Galant music
| Periods and eras of Western classical music |
|
|---|---|
| Early | |
| Medieval | c. 500–1400 |
| Renaissance | c. 1400–1600 |
| Common practice | |
| Baroque | c. 1600–1750 |
| Classical | c. 1730–1820 |
| Romantic | c. 1780–1910 |
| Impressionist | c. 1875–1925 |
| Modern and contemporary | |
| c. 1890–1975 | |
| 20th century | (1900–2000) |
| c. 1975–present | |
| 21st century | (2000–present) |
In music, galant refers to the style which was fashionable from the 1720s to the 1770s. This movement featured a return to simplicity and immediacy of appeal after the complexity of the late Baroque era. This meant simpler, more song-like melodies, decreased use of polyphony, short, periodic phrases, a reduced harmonic vocabulary emphasizing tonic and dominant, and a clear distinction between soloist and accompaniment. C. P. E. Bach and Daniel Gottlob Türk, who were among the most significant theorists of the late 18th century, contrasted the galant with the "learned" or "strict" styles (Bach 1753, passim; Türk 1789, p. 405). The German empfindsamer Stil, which seeks to express personal emotions and sensitivity, can be seen either as a closely related North-German dialect of the international galant style (Heartz and Brown 2001a; Heartz and Brown 2001b; Palmer 2001, xvii; Wolf 2003), or 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-eröffnete Orchestre, oder Universelle und gründliche Anleitung wie ein Galant Homme einen vollkommenen Begriff von der Hoheit und Würde 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 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.
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