Robert O.

Gjerdingen, Music in the Galant Style

ROBERT O. GJERDINGEN, MUSIC IN THE GALANT STYLE (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007), ISBN 978-0-19-531371-0, xii + 514pp, £34.99.

This is one of the most unusual books on music that I have encountered in a long time.
Its design is eye-catching and it is packed with flights of fancy, such as a subordinate
long-title in impeccable eighteenth-century style, reproduced both on the dust jacket
and within, and ending with ‘…Said Music All Collected for the Reader’s Delectation
on the World Wide Web.’ It quickly becomes clear that Robert O. Gjerdingen’s fun is
not frippery. The depth of his engagement makes it seem entirely natural that he
should affectionately emulate his beloved. If there is one other labour of love to which
his work relates closely, it is Daniel Heartz’s Music in European Capitals: The Galant
Style 1720–1780, to which Gjerdingen pays warm tribute as providing ‘a wealth of
historical and biographical detail that complements my own, more modest volume’
(viii).1 Together, Heartz and Gjerdingen form ‘as it were, a “history and theory” of the
galant style’ (viii).
Gjerdingen wrote this book because his love for galant music has made him ask
searching questions. Some of his questions might have flitted through the minds of
others, in class discussion perhaps or a dinner conversation; but he is the first to have
explored these deep issues in print and thereby to have provided answers that are
rooted in firm evidence and in a musical insight that is as verifiable as it is perceptive.
One question he attempts to answer is this: What was it that enabled so many com-
posers of the eighteenth century to produce vast quantities of music that ranged so
widely in character, and to do so rapidly and, it seems, so effortlessly? Although that
question is in danger of simplifying complicated issues, it has validity, for there seems
little doubt that the eighteenth century was one in which prolific composers were
particularly common—Haydn, Mozart, Quantz, Telemann and a host of lesser-known
others. Gjerdingen’s answer unfolds across the book as a whole; and although the
bones of the answer emerge very early on, the meat offered by the many following
chapters gives his arguments a striking authority. Gjerdingen sees galant music not as
an autonomous art in the nineteenth-century sense (a concept so dominant that it still
hinders the reception of galant music), but as a highly sophisticated manifestation of
that ‘collection of traits, attitudes, and manners associated with the cultured nobility’
(5). Just as cultivated people of the eighteenth century had a vast, now-lost repertoire
of gesture, language and deportment that were important in oiling the wheels of polite
society, so ‘a hallmark of the galant style was a particular repertory of stock musical
phrases employed in conventional sequences…. Even J. S. Bach, whom the general

1 Daniel Heartz, Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style 1720–1780 (New York: Norton, 2003).

Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, 4 (2008–9), p. 101

public has long viewed as the paradigmatic Baroque composer, created galant music
when it suited his and his patrons’ purposes’ (6).
To a level that few books on music history have managed to achieve, this one
reveals the limitations of inherited concepts of style and period. If its view of galant
style seems strange or new to us, the problem is ours, for terms such as Baroque or
Classical are foreign to the times they purport to represent, and ‘obscure rather than
illuminate eighteenth-century music…to call the music of the great galant musicians
pre-Classical is no more enlightening than to call George Gershwin pre-Rock’ (5–6).
Gjerdingen also engages in a neat piece of iconoclasm in demonstrating how inade-
quate ‘the Romantic ideal of a three-part sonata of “exposition, development, and re-
capitulation”’ (364) is when faced with the music of Mozart, and in particular with the
first movement of his celebrated Sonata in C K545. As an antidote we get an analysis
that goes a long way towards demonstrating how differently Mozart thought, and that
makes one reconsider what lies behind the so-called subdominant recapitulation that
starts in bar 42.
There is nothing new about debunking concepts of period, form and style; and in
his discussion of that Mozart sonata Gjerdingen acknowledges the pioneering work of
Leonard Ratner. But the way in which Gjerdingen debunks is strikingly independent
and includes a rare ease in drawing on telling extra-musical analogies. Galant music,
‘like the art of figure skating, is replete with compulsory and free-style “figures”’ (7).
He then gives us a list of figures used in a recent skating performance, and compares it
to the ‘musical figures or schemata presented in the second half of a slow movement
by the eighteenth-century Venetian composer Baldassare Galuppi’ (7). The last four of
these are ‘Clausula Vera/Ponte/Cudworth cadence…deceptive/Passo Indietro to Mi–
Re–Do cadence’. (8) This use of period terms is central to Gjerdingen’s methods; and
unlike many who seek to avoid using anachronistic analytical terminology, he has a
happy knack of supporting those terms with direct reference to the musical sound and
not merely to the theoretical concept. While the result is a book replete with learning,
it is also a book dominated by readable and informative language, epitomized in the
‘Notes for the Reader’ (19) that come at the end of the introductory chapter. There we
learn that his terminology for schemata follows ‘in the footsteps of Joseph Riepel, the
eighteenth-century writer and chapel master at Regensburg who gave names to
several important musical schemata’ (20). He avoids the roman-numeral system for
describing chords, favouring instead the normal eighteenth-century shorthand of
thoroughbass. And, in one of his most revealing paragraphs on methodology, he
declares that because ‘The relationship between local and global meanings of chords
and keys was fluid in galant music’ (21), he wishes to avoid discussing this music via
concepts of tonality that are rooted in the preoccupations of later times. As he says,
‘Indeed, the craft of the galant composer depends heavily on the ability to modulate

