Music in the Galant Style is an authoritative and readily
understandable study of the core compositional style of the eighteenth
century. Gjerdingen adopts a unique approach, based on a massive but
little-known corpus of pedagogical workbooks used by the most
influential teachers of the century, the Italian partimenti. He has
brought this vital repository of compositional methods into
confrontation with a set of schemata distilled from an enormous body of
eighteenth-century music, much of it known only to specialists,
formative of the "galant style."