Music in the Galant Style?

An Andante by Nielsen

Abstract

Nielsen’s predilection for eighteenth-century music is documented in his essays and letters and is also detectable in his compositional output. Theorists have most commonly focused their efforts either on the lower levels of musical organisation (such as his approach to harmony and contrapuntal techniques, especially fugue) or on the higher formal level (encompassing his employment of variation form and his relationship with the Beethovenian sonata tradition). The middle level of the structural hierarchy, however, has received comparatively little attention and remains untheorised.

Robert O. Gjerdingen’s 2007 study of galant style provides a rich nomenclature for discussing musical syntax. In this article I demonstrate Nielsen’s engagement with an eighteenth-century idiom in which he would have been immersed during his education at Copenhagen Conservatoire, an institution that was modelled on the classically conservative Leipzig Conservatoire. The Andante of his First Symphony (1894) was composed in the years after his graduation from Copenhagen and it presents a clear example of the galant influence. Galant exemplars in this music are sometimes treated conventionally but are often heightened or dramatised by various means. One of the aims of this analysis is to combine formal approaches (Hepokoski and Darcy 2006, Hepokoski 2021) and syntactical ones (Gjerdingen 2007) in order to enhance our understanding of Nielsen’s idiolect, which still remains underrepresented in the theoretical literature despite his important place as an early modernist.