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Mozart's Viennese Instrumental Music: A Study of Stylistic Re-Invention.

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Mozart's Viennese instrumental Music: A study of stylistic re-invention. By Simon P. Keefe. Rochester NY: Boy-dell Press, 2007. [viii, 217 p. ISBN-10 1843833190; ISBN-13 9781843833192. $80.] Music examples, references, index.

Simon Keefe's engagement with Mozarfs compositions of the 1780s presents a daring reappraisal of the scholarly genre of style history. Crucially, Keefe has untied the knots between climactic works and their biographical position, which have formerly held together the complicated web woven from Romantic notions of biography and the idea of compositional maturity. Instead, Keefe's style history explicates in detailed analyses the intricacies of works traditionally considered as mature as well as those of works considered stylistic oddities, leading to a much-needed reappraisal of the latter. In doing so, Keefe grounds the notion of a stylistic development in eighteenth-century aesthetics and philosophy, by tying it. on the one hand to the traditional rhetorical interest in invention and, on the other, to the rising concern with originality. In combination, these two yield an approach to style-change that considers the merits of process, not of result.

It is undoubtedly Keefe's previous engagement with Mozart's piano concertos that yielded his notion of the titular stylistic reinvention, a two-fold process initiated by the composer's own arch-awareness of his compositional and aesthetic tools, which at first allows him to manipulate his own stylistic building blocks, forcing him ultimately into a reformulation of his musical language. Keefe unravels this idea most convincingly in the first section of his...

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