Music in the Sonata form for the saxophone: learning to play the Saxophone in online educational courses: online platforms vs. traditional education in a conservatory

Chinese musical instruments, both traditional and borrowed, play a pivotal role in the traditional music revival and help musicians to communicate the message, and express the national rhythm and rich musical texture. The purpose of this paper is to conduct a comparative analysis of the learning effectiveness regarding courses via online platforms and traditional teaching approaches. The learning program aims at the creation of music in the sonata genre and focuses on performance and composing quality. The realization of the article purpose was due to the use of analysis and observation methods, calculations of the variation coefficient, the efficiency coefficient, and the standard deviation coefficient. To achieve the goal and introduce the learning strategies, the scholars calculated the correlation coefficient of the rankings of the variables to identify the advantages of the learning platforms (Playground Sessions, Soundation Studio). The research finds that the advantages of the traditional approach are the quality of education (0.092), teamwork (0.086), time and cost savings (0.093) and motivation to master different styles of playing the saxophone (0.088). The scientists argue that to write sonatas, a musician should consider the expressiveness of sound, the musical melisma, the pitch, the colours of sound, and the timbre. It was found that in Group 1 (trained on the online learning platforms), the quality of written sonatas was higher (0.9), but the level of performance was lower (0.87) than among students in Group 2, who learnt to play the saxophone using traditional learning approaches (0.91). The difference in results is explained by the possibility of using the Soundation Studio computer programme. This programme helps musicians to work on and create musical compositions, however, the online platforms do not permit them to develop and acquire instrument-playing skills. The research significance is the possibility of using new approaches to writing sonatas as a part of an online learning course aimed to teach students to play the saxophone. The prospects for further research may be related to determining the most effective approaches for creating melodies in the sonata genre, considering the specifics of online learning, traditional teaching and blended learning system.