Courtly Behaviors

Abstract

In addition to preserving a record of tones, chords, intervals, and other musical features, the historical text known as Mozart's Keyboard Sonata in Et Major, K. 282 (189g), also preserves traces of complex musical behaviors that were developed and replicated within eighteenth-century court society. The article focuses on several musical behaviors that would have been obvious to courtiers in Mozart's time and relates his presentation of them in K. 282 to courtly norms.