Scarlatti Sonata K322 in A Major

Scarlatti’s Sonata K.322 for Classical Guitar

Domenico Scarlatti’s Sonata in A major, K.322 (L.483), sits among the composer’s most performed keyboard works on the classical guitar. It closes out CGC Academy’s Grade 8 curriculum as a fitting capstone: an energetic and rhythmic piece with a continuously moving bass line, fast scale runs, and a string of bright trills, all amidst a delicate dance-like lift. Have a listen to Simon’s fun and colorful performance in the video above and then let’s take a look at the piece’s background and its place within the guitar repertoire.

Who Was Domenico Scarlatti

Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti was born in Naples in 1685, the same year as Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel. This says a lot about how differently music could develop across a continent before travel and communication tied the world together: three composers born within months of each other, each shaping a distinct national and personal style, largely without hearing one another’s music.

Scarlatti was the sixth of ten children born to Alessandro Scarlatti, himself a major opera composer of the Neapolitan school, and Domenico’s early training came from within that operatic, Italianate world. He held early posts in Naples and Rome as a composer and organist, and by his 20s he had built a reputation as a formidable harpsichordist, reportedly matching Handel note for note in a celebrated keyboard contest arranged in Rome around 1709, though by most accounts Handel was judged the stronger organist. But the music Scarlatti is remembered for today, the 555 keyboard sonatas that make up the bulk of his surviving output, came later, and came from somewhere else entirely.

The Move to Spain and Its Influence on His Style

Around 1719, Scarlatti took a post at the Portuguese royal court in Lisbon, where he taught keyboard to the young Princess Maria Barbara. When Maria Barbara married the heir to the Spanish throne in 1729, Scarlatti followed her to Madrid, and he would spend the rest of his life, nearly three decades, in Spain. It’s in this Iberian period that almost all of his keyboard sonatas were written, and it’s here that his style became something distinct from the Italian and Portuguese-Spanish court music around him.

Scarlatti absorbed the sounds of Spanish popular and folk music directly. He took guitar strumming, castanets, the stamping rhythms of flamenco and fandango, and the melodic turns of Moorish-influenced Andalusian song, and folded them into the aristocratic language of the harpsichord. His sonatas imitate guitar rasgueado with rapid repeated chords, use hand-crossings that suggest the leaping footwork of dance, and lean on modal, Phrygian-tinged melodic lines borrowed from flamenco practice. This is part of why his music sits so naturally on the classical guitar: Scarlatti was, in effect, already writing guitar music, just for another instrument. His connection to the Spanish guitar tradition that would flourish a century later in the hands of Tárrega and his students is more than coincidental proximity; the two traditions share a common well of Iberian folk material.

Style: Dissonance, Ornamentation, and Form

Three features define Scarlatti’s mature style, all of which are present in K.322.

The first is his handling of dissonance. Scarlatti frequently reaches for a sharp, close-interval clash, often an acciaccatura, a “crushed” grace note struck simultaneously with the note it decorates, and then releases it into consonance almost immediately. The effect is a kind of harmonic clash that startles the listener and then quickly resolves. It’s a texture borrowed in part from Iberian guitar and keyboard practice, where such crunches were a common ornamental color.

The second is ornamentation. Scarlatti’s trills, turns, and mordents tend to be bright and quick rather than long and expressive in the French Baroque manner. On the harpsichord, where a struck note begins decaying the instant it sounds, fast ornamentation helps sustain the impression of a ringing, chiming texture. That same effect translates naturally to the guitar, another plucked, decaying-tone instrument, which is part of why Scarlatti’s ornamental writing feels so at home in a guitarist’s hands.

The third is form, and here a common misconception is worth clearing up. Despite the title “sonata,” Scarlatti’s works don’t follow the sonata-allegro form later codified by Haydn and Mozart, with its exposition, development, and recapitulation. Scarlatti was writing before that structure existed. His sonatas are single-movement works in binary form: two roughly balanced halves, each repeated, the first modulating away from the home key and the second finding its way back. K.322 follows this pattern closely, its two halves built from the same rhythmic material, restated and reworked rather than developed in the later Classical sense.

From Harpsichord to Guitar

Fitting a piece conceived for a two-manual instrument played with ten independent fingers onto six strings and one pair of hands presents real challenges for an arranger. The continuous moving bass line that gives the piece its rhythmic drive has to share space with the melodic material and harmony above it, all on an instrument that can sound at most six notes at once, and usually far fewer comfortably. Passages that lie easily under two hands spread across a keyboard sometimes require compromise: octave displacement, a thinned chord, or a hand-crossing figure reworked into something a guitarist’s right hand can articulate cleanly.

What makes K.322, and much of Scarlatti’s output, unusually guitar-friendly is that so many of these keyboard textures were already imitating guitar textures in the first place. Strummed chords translate back to strummed chords. Rapid repeated notes suit a guitarist’s alternating right-hand fingers about as well as they suit a harpsichordist’s fingers. The piece doesn’t fight the instrument the way some keyboard transcriptions do; it recognizes something closer to home.

Listen to this bright and energetic piece played on its original instrument:

Its Place in the Repertoire

Guitarists have been arranging Scarlatti’s sonatas for well over a century, and K.322 in particular has become one of the more widely performed and taught examples, appearing in method books, exam syllabi, and recital programs around the world. Multiple published and self-published arrangements exist, generally staying close to the original text with only the adjustments necessary for six strings, a sign of how little needs to change to make the music work.

That K.322 now sits near the top of a graded curriculum built for guitarists, despite never being written with the instrument in mind, says something about how thoroughly Scarlatti’s Iberian sonatas have been adopted into the repertoire. Alongside the guitar transcriptions of J.S. Bach, another composer who never wrote a note for the instrument, Scarlatti’s sonatas stand as proof that a piece’s home instrument matters less than whether its musical ideas translate. In Scarlatti’s case, they translate remarkably well.