Formal Functions in Menuets by Mozart, Part 5: More to Theoretical Issues

This essay considers some theoretical questions raised at the end of Part 4 in this series. William Caplin’s theory of formal functions in Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven stipulates that themes are of two primary types (period, sentence) and several secondary types (“hybrids”). These need to be resorted in order to account for eighteenth-century practice more broadly, following from the results of the work in this series, Parts 1-4.