Since 2022, performer-musicologists Jonathan Salamon (University of Cambridge) and Alexander Nicholls (independent scholar) have hosted yearly summits under the banner of Galant Schema Studies (or schema theory), a field of musical analysis extending from the appearance of Robert Gjerdingen’s 2007 monograph Music in the Galant Style (New York: Oxford University Press). As a discipline, schema theory deals with conventional musical patterns and our mental models (or schemas) of them, asking how these schemas are learned, recognized, conceived and manipulated by those who share a common musical culture. This year’s virtual gathering, entitled Galant Schema Theory: Contemporary Approaches to Composition, Pedagogy, Performance, featured thirteen presentations over two days by an international slate of scholars, as well as a keynote address by Gjerdingen (Northwestern University) himself.

What do schema theorists do? To judge by the papers at this conference, they identify, classify and label conventional patterns, assembling what John Rice has called the ‘schematicon’ of eighteenth-century music and using it to parse the musical flow into meaningful chunks (Rice, ‘Adding to the Galant Schematicon: The Lully’, Mozart-Jahrbuch (2014), 205–225). Schema theorists are exactly the kind of scholars to enjoy a game of ‘schema bingo’ (played at the end of the conference’s first day), marking off a grid of named patterns – Romanesca, Prinner, Fonte, Monte, Ponte and more – as they spot them aurally in a sonata by C. P. E. Bach. This at times lends the discipline an air of taxonomic decadence, as though its very essence lay in the pleasure of labelling. Yet the true value of Gjerdingen’s project lies in using this schematicon and the pedagogical technologies through which it was taught (partimenti and solfeggi) to reveal how the practical knowledge of eighteenth-century musicians was shaped at a structural level by courtly values of graceful action, witty repartee, sociability and comparative judgment. Herein lies the theory’s appeal: its clearly perceptible analytical objects and focus on pragmatic knowledge make it accessible for practising musicians and scholars alike, while its broad, interdisciplinary scope makes it a powerful tool for asking big questions about music, culture and knowledge.

Many of the papers admirably seized upon this impulse to tunnel out from musical details to larger questions about the nature of musical knowledge. Gilad Rabinovitch (Queen’s College, City University of New York), for instance, presented ongoing research into the gestural and schematic language of nineteenth-century preluding. His talk examined not only the conventional patterns mustered by musicians such as Clara Schumann or Carl Czerny in their improvisations, but also the musical gestures that underpin them – a forceful ‘arpeggio wave’ at an opening, a ‘small gesture’ (sigh, turn or pair of schemas) devised in response, a ‘turning-point’ around a chromatic schema or a crashing descent ‘bringing down the house’ at the end. In this way, Rabinovich imbues schematic choices with narrative meaning by considering how they modulate listener attention and punctuate the communicative process that connects performers to their audiences. The result is a more richly textured view of what Jeff Pressing calls the ‘knowledge base’ of improvisation, that ‘cauldron of devices [including] musical materials and excerpts, repertoire, subskills, perceptual strategies, problem-solving routines, hierarchical memory structures and schemas, generalized motor programs, and more’ (‘Psychological Constraints on Improvisational Expertise and Communication’, in In the Course of Performance: Studies in the World of Musical Improvisation, ed. Bruno Nettl with Melinda Russell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 53). The power of schema theory lies in the precise images it can render of such rich networks of knowledge.

What makes schema theory particularly valuable in this pursuit is its omnivorousness, its clarion call to theorize capaciously across cognitive, structural, semiotic, historical and anthropological domains about how musical know-how relates to the process of musical enacting. On the other hand, schema theory diminishes in value the more it is reduced to yet another way of labelling familiar structures, the more its objects of enquiry are narrowed to middleground prototypes, Gerippe (voice-leading skeletons) or what have you. I was glad to see many papers that resisted this urge, using schemas to undermine dichotomies or map out new conceptual territory. Derek Remeš (Technische Universität Dortmund), for instance, examined the ambiguous status of parallel-third harmonizations (or Austerzen) as both an improvisational technique and an expressive signifier. Meanwhile Stephen Tian-You Ai (Harvard University) explored how Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre deployed schemas strategically to navigate the uneven pitch terrain of meantone-derived temperaments in narratively compelling ways.

But the most exemplary contribution in this regard was from McKenna Sheeley-Jenkins (University of Western Ontario): ‘Pedal Schemas: A Harp-Centric Mode of Analysis’. Echoing the organological pursuits of Jonathan De Souza (see, for example, Music at Hand: Instruments, Bodies, and Cognition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017)), Sheeley-Jenkins explored the actions of a harpist as they use pedals to manipulate tonality, adopting voice-leading terms to map the parallel, similar, oblique or contrary motion of the feet along the pedalboard. Pedal schemas capture embodied knowledge of this footwork, for example when shooting both feet to the outermost pedals to raise one pedal while lowering the other. Though her twentieth-century repertoire lay far from the galant style, Sheeley-Jenkins offered perhaps the most promising vision of the field’s future by showing how schemas can form just as readily around the repetitive movements of a performing body as they can around conventional sequences of pitches. Her work thereby gestures towards a schema theory that concerns itself less with delineating what schemas are and more with creatively reimagining what it means to bring a structured packet of musical knowledge (which is all schemas actually are) into action.

