Historical information regarding composers’ lives and works can be found in their biographies. These biographies cover chronological information on composers’ lives and their works in general. It has been seen that the information on the evolutionary progress of the international polyphonic classical music history has been formed widely through the findings from composers’ biographies.

The 19th century, in which the relationship between music and science was established with the expression of musicology, which corresponds to the expression of Musikwissenschaft (Logier, 1827), led to the handling of this historical information within the framework of a system. Chrysander, in his classification, defined the field of musicology in the form of historical studies which includes “history, theory, aesthetics, folk music researches and presentation of newly discovered works to musicians” (1863). With this classification, these biography representations continued to exist in the field of musicology studies as a field of European music history. 

This historical information created in the context of composers and their works was handled in a scientific framework in the studies of music history after music gained its scientific identity1 in terms of content and terminology. This framework was formed with a scheme created by Adler in the article2 titled “Umfang, Methode und Zeil der Musikwissenchaft” (Scope, Method and Purpose of Musicology) (Mugglestone & Adler, 1981). In this scheme, the historical information mentioned was placed under the title of “Historical Musicology” (composers and their works). “Historical Musicology” and “Systematic Musicology” (musical analysis) that were placed in the scheme together form the studies regarding music history.  

With the studies that are classed as “New Musicology” in Europe and “Critical Musicology” in the USA, a new tendency in terms of content regarding the approaches to music history has emerged. In his book evaluating the New/Critical Musicology, Kerman states that the musicology should include humanitarian disciplines, literature, and cultural theory as well as gender studies in the study of “music as an aesthetic experience” (1985, p. 12). The definition of “New Musicology” is the post-capitalist, post-positivist, post-modernist music scientific studies analyzing music-related problems in a multidisciplinary structure. Thus, all contexts of music in the “New Musicology” approach have gained an interdisciplinary framework (Yöre, 2016). New musicology’s contemplation methods, concepts, definitions, fields of study, as well as the information related to leading scholars’ theoretical frameworks have influenced music history studies. 

With this approach, studies on statements and determinations related to different disciplines of biography studies have started to be conducted. In these new evaluations, the idea of researching composers’ lives and works with an interdisciplinary approach, by taking into consideration the social, economic, politic influences in the geography where the composer lived, has been formed. In this article, which is a study using historical and critical methods of musicology, I aim to evaluate Mozart’s art view by the help of slices from his life and his own words taking Becker’s Art Worlds as a functional sociology theory into consideration.