Nicanor Abelardo (1893 - 1934) was a composer who emerged from post-colonial Philippines to create a national musical identity. A composer of over 140 works that included sonatas, concerti and chamber music, Abelardo is best known for elevating the Philippine genre of the Kundiman into a western art-song form. He is credited as being the most prominent and most influential of composers during the height of classism in Filipino music, a period which lasted from the 1860s until the end of World War II. The Violin Sonata (1931) by Abelardo is a composition for violin and piano that does not fit the characteristics most associated with Philippine music, particularly the Kundiman that Abelardo is best known for during that time period. Abelardo composed the Sonata as a student at the Chicago Musical College. It is a work that allowed the composer to explore unfamiliar musical languages influenced by Debussy, Schoenberg, Ravel, Hindemith and Bartok. The Sonata embodied a modern and western sound by a composer who exemplified Philippine music, nationalism and identity. There is no published copy of the Violin Sonata: only the original manuscript and a few hand-copied scores are in existence. This is a critical edition of Abelardo's Violin Sonata. It is a work that adheres to the tonal and structural paradigm of sonata form but is chromatically enriched by Abelardo's integration of the whole-tone scale to create a work that is both diatonic and atonal.