The idea that the only trustworthy things in the musical universe are its materials is not confined to proponents of Adorno. Among those who are indifferent or even averse to German philosophy, some have sought to describe Mozart's musical universe in terms that also distill his music into some simpler state. In recent Mozart studies, two choices have prevailed: one resolving his music into system, the other into historical structure. Within that first category, that of rationalization, there is a further division, and it is especially germane here because it reenacts as music-theoretical inquiry a paradox manifest earlier, in modernist composition. As many have noted in various ways, two of modernity's leading and ostensibly antagonistic compositional schools—one striving for total randomness, the other for total organization —have the common interest of liberating art from authorship, and so from responsibility. Or, rather, these systems preserve a kind of agency but relocate it from the person to the system. There is either chance, or there is its doppelgänger, necessity.

Such mechanization is exemplified in a recent, ambitious study of some formal procedures in music at the time of Mozart. For a concise description both of their system and how a contemporary of Mozart would have approached the craft of composition, Warren Darcy and James Hepokoski use a metaphor that likens the act of composing to the operation of a software program. To raise an objection out of order: right from the start a structural problem arises, because the metaphor's required fourth element is unclear or missing.

Composer:Work::Software User:???

But, again, that is to get ahead of things.

Here is their metaphor presented without interruption: “For novice-composers, one might wittily fantasize—provided that the image is not taken too literally—something on the order of an aggressively complex ‘wizard’ help feature within a late-eighteenth-century musical computer application, prompting the still-puzzled apprentice with a welter of numerous, successive dialog boxes of general information, tips, preselected weighted options, and strong, generically normative suggestions as the act of composition proceeded.”