Description

The galant composer has traditionally been portrayed as a struggling artist alone against the world, who strove to write tortured masterworks for posterity. In Music in the Galant Style , Robert O. Gjerdingen breaks new ground, showing us instead a prosperous civil servant, adroitly managing his aristocratic patron's musical enterprises and producing music with a fashion-conscious eye towards fast-paced consumption and abundant production.

Musical proficiency was among those skills expected of the ideal galant courtier, and from their positions of relative power these courtiers played a major role in shaping the musical styles -- and musicians -- that prospered in galant society. They commissioned music to entertain themselves as listeners, to educate and amuse themselves as amateur performers, and to glorify themselves as patrons of the wittiest, most charming, most sophisticated and fashionable music that money could buy. The galant composer was therefore required to produce a large quantity of music for immediate consumption, manage its performance and performers, and evaluate its reception for the next round of composition. This artist was surrounded by patrons and performers, churning out work after work, and struggling not necessarily to build his reputation for generations to come, but only to keep up with the pace of the demands and schedule laid upon him from day to day.

As evidence of the rapid production and standardization of practice, musical scores from this period provide only a bare notation of the sequence of schemata, leaving graces, ornaments, and variation to be improvised by the skilled performer. Gjerdingen identifies these various schemata which as the core of galant musical style are the fundamental building blocks of galant composition. For each schema, he outlines its characteristic melodic, contrapuntal, harmonic, and metric features, presenting straightforward cases of their employment in actual compositions of the period, as well as examples that embellish, or deviate from the schema as initially described. Replete with numerous musical examples, early chapters describe variants and stylistic changes typical of different decades and courts, and later chapters introduce whole movements by the great composers of the galant style, allowing the reader to experience the phrase schemata in their full context. This book will help students, scholars, performers, and all lovers of 18th-century music to understand music in this style and develop a broad view of the repertoire, and aligns well with recent trends in performance practice scholarship.

Reviews

"A path-breaking work in musical analysis. Professor Gjerdingen opens the doors into the compositional studios of the 18th century, showing us how characteristic idioms within the galant style that formed a lingua franca among musicians across Europe can be modeled-and easily replicated--by a small number of recurring voice-leading 'schema.' Richly illustrated with diverse musical examples and eye-catching graphics, this remarkable and original study will prove invaluable to all analysts and historians of 18th century music."-Thomas Christensen, Professor of Music, University of Chicago

"Gjerdingen's study promises to reframe nearly all the work that scholars have lavished on compositional practice in the eighteenth century by answering a question that no one seems to have asked before now - how were eighteenth-century composers (Italian-born and Italian-trained composers above all) able to produce such massive quantities of music in such a broad spectrum of genres, and to do so with both facility and taste?"--Thomas Bauman, Professor of Musicology, Northwestern University

"After reading this text, I came away believing that I had learned much that was new, that I had significantly refined my hearing of galant style, and that I had developed a greater appreciation of music that is generally unfamiliar but deserving of greater performance. One can hardly ask more from any book!"-- William E. Caplin, Professor of Music Theory, McGill University

Product Details

528 pages; 29 halftones, 299 music examples; 8-1/2 x 11; ISBN13: 978-0-19-531371-0ISBN10: 0-19-531371-2

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