JSMI, 4 (2008–9), p. 102

between perceived certainty and uncertainty, between, on the one hand, giving the
courtly audience a sense of security and groundedness and, on the other hand, taking
listeners down dark alleys of strange chords and keys where they may feel utterly lost’
(21).
In the twenty-nine chapters that follow, each devoted to specific schemata or
figures, or to exemplary works, Gjerdingen keeps his intellectual eye and his musical
ear firmly focussed. On the whole, his method is built upon the discussion of specific
works of music, with his aural and intellectual perceptions supported by frequent
reference to period treatises and other instructional material.
He begins with a discussion of one of the most enduring schemata, the Romanesca,
and follows through several treatments of this classic bass pattern and its associated
upper voices, showing how composers as varied at Pachelbel, Handel, Cimarosa and
Mozart found contrasting solutions to the challenges and wealth of possibilities it
offers. To anyone familiar with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century concepts of music
theory, this chapter typifies one of the greatest challenges of the book’s subject—and
one of the strongest examples of how the challenges are met. For example, as Gjer-
dingen discusses what he calls variants of the Romanesca, many of us may think, as I
did at first, that he implies an intellectually aware association between these variants
and the original. For example, is it right to describe the descending scale C–B–A–G–F–
E as the ‘stepwise variant’ (33) of the Romanesca’s C–G–A–E–F–C? The sceptic might
answer that some notes go up and some notes go down, and that these are among
common patterns used by composers who were quite unaware of the Romanesca
itself. However, Gjerdingen provides an effective answer, one that avoids having
things all ways at once by rooting itself in the relationship between theory and
practice, including the principles of solmization as taught by eighteenth-century
pedagogues and composers. He draws on this to show that one of the most important
qualities of galant music is its concept of good taste in the ways pitches relate to one
another in sequence. For example, in discussing the bass progression E–F in the old
Romanesca, he demonstrates that ‘galant musicians responded with a 6/3 chord on mi
and a 5/3 chord on fa. To do otherwise would have been a faux pas’ (39). And his
conclusion is that ‘a musical schema can be a patchwork, the result of interactions
between numerous small practices and the larger forces of both historical precedent
and contemporary fashion. The musicians who developed the galant Romanesca
preserved a number of venerable traits from its sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
antecedents’ (39); and their adaptations of it were specifically designed to suit the
schemata they were deploying.
This is a dynamic, mobile view of how galant music came about and of how it
works. So, as the chapters accumulate more and more detailed knowledge, Gjerdingen

JSMI, 4 (2008–9), p. 103

turns increasingly to the analysis of entire movements. One of the most interesting is
Chapter 24, ‘An Andantino Affettuoso by Niccolò Jommelli’. The background to this
duet for lovers, with two violins and continuo, is sketched out with a striking aware-
ness of the ways in which Jommelli deploys schemata for calculated expressive pur-
poses. This master of opera seria draws on formulae that would have appealed to the
ears and intellectual knowledge of the musical cognoscenti, yet that also would have
made their mannerly point to those unversed in the niceties of musical technique. The
result is terrific music; and some of the music’s power lies in the way that the com-
poser constantly sidesteps the obvious consequences of the schemata he uses. It’s not
the schemata alone that count; it’s how things are put together, and how the com-
poser’s inventive musical speech stretches boundaries without transgressing the good
taste that the schemata represent. Gjerdingen lets us see and hear what Jommelli does
by providing a richly annotated full score, with just a handful of detailed written
observations in the main text. For the rest, he lets a diagrammatic presentation do its
work. More importantly, he encourages our ears to discover for ourselves.
One of the great strengths of this book is the way in which it relates theory and
pedagogy to compositional practice. The discussion of pedagogy is dominated by
partimenti, and by various composers’ examples of this ‘intense nonverbal form of
instruction originally intended for poor boys learning a trade’ (171). Gjerdingen also
shows how and why this method became supplanted by something more suited to
well-to-do amateurs—by prototypes of ‘the sort of handy “how-to” book that would
become a middle-class staple’ (171); and there is plenty of discussion of thoroughbass.
But what he does not mention very much at all is the relationship between all these
things and the formal instruction in counterpoint that so many of the composers
represented in this book would have received. This comes across not so much as a lack
as an implied but unanswered question. After all, so many of the composers were
church musicians; and much of the florid passage work demonstrated in the legion of
music examples elaborates two- or three-part counterpoint. Mozart’s technical flair,
and his ability to deploy schemata imaginatively, is given plenty of attention in the
two chapters focussing on him. However, it is well worth remembering that Mozart
himself was altogether typical of his century in seeing formal training in counterpoint
as a cornerstone of teaching, as the celebrated Attwood Studies show. Gjerdingen gives
many interesting examples of contrapuntal skill, including fugal and canonic writing;
but they appear fully fledged, and I for one was left wondering what instructional
links, if any, were made between the florid surface of so much galant music and the
underlying structures that, so often, are themselves elaborations of progressions
demonstrating the precepts of traditional contrapuntal instruction.
One of Gjerdingen’s main areas of research is music cognition, and this book is a
remarkable testament to the ways in which disciplined thought about musical

JSMI, 4 (2008–9), p. 104

perception can challenge musical preconceptions and analytical orthodoxies. One of its
most pleasing attributes is its refusal to be doctrinaire. For example, although the
author rejects the application of nineteenth-century harmonic concepts to galant
music, he also makes it clear that each age will see a single piece of music through a
slightly different lens. In some ways it represents an attempt to understand how the
composers themselves thought; and in that respect his approach bears some com-
parison with the work Laurence Dreyfus has undertaken on Bach.2 It’s the sort of book
that will stimulate readers to think afresh about galant music. I suspect that it will also
stimulate creative minds with good ears to ask equally searching questions about
other music.

Martin Adams
Trinity College Dublin

2 Laurence Dreyfus, Bach and the Patterns of Invention (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1997).

JSMI, 4 (2008–9), p. 105