The music analytical part of research is based on a narratological model of dialogue in Mozart's concerto form developed in my dissertation that juxtaposes internal dialogue with cultural influences. Here one argues for a novel explanation of mechanism of dialogue between solo and ritornello (orchestra) sections in concerto form. The presentation is based on an existential semiotic framework that seeks resemblances of morality, passions and related concepts between Enlightenment society and narratological features in concertos. Of special importance are those concertos (KV 467, 482, 453, 456), where this interaction is the result of historical layering of discourse and the deontic forces that arise in the ensuing dialogue. The paper further enquires if this is a symptom of a broader stylistic change that rearranges baroque, classical and romantic influences within classical style paving the way to romanticism and possibly provoking parallels with the idea of a second Enlightenment. In analyzing the text corpus distributional semantics will serve the purpose of finding such occurrences that hold resemblance to moral terms and topics found in the concerto corpus. A thoroughgoing issue in the paper is how the examination of these phenomena can be supported by DH methodologies.
To build up a sense of representation of an individual in society within a concerto's solo-ritornello alteration, one needs a methodology to describe an 18th century person's sociability. In terms of topics and morality one needs to be able to identify them as belonging either to individual or social spheres. A close counterpart would be private and public spheres as they were conceived in the Enlightenment. A third factor to be considered is the ancient regime with a sociability of its own. To match with the concertos an examination of individual-social -relation from Baroque to romanticism is needed because of the historical layering of concerto dialogue. The nature of interaction is subject to change in individual's reaction to changing societal norms that in the study are depicted as deontic statements in natural language. In finding co-occurring terms distributional semantics helps to find similarities and differences between moral terms and topics and to form corresponding groups of concepts. Here the role of benevolence is especially central. In the above group of four concertos the interaction is especially geared toward progressive sociability and the group serves as a corpus for a study that is more limited in scope. In a wider study of the whole concerto corpus an even broader parallel examination of stylistic and historical changes of moral and topical content becomes possible. In the process a conception of representation of culture will emerge. The latter research will also allow a stylistic re-evaluation of Mozart's concertos and the model of concerto form behind it.
Keywords:
Mozart, concerto form, Existential semiotics, cultural representation, distributional semantics