The MSA’s Study Session during the 2025 meeting of the American Musicological Society in Minneapolis will take place Friday, November 7 from 12:30 to 2:30PM in Northstar Ballroom A at the conference hotel.
Edward Klorman: “Mozart’s Early Viennese String Quartets, K. 168-73, and the Question of Stylistic Continuity”
For some 200 years, editions of Mozart’s string quartets have designated his last ten quartets (from K. 387 to K. 590) as his ten “celebrated” or “principal” quartets. These monickers reflect a traditional view of his earlier quartet collections as juvenilia, and that, after a ten-year hiatus from quartet-writing, he composed his “Haydn” quartets in 1782–85, inspired by the novel style of Haydn’s Op. 33. My research pushes back on this narrative through analytic readings of Mozart’s earlier collection of Viennese quartets (K. 168–173, composed 1773) that highlight certain aspects of stylistic continuity between the earlier and later quartets.
Paul Corneilson: “The Original Cast of Mozart’s La finta giardiniera”
The original cast of Mozart’s La finta giardiniera (1775) has never been adequately addressed. Act 1 of Mozart’s autograph score is missing and presumed lost, and a printed libretto for the production at the Salvatortheater in Munich does not survive. The cast proposed by the editors of the opera in the NMA is based on older literature, and does not include a potential singer for the role of Arminda. After examining the surviving libretti and other documentation from Munich in the mid-1770s, I propose a more plausible solution.
Matteo Magarotto: “A Modular Analysis of Mozart’s Sonatas: A Case Study with K. 279-84”
At an Encounter with Dorian Bandy and Dean Sutcliffe in January 2025, the notion of a “modular” design in Mozart’s music kept creeping in. The insight effectively coordinates today’s diverse analytical models under a central signifier: basic phrasal units in sonata theory are called “modules” (Hepokoski and Darcy 2006); schemata and topics (Gjerdingen 2007, Mirka 2014) are similarly modular. Moreover, the modular perspective aligns with 18th-century views of a composition as a succession of “ideas” (Gedanken). In this presentation, I advocate for an integrated “modular analysis,” using Mozart’s first set of unaccompanied keyboard sonatas (ca. 1775) as case study. Through a comparative analysis of the first movements, I posit the existence of mental scripts that coordinate a “horizontal” series of functional slots with “vertical” subsets of schematic and topical options for each slot. I highlight how such an approach can produce results that are both historically grounded and hermeneutically rich.
Beverly Wilcox: “Paris in the 1770s: Mozart, Mass Patronage, and the Central European Travel Itinerary”
This paper examines Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s 1777–1778 visit to Paris through the lens of a broader Central European paƩern: Austro-Bohemian musicians who came to display their talents in public and semi-public concerts and engrave their works for sale to the public. These pioneers struggled to break free of court society and live as freelance arƟsts at a Ɵme when the insƟtuƟons necessary to do so – publishing and concerƟzing for a mass market of musical amateurs – were only beginning to develop. Paris was, in the 1770s, the only European city where both were readily available, and Mozart’s leƩers are some of the most detailed descripƟons we have of this unique musical marketplace. This study situates his leƩers within the experiences of a cohort of Austro-Bohemian musicians and contextualizes his strategies in light of those of others, including the Stamitz family of violinists and the Bohemian serf horn player Giovanni Punto.