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Galant music
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In music, galant refers to the style which was

Periods and eras of
fashionable from the 1720s to the 1770s. This
Western classical music
movement featured a return to simplicity and
immediacy of appeal after the complexity of the
Early
late Baroque era. This meant simpler, more
Medieval
c. 5001400
song-like melodies, decreased use of polyphony,
short, periodic phrases, a reduced harmonic
Renaissance
c. 14001600
vocabulary emphasizing tonic and dominant, and
Common practice
a clear distinction between soloist and
accompaniment. C. P. E. Bach and Daniel
Baroque
c. 16001750
Gottlob Trk, who were among the most
Classical
c. 17301820
significant theorists of the late 18th century,
Romantic
c. 17801910
contrasted the galant with the "learned" or
"strict" styles (Bach 1753, passim; Trk 1789,
Impressionist
c. 18751925
p. 405). The German empfindsamer Stil, which
Modern and contemporary
seeks to express personal emotions and
Modern High modern
c. 18901975
sensitivity, can be seen either as a closely related
North-German dialect of the international galant
20th-century
(19002000)
style (Heartz and Brown 2001a; Heartz and
Contemporary Postmodern
c. 1975present
Brown 2001b; Palmer 2001, xvii; Wolf 2003), or
21st-century
(2000present)
as contrasted with it, as between the music of
Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach, a founder of both
styles, and that of Johann Christian Bach, who carried the galant style further and was closer to
classical.
This musical style was part of the wider galant movement in art at the time.
The word "galant" derives from French, where it was in use from at least the 16th century. In the
early 18th century, a Galant Homme described a person of fashion; elegant, cultured and virtuous.
The German theorist Johann Mattheson appears to have been fond of the term. It features in the title
of his first publication of 1713, Das neu-erffnete Orchestre, oder Universelle und grndliche
Anleitung wie ein Galant Homme einen vollkommenen Begriff von der Hoheit und Wrde der edlen
Music erlangen. (Instead of the Gothic type rendered here in italics, Mattheson used Roman to
emphasize the many non-German expressions (Mattheson 1713, title page; Heartz and Brown
2001)). Mattheson was apparently the first to refer to a "galant style" in music, in his Das
forschende Orchestre of 1721. He recognized a lighter, modern style, einem galanten Stylo and
named among its leading practitioners Giovanni Bononcini, Antonio Caldara, Georg Philipp
Telemann, Alessandro Scarlatti, Antonio Vivaldi and George Frideric Handel (Heartz 2003, p. 18).
All were composing Italian opera seria, a voice-driven musical style, and opera remained the
central form of galant music. The new music was not as essentially a court music as it was a city

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music: the cities emphasized by Daniel Heartz, a

recent historian of the style, were first of all
Naples, then Venice, Dresden, Berlin, Stuttgart
and Mannheim, and Paris. Many galant
composers spent their careers in less central
cities, ones that may be considered consumers
rather than producers of the style galant: Johann
Christian Bach and Carl Friedrich Abel in
London, Giovanni Paisiello in St Petersburg,
Georg Philipp Telemann in Hamburg, and Luigi
Boccherini in Madrid.
The rejection of so much accumulated learning
and formula in music is paralleled only by the
Andr Campra, L'Europe galante 2nd edition
rejection in the early 20th century of the entire
(1698) Play ouverture
structure of key relationships. Not every
contemporary was delighted with this
revolutionary simplification: Johann Samuel Petri, in his Anleitung zur praktischen Musik (1782)
spoke of the "great catastrophe in music" (Blume 1970, p. 20).
The change was as much at the birth of Romanticism as it was of Classicism. The folk-song
element in poetry, like the singable cantabile melody in galant music, was brought to public notice
in Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient Poetry (1765) and James Macpherson's "Ossian" inventions
during the 1760s.
Some of Telemann's later music and of Bach's sons, Johann
Quantz, Hasse, Giovanni Battista Sammartini, Giuseppe Tartini,
Baldassare Galuppi, Johann Stamitz, Domenico Alberti, and
early Mozart are exemplars of galant style.
This simplified style was melody-driven, not constructed, as so
much classical music was to be, on rhythmic or melodic motifs:
"It is indicative that Haydn, even in his old age, is reported to
have said, 'If you want to know whether a melody is really
beautiful, sing it without accompaniment'" (Blume 1970, p. 19).
This simplification also extended to harmonic rhythm, which is
generally slower in galant music than is the case in the earlier
baroque style, thus making lavish melodic ornamentation and
nuances of secondary harmonic colorings more important
(Palmer 2001, xvii).
The affinities of galant style with Rococo in the visual arts are
easily overplayed, but characteristics that were valued in both
genres were freshness, accessibility and charm. Watteau's ftes
galantes were rococo not merely in subject matter, but also in

Louis Fuzelier and Jean-Philippe

Rameau, Les indes galantes
(173536)

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the lighter, cleaner tonality of his palette, and the glazes that supplied a galant translucency to his
finished pictures often compared to the orchestrations of galant music (Heartz 2003,).

Sources
Bach, Carl Phillip Emanuel. 1753. Versuch ber die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen, mit
Exempeln und achtzehn Probe-Stcken in sechs Sonaten erlutert. 2 vols. Berlin: In
verlegung des auctoris, gedruckt bey C.F. Henning.
Blume, Friedrich. 1970. Classic and Romantic Music: A Comprehensive Survey, translated by
M. D. Herter Norton. New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 9780393021370 (cloth); ISBN
9780393098686 (pbk).
Grout, Donald Jay, and Claude V. Palisca. 1996. A History of Western Music, fifth edition.
New York: W. W. Norton.
Heartz, Daniel. 2003. Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style, 17201780. New York:
W. W. Norton. ISBN 9780393050806.
Heartz, Daniel, and Bruce Alan Brown. 2001a. "Empfindsamkeit". The New Grove Dictionary
of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London:
Macmillan Publishers.
Heartz, Daniel, and Bruce Allen Brown. 2001b. 'Galant'. New Grove Dictionary of Music and
Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan
Publishers.
Mattheson, Johann. 1713. Das neu-erffnete Orchestre, oder Universelle und grndliche
Anleitung wie ein Galant Homme einen vollkommenen Begriff von der Hoheit und Wrde der
edlen Music erlangen (The Newly Inaugurated Orchestra, or Universal and Fundamental
Guide Showing How the Galant Man May Acquire a Perfect Notion of the Majesty and Worth
of the Noble Art of Music), with added remarks by Reinhard Keiser. Hamburg: Benjamin
Schiller.
Palmer, Kris. 2001. Ornamentation According to C. P. E. Bach and J. J.Quantz. Bloomington:
1stBooks Library. ISBN 9780759609358.
Trk, Daniel Gottlob. 1789. Klavierschule, oder, Anweisung zum Klavierspielen fr Lehrer
und Lernende: mit kritischen Anmerkungen (https://archive.org/details
/klavierschuleode00trkd). Leipzig: Schwickert; Halle: Hemmerde und Schwetschke.
Wolf, Eugene K. 2003. "Empfindsam style". The Harvard Dictionary of Music, fourth edition,
edited by Don Michael Randel. Harvard University Press Reference Library 16. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-01163-2.

Further reading
Robert, O. Gjerdingen. 2007. Music in the Galant Style. Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-531371-0.

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