“It’s so bland,” said one student. “It’s so predictable,” said another. “It just so…yecch…nice!” said yet another, his lip curling in disdain.
And indeed much of it is bland, predictable, nice-y nice. Saccharine, even. But it is the music of profound social change nonetheless. I speak of the Galant style, that typically decorous and attractive music that played such an important part in setting the stage for Viennese Classicism. Foreshadowed by the elegant gentility of Italian baroque masters such as Corelli, Galant art flourished in the years between the late Baroque and the full flowering of Viennese Classicism in the 1770s, best practiced by composers who are now considered lesser lights of the era but who were, in fact, estimable musicians and highly polished composers. Wagenseil, Toeschi, Holzbauer, Monn, Gossec, JC Bach, Abel, Arne, Herschel, Hoffman, Ordoñez, Leclair. That's just a start; there were many more, gentlemanly composers all, producing a steady stream of symphonies and chamber pieces and piano pieces and serenades and divertimenti and concertos. Nor was Galant an all-or-nothing affair; composers could write in a Galant style one day and the more turbulent Empfindsamer stil (style of sensibility) the next. The great lights of the later Viennese Classical might well incorporate Galant moods or gestures in their music, as was the case with Haydn, Mozart, Vanhal, and even Beethoven—at least in his early years. It was a pan-European, pan-continental style, the Galant, practiced in New and Old Worlds alike, familiar to all listeners wherever Western culture and its art music had taken hold.
To understand the social significance of the Galant style, a glance at the overall European situation is in order. Steven Pinker’s "The Better Angels of Our Natures" reproduces a bevy of graphs that document a notable cessation of public violence and injustice during the second half of the 18th century. Some sociologists have dubbed the era as the beginning of the Humanitarian Revolution, a time when the worth of the individual life came to be valued over the worth of the individual soul. The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason: whatever we choose to call it, the late 18th century saw an overturning of ages-old practices of casual cruelty at both the public and private level. Public executions began falling out of favor. Persecutions of heretics, burning of witches, animals brutalized as public entertainments, all mostly faded out before the dawn of the 19th century. Judicial torture, for long a mainstay of the legal system, had been retreating for a good long time but by the days of Voltaire was finally coming to an end. And even if chattel slavery was still alive and kicking, at the very least sensible people were speaking out against it—a new development in the history of humanity.
This overall softening of human nature, this move away from publicly-sanctioned violence and cruelty, was accompanied by growth in manuals on etiquette—a word which carried a great deal more weight in those days than it does now. To us, "etiquette" means Emily Post or Miss Manners and is all about which fork to use at a formal dinner or how to write an appropriate thank-you note. To earlier eras, etiquette was about avoiding grave offense that could lead to bloodshed. Students of medieval culture are only too familiar with the volatility of the folks of the middle ages. Barbara Tuchmann speaks of their childishness, in the way that they could be jolly and friendly one instant, seething with rage and tearing up the room the next. Emotions were unchecked, untrammeled, very much on the surface. People were armed with knives and swords, and they knew how to use them. In fact, men continued to wear swords as late as the first half of the 18th century; both Handel and Bach were engaged in impromptu street swordfighting in their youth, and yet they were educated, sensible men and certainly not violent street-rabble types. The "code duello" that took the life of Alexander Hamilton lingered on well into the nineteenth century.
Germanophone Europe had just recently emerged from a series of horrific religious wars that are bundled up with the tidy label “The Thirty Years War” but which were actually longer than thirty years, and they weren't really wars. They were genocides, holocausts, scorched-earth annihilations. They drained the economies of their respective countries and tallied up horrific death rates, up to a third or more of their populations. They were brutal, seething with almost unimaginable cruelties and disregard for human dignity or decency. There is nothing nastier than a religious war, and in the Wars of Religion of the 17th century Europe turned into killing field.
In the slow rebound that followed the Treaty of Westphalia, a new European order emerged that was less tribal, less local, less obsessed about religion and more concerned with the creation of stable and responsibly-governed societies. It was just a start, but the flowering of the German High Baroque, and its successor the Viennese Classical, could not have taken place in the atrocity-soaked horror of the Wars of Religion. The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, the Humanitarian Revolution, all emerge from a Europe seared and scarred by its nightmares.
