Between Style and Invention
Horizontal, nursing a summer cold, I've plowed my way through Daniel Heartz's Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style, 1720-1780 . It has a lot of contextual data (especially of the who-met-whom-and-when-and-where-they-met variety) and usefully covers repertoire and composers and locales that have been slighted by the standard classical musical history survey course (which tends to jump straight from Sebastian Bach to Haydn). Useful, but jeez, it is anything but a pleasure to read, with too little analysis of the music itself and an organization by capital cities and then by composers which often requires the author to do some awkward jumping. (Fortunately, we have Robert Gjerdingen's delightful Music in the Galant Style to make up for some of the theoretical deficits.) Moreover, it's in a graceless writing style that refuses to invite the reader into repertoire that is often, very much inviting, especially when one considers a cast of composers including Vival...
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