Formal structures in the solo keyboard music of J.C. Bach and their influence on Mozart
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During his lifetime, Johann Christian Bach (1739--1782) was considered the most famous musician of the Bach family throughout England and Europe. Although his music was highly regarded in the eighteenth century, little scholarly work has been undertaken on the historical and analytical aspects of his compositions. His keyboard compositions are valuable in tracing his musical development since this was the only genre that he wrote throughout his career in Berlin, Milan and London. Previous analyses of Bach's keyboard music have mainly focused on stylistic development, thus neglecting the importance of phrase and larger formal functions. I adopt William Caplin's theory of formal functions to analyze Bach's solo keyboard sonatas: the Solo in A minor from Berlin (1750--55), three sonatas from the Milan collection (1755), six sonatas from London Op. 5 (1767), and six sonatas from London Op. 17 (1773--4). I demonstrate that Bach gradually refines phrase and thematic functions of the exposition of first-movement sonatas. I examine Bach's use of core technique and subordinate theme-like units in development sections and discuss the reasoning behind different recapitulation strategies. I also compare the sonata forms of the first movement to the second and third movements, and discuss other types of large-scale formal design (theme and variations, minuet and trio, and rondo). Many sources indicate that Mozart was greatly influenced by Bach, but they remain vague in describing the type and extent of this influence. Building on previous melodic, motivic and stylistic studies, I draw important phrase-structural connections between the music of Bach and Mozart. I discuss the construction of Mozart's early piano pieces (KV 6 through K 284) and demonstrate that he adopts particular phrase-structural and thematic designs similar to pieces from Bach's Op. 5 and 17 collections. Through form functional analysis, I illustrate Bach's development of phrase and thematic structures and provide important phrase-structural evidence of his influence on the music of Mozart.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".