Enlightenment ideals postulated a humanity freed from superstition and governed by reason and dignity. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, says one of the talismanic documents of Enlightenment philosophy. Such lofty goals were impossible to achieve, much less maintain, if people behaved like the aristocrats of Romeo and Juliet who explode into a savage street battle within the first few minutes of the play, all over a few casual insults. A civil society is impossible if people are incapable of being civil. But that was all changing, and it was all changing fast. I may be indulging in a platitude here, but it seems that childishly reactive people were at last starting to grow up, at least a little bit.
The elaborate manners and social stratification that characterize genteel 18th century life are part of that growing up process. People were learning how to behave at both the micro and macro levels. For an example of the micro level, consider that as recently as the Renaissance it wasn't considered offensive to defecate into a chamber pot right at the dinner table, even in upper-class households. But that wouldn't have been the case at a Jefferson family dinner at Monticello. At the macro level, consider the advance in basic human rights enshrined in the Constitution of the United States, particularly its first ten amendments.
At this point I move past background and into my own esthetic reactions, opinions, and impressions. For me, the refined clarity of the Galant style, with its carefully-balanced forms, uncomplicated yet attractive harmonic language, scrupulous avoidance of coarse emotions, transparent instrumental writing, variety in materials, elaboration in the place of motivic development, and reliance of homophonic texture over polyphony, expresses in music the same careful control and emphasis on civility that characterized Enlightenment ideals. I am reminded of a tour I took of the San Francisco Zen Center, which is housed in a lovely building designed by eminent Bay Area architect Julia Morgan. How does one make a Zen temple out of a Julia Morgan building, asked our tour guide. By the way we live in it, he answered. The way we move about the building, enter a room using this foot, bow in this way, the care we take to maintain a quiet, unhurried life. Living a meditative life is all about form and intention, and that was, in a nutshell, pretty much what Enlightenment social engineers were doing with their elaborate courtesies, elevated standards of deportment, and love of delicately complex ornamentation. An 18th century porcelain, all pale and fragile and lined with delicate streaks of gold amidst the fluffy pink and blue accents, is a thing that must be handled with care and respect. It isn't functional; neither tool nor implement, its purpose is to be appreciated, protected, and maintained. Those eggshell-thin surfaces, those twee poses and studiedly bland facial expressions, bear potent witness to a fundamental change in human society: those little figurines cannot survive in a violent or careless world. Like household Buddhas or Kuan Yen statues, they serve as reminders for us to maintain our cool, to avoid causing offense, and to do our part to help create a just society in which barbaric brutality can be kept firmly at bay.
And what are those delicately predictable cadences of a Galant minuet, the pale descending scales and concluding cadential 64 figures, the paper-thin textures and simple harmonies, but yet another reminder, this time expressed in sound? You can destroy the mood of a Galant andante with one harsh word or gesture; they require being heard in a relatively small, quiet room. They do not render up their subtleties easily; you must pay attention. Nor are they puzzle-boxes filled with hidden meanings. They are what they are; graceful, gracious, ingratiating confections to be savored in the moment. Think of them as ambassadors of peace. Think of them as earth-grounded Tibetan monks. Think of them as Zen masters presiding over a sesshin. Think of them as antennas that broadcast cool rays that dampen any tension or simmering violence in the room.
But don't think of them as bland or predictable. That doesn't do them justice, not by a long shot. In their very predictability they tell us that over the long haul, reason and compassion are prevailing over human brutality. They have become oh-so familiar sounding to us, so cool and flavorless and cookie-cutter-ish. We take them for granted, just as we take the ideals they exemplify for granted. Despite numerous incidences of falling off the wagon—Napoleonic Europe, World Wars—humanity has come a long, long way since we all shrieked with delighted laughter as a screaming cat was slowly burned to death in front of us. We have learned, at least in part, to care, to emphathize, to make the safety and well-being of our fellow humans not only a priority, but to elevate it into a truth that we hold to be self-evident. Yes, a minuet by Christian Cannabich lacks the bite, fire, and glamor of a Beethoven scherzo, just as the studiedly polite proceedings of a civil court case lack the bite, fire and glamor of an accused heretic howling in agony as he is being disembowled before merrymakers in a public square. But both the minuet and the court case stem from the same underlying impulse, which is to tame and temper our inner devils, cultivate our better angels, and create a culture for ourselves in which we can live lives that are other than brutal, painful, and short.