The Romanesca
Robert O. Gjerdingen · 2007
Abstract for the patrons of gallant music, making informed judgments about compositions and their performances required familiarity with the important schemata of the style. For the composers, making works worthy of praise required being able to produce exemplars of every schema correct in every detail. The more passive knowledge of patrons could be gleaned from frequent listening to the typical phrases of gallant music. The active, operationalized knowledge of composers was carefully taught to them by music masters— maestros. The greatest maestros of the age worked in Italy, and they developed a unique method of instruction centered on the pertinent—the instructional bass. A pertinent resembled the bass part given to eighteenth-century accompanists, with the difference being the lack of any other players or their parts. The pertinent was the bass to a virtual ensemble that played in the mind of the student and became sound through realization at the keyboard. In behavioral terms, the pertinent, which often changed clefs temporarily to become any voice in the virtual ensemble, provided a series of stimuli to a series of schemata, and the learned responses of the student resulted in the multivehicle fabric of a series of phrases and cadences. From seeing only one feature of a particular schema—any one of its characteristic parts—the student learned to complete the entire pattern, and in doing so committed every aspect of the schema to memory. The result was fluency in the style and the ability to “speak” this courtly language.