Music in the galant style - Robert O. Gjerdingen

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 ofeighteenth-century music, much of it known only to specialists, formative of the "galant style."