Robert Gjerdingen

Robert O. Gjerdingen is a scholar of music theory and music perception, and is an emeritus professor at Northwestern University. His most influential work focuses on the application of ideas from cognitive science, especially theories about schemas,[1] as an analytical tool in an attempted "archaeology"[2] of style and composition methods in galant European music of the eighteenth century. Gjerdingen received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984 after studying with Leonard B. Meyer and Eugene Narmour. His 2007 book Music in the Galant Style, an authoritative study on galant schemata, received the Wallace Berry award from the Society for Music Theory in 2009 and has become influential in the field of music theory.[3] Gjerdingen was also editor of the journal Music Perception from 1998 to 2002.

Publications
  • Music in the Galant Style: Being an Essay on Various Schemata Characteristic of Eighteenth-Century Music for Courtly Chambers, Chapels, and Theaters, Including Tasteful Passages of Music Drawn from Most Excellent Chapel Masters in the Employ of Noble and Noteworthy Personages, Said Music All Collected for the Reader’s Delectation on the World Wide Web (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
  • Studies on the Origin of Harmonic Tonality [an English translation of Carl Dahlhaus's Untersuchungen über die Entstehung der harmonischen Tonalität ] (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
  • A Classic Turn of Phrase: Music and the Psychology of Convention (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988).

In addition to these monographs, Gjerdingen has also edited two volumes of historical partimenti by Italian composers who taught at the conservatories in Naples.

References
  1. Bent, Ian D.; Pople, Antony. "Analysis, §II: History". Grove Music Online. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 14 August 2017. This did not prevent the cognitive sciences from making a significant impact on musical theory, however, as was shown, in addition to the theory of Lerdahl and Jackendoff, by Narmour's exceptionally detailed theory of melodic structure (1992), and Robert Gjerdingen's application of schema theory to phrase patterns in classical music (1986, 1988).
  2. Gjerdingen, Robert O. (2007). Music in the Galant Style. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 16.
  3. In a 2011 review of the book for the journal Theory and Practice, Paul Moravitz Sherill writes that the book "is a work that needs little introduction. In 2009, it received the Society for Music Theory's Wallace Berry Award, and papers extending the project of [Music in the Galant Style] have garnered attention at several regional and national conferences".
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