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. In the 19th and 20th centuries, musicologists gave the term a narrower meaning. They used it to describe compositions that moved away from the Baroque's rhetorical formal style, but only partly showed traits of the pre-classical period. The galant style can be seen as a step towards the formally freer, sensitive style, Empfindsamkeit, that prepared the early classical period.