Robert O. Gjerdingen: Child Composers in the Old Conservatories: How Orphans Became Elite Musicians Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. ISBN 978–0–19–065359–0. 355 pp. €28.50.

Robert Gjerdingen scarcely needs any introduction. His 2007 book, Music in the Galant Style, has already become a classic, and his study of "schemas"—fixed, recognizable, and replicable musical patterns in the galant style—has had a profound influence on music-theoretical discourse. It has gained broad currency, and not just among music theorists and musicologists, for its holistic treatment of musical phrases attracts many non-specialists. The schemas discussed by Gjerdingen offer excellent tools for keyboard improvisation and are clearly recognizable from listening to eighteenth-century music in particular. […]

The Mulliner Book

Tallis was known as an organist for fifty years, but only a small amount of his keyboard music has been preserved. Most of it is found in a manuscript called the Mulliner Book. This chapter takes a closer look at the Mulliner Book itself, at Tallis’s instrumental works, and at the context in which they were played. Much of this music was rooted in a flourishing Tudor tradition of keyboard improvisation. The organ substituted for the voices of singers or alternated with them, adding an extra dimension to the soundscape of church services. The latter part of the chapter discusses Tallis’s few surviving secular songs (also found in the Mulliner Book) and his equally few known works for viol consort—two groups of pieces that reveal some unexpectedly close ties with the music of the broader European Renaissance.

Some (Dis)Assembly Required

In 2010, researchers at the Bach-Archiv Leipzig rediscovered a manuscript treatise by the central German organist and theorist Jacob Adlung titled “Anweisung zum Fantasieren” (Instruction in Improvisation), dating from c. 1726–27. The treatise, which is investigated here for the first time in print, contains twenty-eight typical baroque voice-leading patterns. Although Adlung demonstrates the variation of these patterns in detail, he remains largely silent regarding their concatenation into larger structures. Two publications by Adlung’s south-German contemporary Johann Vallade represent the ideal complement to Adlung’s treatise, since both authors rely on the principle of modularity, but in a reciprocal manner: Adlung demonstrates and varies individual patterns (a bottom-up approach), while Vallade begins with complete pieces and breaks them into smaller parts (a top-down approach). Thus I suggest that Vallade’s pieces can be productively understood as models for the concatenation of Adlung’s patterns—a sort of missing appendix to Adlung’s instruction. By viewing these authors’ methods as complementary, we gain a more complete picture of how keyboard improvisation and composition were taught in the eighteenth century, which has important implications for historically informed analysis.

The School of Abbé Vogler

Chapter 1 tracks a line of improvisational influence that issued from the organ playing and theoretical teachings of Georg Joseph (Abbé) Vogler, whose most famous students were Carl Maria von Weber and Giacomo Meyerbeer. Although Vogler was in many respects a product of eighteenth-century aesthetic and theoretical dispositions, he also had a progressive, even experimental streak that manifested itself in his improvisations. He anticipated the figure of the modern virtuoso by touring and playing organ concerts that featured dramatic improvisations depicting biblical narratives. Most important, he made keyboard improvisation an integral part of his pedagogical method, requiring students to improvise simultaneously with him and with each other. While Vogler instructed his students in thoroughbass methods, his improvisational teaching featured freer types of contrapuntal and figural elaboration that influenced their performances and compositions. Vogler’s approach to improvisation encouraged harmonic experimentation that influenced Weber’s and Meyerbeer’s expanded use of tonality.

Carl Loewe’s Performative Romanticism

Chapter 3 is about Carl Loewe, a little-known musician who undertook an unprecedented and remarkable task: improvising entire songs, both the melody and the accompaniment, on poems given to him by the audience. This chapter reconstructs Loewe’s methods for performing this difficult feat and describes the cultural impetuses that motivated it. I propose that Loewe’s improvisations, performed mainly on a series of concert tours he undertook in the 1830s, condensed a number of independent cultural strains—the kapellmeister’s fluency in keyboard improvisation, the practice of touring virtuosos, the literary cult of poetic improvisers, and the genre theory of the ballad, which described it as a species of epic or bardic narration that was understood as improvisatory in character.