For this practicum, I decided to analyze some of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s letters. His correspondence with this wife, sister, and father. I used three letter sets, not from one time frame.

Using a quick Ctrl+F internet search finder I decided to find how many times music was mentioned in his letters. I want to pick apart the letters that I knew had “music” in them. For this I only chose three letters: Bologna, August 4 1770; Milan, August 31 1771; and Salzburg, Sept 4 1776. I should have focused on one time frame in a shorter span of time. However, some of these letters were written in Italian and German found on the Gutenberg project’s website.

For my final project, I am hoping to use maps and charts to course the tour that Mozart took with his father during his younger years. Mozart went and played for various people in various locations when he was younger. His father had a heavy influence on his childhood and made him play violin in front of crowds to be known as the prodigy he was.

In the three letters I looked at, I used the a Wordle, to highlight some of the words most often used in these three letters. I have already identified flaws in this process, particularly with having no set time frame. However, since some letters were written in German and Italian I skipped those correspondences. Also, some context describing words were not included in this Wordle because it the software only looks at the number of times one word is used, not the description of the word. Below is the Wordle for the three letters I looked at:

As you can see, music is probably the most common word used in his letters. As is write, and violin. What I think was missed in my analysis is that I was looking for the word music, so naturally I found letters that used it a lot. It did not encompass a wide variety of letters nor any other words that would be used to describe music or a type of music.

As such, this Wordle is flawed, but shows how often Mozart thought about his music as well as how many times he spoke about writing letters within letters he was writing.