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Robert Gjerdingen's Music in the Galant Style was published more than three years ago, and has not only already been acknowledged in numerous reviews, but has meanwhile also become a classic of contemporary music-theoretical discourse. In the following, therefore, I am not so much concerned with portraying Gjerdingen's method faithfully yet again as with highlighting a few central aspects of his theory and engaging with them productively.
The book is an event. Anyone working through its almost five hundred pages will see the music of the eighteenth century with different eyes, and hear it with different ears. And it is indeed a case of 'working through' the book: it cannot simply be read passively. Its content must be actively acquired: one needs to play it, to have the countless examples in one's ear, in order to follow Gjerdingen's argument, which is by no means always simple.
Wilhelm Seidel once emphasized the notion of 'galant' as above all an 'attitude' ('Galanter Stil', in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, second edition, Sachteil, volume 3 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1995), 983-989), and Gjerdingen likewise makes a point of avoiding any historical restriction: 'My focus is thus on "galantâ[euro] as a code of conduct, as an eighteenth-century courtly ideal (adaptable to city life), and a carefully taught set of musical behaviors' (6). This 'code of conduct' becomes compositionally and technically concrete in 'a particular repertory of stock musical phrases employed in conventional sequences' (6).
Gjerdingen then takes the galant style as an example within which to develop his well-known theory of musical schemata, which is the book's primary content. His analogy between the musical 'galant style' and 'educated' courtly discourse, with its cultivated forms of interaction, may at first glance seem overly simple and direct; one central aspect of the galant, after all, is that of a courtly code of behaviour breaking the social boundaries of its origins, to the point that it virtually embodies the zeitgeist of an era and, above all, becomes the model for a new aesthetic. Johann Mattheson already speaks explicitly of a 'galant musical science' ( galante Musicalische Wissenschaft), demonstrating the adaptation of the term in an early Enlightenment, bourgeois context (Johann Mattheson, Das Neu-Eröffnete Orchestre...