Description: This innovative look at eighteenth-century musical form encourages audiences and performers to experience Galant music through the eyes and ears of those who originally composed, performed, and listened to it. Author L. Poundie Burstein argues that this means approaching these compositions through the metaphor of a journey.
Review Quotes: "Burstein (Hunter College; Graduate Center, CUNY) has written a clever, idiosyncratic examination of the compositional procedures of the exposition sections of mid-18th-century sonata form movements. Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty." -- W. E. Grim, Strayer University, CHOICE
"A new book, Journeys Through Galant Expositions, by Professor L. Poundie Burstein (The Graduate Center, Hunter College), seeks to reignite the experience of these listeners through the use of metaphors and approaches that were popular among musicians at the time-specifically, metaphors that relate musical form to "journeys." -- The Graduate Center, Hunter College"A compelling 'journey' indeed, in witty and engaging prose. At last, an account of 'galant' musical form that doesn't merely pay lip-service to the theorists of the time, but genuinely understands and applies their ideas. Burstein provides a welcome and necessary corrective to currently dominant theories of sonata and allied forms" -- James Webster, Cornell University"Armed with a commanding knowledge of both modern and eighteenth-century theories of musical form, and of both the canonic repertory of the late eighteenth century and that of the Galant style that preceded it, L. Poundie Burstein's Journeys Through Galant Expositions creatively weighs both the theories and the repertories against one another. This original and eye-opening exercise is full of musical and music-theoretical surprises, and it establishes him as a scholar of the highest rank among today's theorists of musical form." -- Patrick McCreless, Yale University