Galant music

In music, galant refers to the style which was fashionable in the upper-class societies of Western Europe from the 1720s to the 1770s. On the other hand, the term found a narrowing in musicology in the 19th and 20th centuries: the focus is on compositions that can be seen as moving away from the Baroque in its more rhetorical formal language, but which at the same time only display qualities that can be attributed to the pre-classical period to a limited extent. At this point, the galant style can be seen as a step towards the formally freer, sensitive style, Empfindsamkeit, that prepared the early classical period.