Music in the Galant Style

by Robert Gjerdingen

LOCAL KEY VERSUS GLOBAL TONALITY. The relationship between local and global meanings of chords and keys was fluid in galant music. Many of the methods of musical analysis in vogue today often overstate the degree to which one can clearly distinguish between local and global significance. Indeed, the craft of the galant composer depends heavily on the ability to modulate between perceived certainty and uncertainty, between, on the one hand, giving the courtly audience a sense of security and groundedness and, on the other hand, taking listeners down dark alleys of strange chords and keys where they may feel utterly lost. The lodestar of galant music was not a tonic chord but rather a listener’s experience, which the masters of this art modulated with consummate skill. The nineteenth-century term tonality, which was never used by galant composers, was foreign to their more localized preoccupations. I too avoid its use, losing nothing, I would argue, in the process.