Galant music
An eighteenth-century musical style favoring clear melodies, light textures, periodic phrasing, and accessible expression over Baroque counterpoint.
Periodic phrasing: A musical organization in which balanced phrases form larger units, often ending with a cadence. Balanced antecedent and consequent phrases give galant melodies their conversational symmetry.
Arcadian movement: An eighteenth-century artistic movement that idealized simplicity, nature, and pastoral expression. Its preference for naturalness and simplicity paralleled galant ideals in music.
Baroque music: A European musical style from roughly 1600 to 1750, marked by elaborate counterpoint, ornament, and strong contrasts. Its dense polyphony provides the clearest stylistic contrast with galant clarity and light texture.
Opera seria: An eighteenth-century Italian opera genre built around serious subjects, star singers, and alternating recitatives and arias. Galant melodic writing transformed the arias and vocal display central to this genre.
Accompanied melody: A texture that places a prominent melody above a supporting accompaniment. This texture replaces the interwoven voices typical of much Baroque counterpoint.
Johann Mattheson: A German composer and music theorist whose writings shaped eighteenth-century ideas about musical expression and style. His discussions of style and expression illuminate the aesthetic climate in which galant music developed.
Empfindsamkeit: A German artistic style emphasizing intimate, volatile, and emotionally sensitive expression, especially in music and literature. It shares galant clarity but favors sharper emotional shifts and a more personal tone.
Clavier music: Music written for keyboard instruments such as the harpsichord, clavichord, and early piano. Keyboard works were a major setting for galant melody, accompaniment, and phrase design.
Alberti bass: A broken-chord accompaniment pattern that repeats notes in a low-high-middle-high order. Its flowing repetition supports many galant keyboard melodies without competing with them.
Johann Joachim Quantz: A German flutist, composer, and theorist who served Frederick the Great and wrote a major treatise on performance. His treatise describes the expressive, fluent performance ideals associated with galant taste.