This dissertation regards Mozart's violin sonatas not as immaterial structures of compositional style but as patterns of human gesture rooted in the materialities of body, instrument, and sound. Consideration of treatises on music, physiology, dance, theater, and etiquette lends a significant historical and cultural dimension to the approach, demonstrating how conceptions of embodiment influenced performative acts during the Age of Sensibility (ca. 1750–1800). Particular attention is given to the emergence of the "neurocentric" body, which signaled a shift from the heart and humors of Galenic and Aristotelian traditions. By locating the essence of the human self in the nervous system, eighteenth-century science articulated an internal body of acute sensitivity from which aesthetic and cultural practices developed.

Drawing on this broad examination of eighteenth-century aesthetics, the dissertation proposes a model of performance practice based upon embodied gesture. Musical notation contains only gestural potential, and it remains the task of modern-day performers to animate these traces of the eighteenth-century body. Historical knowledge—semiotic awareness—allows the performer to deploy expressive gestures composed of varied articulation, tempo rubato, inventive ornamentation, and a visceral use of instrumental timbre. From notation to utterance, this "open system" connects Mozart's gestures with the experiential domain of interpretive practice.

The dissertation concludes with an inquiry into women's experiences of instrumental music during the eighteenth century, focusing especially on the gestures of Mozart's Sonata in B-flat Major, K. 454. Mozart composed this sonata for a public performance in Vienna's Kärntnertortheater with the celebrated violinist Regina Strinasacchi. By establishing a convincing role for a female virtuoso in the emerging public sphere, he thus challenged the prevailing status of the violin sonata as a kind of domestic music for the "fair sex." Although the sounds of their performance are long gone, gestural analysis provides a compelling means of apprehending the affective traces of historical existence.