye to the girl. The full measure rest in mm.16 in the LH represents the girl ceasing her skips to look up at the squirrel bouncing away, and then returning back to her joyous steps and melodic singing in the forest in mm. 17. As the themes repeat, we imagine that as she continues on, she meets yet another squirrel, with her jumping up trying to catch it once again, but this time, in mm. 27 this squirrel is bolder than the last and runs so high up the tree the girl is relieved when it returns back into her line of vision (in mm. 30 where the B, A, G repeats to emphasize the ending of the phrase in the RH, which represents her sigh of relief). This squirrel wants to stay a bit longer to play, as demonstrated in mm. 32 onwards with the high RH melodic notes and the lengthier run in mm. 37.

However, in mm. 41 we hear a change of tonality and dynamic, it has suddenly become softer and slow-paced, and that’s because the girl and squirrel are hearing footsteps in the distance (as represented in the slur of the LH notes) and are eager to see who or what it may be. In mm. 45 we hear them being a bit more curious (as noted in the RH sixteenth notes of the third beat) to discover what it could be. In mm. 49, they understand that it’s actually the return of the first squirrel! The “jumpy” RH intervals complement the notes from mm. 13’s theme which represents the light hops of the squirrel’s character. Because the girl and her new friends are having so much fun, they play a bit more, as noted in the repeated measures heard in mm. 57 to mm. 70. Also, because the gathering of the pair is now a trio (with the girl and two squirrels), we notice the key also changes from G major to D major, which represents the shift in their group, though the motif doesn’t change. As the piece slows down in mm. 71-73, it represents the girl noticing that the sun is starting to set and it’s time to go home (i.e. return to the first theme in mm. 75). But before she returns home, she dances once more with her squirrel friends, with the final run in mm.104 to mm. 107 signifying her new friends running up and down in larger distances to end their day on a fun note.