Domenico Scarlatti Keyboard Sonata Genre Classification

The emergence of great works was related to the period, the education, the family and the environment which the musician lived in, and related to the occupation, experience the musician was engaged in, and also related to the musician's personality. Great changes had been taken place in Europe in the period which Domenico Scarlatti lived in. At that time, peoples' minds had been renovated with the new ideas of the Enlightenment. Creative thinking methods and individual character liberation was dominant in the new period's thought field. The vises insisted the god's mind change to the people's. The rule by religion was getting collapsed. Nature and harmony, freedom and eternity had become people's thirsty and yearn. In the musical history the period of 17th to 18th century had been known as Baroque. Marvelous form, sober frame and intellectual emotion were the feature of this period in art.The contributions Domenico Scarlatti had made in musical history will not worn away. The one's that emerged in his keyboard sonatas, and verified and recognized generally by the people were applying hands crossing during instrumental performance, rapid repetition of note, and arpeggio figurations rapidly traversing the length of the keyboard, and so on. Applying fortuitous audaciously during creation was very similar to fortuitous musical composition skill that emerged in 20th century. The most outstanding contribution was blazed new trails in structure. Nearly all his sonatas had utilized the classical sonata formulas that came from the classical two shift formulas. This played an important part in the emergence and development that were significant for the musical history for nest years.The variety and plentiful content of Domenico Scarlatti's sonatas is astonishing. They had blazed new trails in harmony, musical form, style and instrumentalperformance skill. They are extremely valuable to study and refer to, and greatly affective to the posterities. All of the styles were known as Sonatas by the musician, but the styles indicated by the musician himself were Minuet, Fuga, Gavota, Pastoral, Capriccio, Gegue and Toccata. Through posterities analyzing, summing and indicating, and the writer's analyzing and studying, the styles defined evidently are Pavan, Bourree, Ricercare, Sarabande, Allemande and Courante. Also, there are cases that one musical composition combined many styles. Mr. Scarlatti composed 555 keyboard sonatas which have been called a great treasure in European Baroque's styles owing to the variety of styles. The first important task of this paper is to classifying, deeply analyzing and studying the styles of the sonatas.