Pedagogical topics loomed large at the conference, a natural emphasis given Gjerdingen’s central thesis that a musician’s training profoundly shapes the music they create. But despite the growing availability of pedagogically oriented texts by Giorgio Sanguinetti, Job IJzerman and others (see Sanguinetti, The Art of Partimento: History, Theory, and Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) and IJzerman, Harmony, Counterpoint, Partimento: A New Method Inspired by Old Masters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018)), a central question remains unresolved: can partimenti and solfeggi, designed for years of individualized apprenticeship with a maestro, be meaningfully adapted to the scale, pace and institutional structure of the modern university classroom? While this question still awaits systematic exploration, several presenters offered promising case studies rooted in their own teaching. Changhee Lee (Beijing Normal–Hong Kong Baptist University) outlined a schema-based approach to harmonization and score reading in keyboard-skills courses, one that employs strategies of ‘reduction’, ‘redistribution’ and ‘rewriting’ to accommodate mixed skill levels. Robert Hjelmstad (University of Denver) similarly showed how schemas can be embedded within piano-literature surveys, keyboard-harmony classes and private lessons, even when instructors are not theory specialists. Charles Weaver and Dani Zanuttini-Frank (The Juilliard School) reported on their revival of Neapolitan solfeggio training in a graduate ear-training course for baroque instrumentalists, using hexachordal solmization and mutation to strengthen tonal awareness, intonation and schematic fluency. Though much remains to be learned about their impact, these experiments show that even small doses of schematic thinking can yield meaningful results, testifying to the power that schema theory still holds to reshape music education.

As a music theorist, what I find most exciting about schema theory is its insistence that musical structure offers an indispensable viewpoint into the socio-cognitive world of musicians. My initial encounters with Gjerdingen’s work felt like an invitation to see analysis not as an isolated technical exercise, but as one facet of (and always in dialogue with) a broader anthropology of musical creativity. Several presentations took up this invitation, bridging work in schema theory with practical performance experience or archival research. Jonathan Salamon reconsidered Handel’s keyboard style through his schematic habits, showing how patterns like the Romanesca and Prinner, absorbed in his early training, became durable stylistic fingerprints that blended German contrapuntal technique with Italianate elegance. Marina Rossi (Università di Trento) in collaboration with Simone Vebber (Conservatorio Gaetano Donizetti, Bergamo; Civica Scuola di Musica Claudio Abbado, Milan) examined a collection of music for harpsichord from the Thun family archive, whose minuets and trios in partimento notation reveal the role of schemas in educating young nobles in provincial centres. Vera Plosila (Universiteit Leiden; Orpheus Instituut, Ghent), by contrast, turned to the accompanied keyboard sonata, drawing on her practice-based research as a fortepiano and traverso performer to show how schema theory can guide the adaptive, collaborative reworking of skeletal scores, revealing the social values embedded in eighteenth-century domestic music-making.

Yet there is at times a tendency in these endeavours to treat the cataloguing of schemas and the amassing of frequency data as if they were, in themselves, explanations of style. Yi Dong’s (Shanghai Conservatory of Music) corpus study of Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies, for instance, offered a valuable map of recurring schemas across nineteen works, but left unstated the broader implications of this map for Liszt’s romantic idiom. Similarly, the careful tracking by Thalia Adelfopoulou (University of Macedonia) of Neapolitan formulas in Nikolaos Mantzaros’s three arias from 1815 showed how the composer’s conservatory training informed his craft, yet stopped short of situating these patterns against musical romanticism as it manifested itself in early nineteenth-century Greece. Corpus study, of course, has its place: in my own contribution (Nathaniel Mitchell, Wesleyan University), I tracked variants of a leaping-fifth vocal cadence (what I call the Morì PAC) across a corpus of arias to show how this schema changed conceptually as it was reiterated – fixing some elements so firmly that they resist change, while opening others to creative variation. However, especially when examining the use of galant schemas beyond the galant style proper, it is essential to ask how materials tailored to an aristocratic, courtly culture respond to the pressure of a very different aesthetic environment, a question that in turn demands that we ask what those different aesthetic conditions are. It has been more than three decades since Leonard Meyer masterfully untangled this question in Style and Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), showing how romantic notions of organic unity and transcendent genius structurally transformed the language inherited from the eighteenth century. Sustained engagement with this foundational work would enrich all who take up such questions, allowing authors to push beyond structural data to make nuanced arguments about what these conventional patterns did for and to those who employed them.

Gjerdingen’s keynote address responded explicitly to such tensions. ‘Style analysis is hard’, he said, because it ‘is multidimensional and closely tied to social groups and subgroups’. Returning to the perennial question of what makes Bach’s ‘Italian’ Concerto sound ‘Italian’, Gjerdingen staged a rich comparative analysis of Bach against his galant contemporaries. His analyses emphasized that aesthetic distinctions often hinge on intuitive perceptual cues that both invite and thwart easy generalization. The intuition that Bach used more complicated diminution patterns than galant composers, for instance, may hold true for Prinners but not for Fontes. Adequate style analysis must account for precisely such details, moving beyond the identification of harmonic schemas to consider diminution, contour, texture and the embodied perceptual responses of listeners. For schemas alone do not make a style. They must be interpreted in relation to larger musical, social and cognitive contexts. The field, he suggested, must resist reifying schemas as disembodied abstractions and instead approach them as flexible, historically situated and perceptually grounded structures of musical sense-making. Only then can schema theory realize its potential to illuminate the subtle workings of musical knowledge by fusing sensitive analysis with rich cultural and cognitive theorizing.