Conference Agenda

How did eighteenth-century musicians view earlier tonal practices? This paper marshals compositional and theoretical evidence to show that eighteenth-century musicians had a keen awareness of Renaissance tonal style. The features of this style include pervasive triadic root-position harmonies; localized accidental inflections in imperfect-to-perfect interval progressions; and avoidance of augmented and diminished intervals. Drawing on eighteenth-century theorists (Werckmeister 1702; Niedt 1717; Paolucci 1765; Martini 1772), as well as examples of stylistic pastiche by Telemann, Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven, this paper demonstrates that Renaissance tonal idioms constituted a well-established, albeit rarely used, stylistic topos in the eighteenth century.

As a case study, this paper focuses on the trio sections of two early Mozart minuets (from symphonies K. 130 and K. 132), which evoke Renaissance music through characteristic progressions. Prior scholars (Zaslaw 1990; Heartz 1995; Brown 2002) have described these trios as “modal,” a term widely used by recent authors—but never by eighteenth-century theorists—to describe Renaissance tonal style. Mozart’s use of this style in minuet trios suggests that he sought to satirize and “exoticize” Renaissance music by juxtaposing its antiquated tonal style with galant idioms. Such a teleological view of music history reflects widely held eighteenth-century views of older music, such as those of Rameau (1722), Mattheson (1739), and Burney (1776). Mozart’s use of Renaissance tonal style thus sheds light on eighteenth-century attitudes toward past versus present styles, as well as notions of music-historical progress.

Few works in the history of Western music have been as admired as Mozart's Jupiter Symphony. Praise has overwhelmingly focused on the contrapuntal mastery deployed in the finale’s coda, where the composer overlaps the five main themes that the movement previously presented in juxtaposition. Although Joseph and Michael Haydn, among others, had written fugal finales in symphonic works, a closer examination of Mozart's strategy through the lens of topic theory, intertextual comparison, and political context suggests that the composer signals more than polyphonic virtuosity: in the Jupiter’s finale, each of these five melodies is linked to distinct social classes.

A year earlier, in the ballroom scene that concludes the first act of Don Giovanni, Mozart had already overlapped dances explicitly linked to different social strata, bringing them together within the same time and space. Focusing on the Jupiter, I will examine the political implications of such compositional strategies. Two main factors particularly support my argument that Mozart’s last symphony carries a subversive political agenda. First, according to Stanley Sadie, the coexistence of buffo, serious, and middlebrow characters in musical works implied a revolutionary agenda, which conservatives at the time harshly criticized in Mozart’s works. Second, significantly suspect was his active participation in a Masonic lodge in Vienna that was banned in 1795 under the reign of Francis II due to its alleged connections with the French Revolution.

My paper will show how Mozart employs invertible counterpoint to generate textural mobility, creating an egalitarian musical space that resists control by a single privileged topic, theme, or instrument. Instead, each of them has its moment to lead the democratic ensemble (by, for example, operating as the top voice of the orchestra). In so doing, the Jupiter invites all social classes to partake in a musical celebration of liberty, fraternity, and equality, foreshadowing the ideals of the French Revolution. Thus, Mozart uses polyphony to dramatize the coexistence and reconciliation of diverse musical identities as an allegory for an idealized society, resonating both with Enlightenment-era discourses on social harmony and with enduring questions about plurality and inclusion in musical and social life.

The term improvisation has attracted rival definitions in the critical and analytical literature. Although some theories confine improvisation to specific musical genres (as when Rousseau says that the fantaisie ceases to exist upon being written down), most cast improvisation across a wider field, with the main debate turning on the role of convention in the practice (e.g., Dahlhaus, Richard Kramer, and Treitler). In Schenkerianism, for example, writing “aus dem Stegreif” allows composers to resist producing pieces that sound conventional, or like “patchwork.” In studies in music cognition, in contrast, convention is integral to improvisation (and composition). The discipline’s comparisons of galant pieces to mainstream jazz or to realized commedia dell’arte scenarios (cf. Baragwanath, Gjerdingen, and Sanguinetti) indicate that much invention takes place before pen is put to paper—the topoi and schemata, along with the form. Here, improvisation means applying a rule.

This paper tests these positions against some musical examples. Although most come from Mozart, the first ones turn to the Miles Davis Quintet from the early ‘60s. These sessions show an interest in form not as ready-made, but as itself a site for creative engagement. In Davis, improvisation is a way to “free one from the constraints of memory,” as Matthew Aucoin says about composition more widely. This more committed activity—improvisation as form-creating spontaneity—prevails with Mozart, too. Although his concertos might seem the genre most receptive to schematic writing, some of his sketches show otherwise. In passage-work in K. 466 and K. 503, for example, Mozart’s first inspiration evidently did not sound spontaneous enough to him. Upon reflection, it seemed overly formulaic, and he had to work (a little bit) to bend the formula to meet the needs of the piece at hand. Here, improvisation means, more liberally, inventing a rule.

A paradox thus besets improvisation, although of the modest rather than earth-shaking variety. For conceiving improvisation as spontaneity with purpose (as Cavell does, glossing Kant) appears paradoxical only when the musical score is taken exclusively as a place where meanings get coolly fixed, instead of also as a place that fuels the fires of invention.