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Music in the Galant Style

by Robert O. Gjerdingen · Oxford University Press

Robert Gjerdingen's catalog of the stock voice-leading patterns (schemata), such as the Romanesca, Prinner, Monte and Fonte, that 18th-century composers learned as apprentices and combined into pieces. Each schema is shown in annotated musical examples, with historical chapters on how composers were trained. Gives composers a concrete, historically grounded vocabulary of phrase-building patterns, which is how 18th-century composers actually learned the craft. This is a different skill from the form-level teaching in Caplin or Schoenberg.

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