Music in the Galant Style Reprint Edition is an authoritative and readily understandable study of the core compositional style of the eighteenth century. Gjerdingen adopts a unique approach, based on a massive but little-known corpus of pedagogical workbooks used by the most influential teachers of the century, the Italian partimenti. He has brought this vital repository of compositional methods into confrontation with a set of schemata distilled from an enormous body of eighteenth-century music, much of it known only to specialists, formative of the "galant style."
Editorial Reviews
Review
"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
"Music in the Galant Style Reprint Edition must count, both in 18th-century music studies and in music theory, as one of the most significant publications of recent decades."--Early Music
Book Description
A major new contribution to compositional method and training of composers in the eighteenth century.
About the Author
Robert Gjerdingen is Professor of Music at Northwestern University's School of Music
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