Child Composers in the Old Conservatories: How Orphans Became Elite Musicians Robert O. Gjerdingen New York: Oxford University Press, 2020 pp. 355, ISBN 978 0 190 65359 0

Robert O. Gjerdingen is among the musicologists who have helped loosen the grip of romanticism and mid-century modernism from scholars’ and performers’ approaches to European music from the long eighteenth century. His books A Classic Turn of Phrase: Music and the Psychology of Convention (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988) and Music in the Galant Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), along with numerous articles and papers on music theory, cognition and perception, have demonstrated both the ubiquity and the salience of galant schemata – those stock musical phrases with which musicians navigated the rich, wide borderlands between convention and invention, performance, improvisation and composition. In doing so, he gives us an insider’s perspective on the building-blocks of common-practice tonality. Now a new generation of scholars, including Giorgio Sanguinetti, Nicholas Baragwanath and Peter van Tour, are publishing critical editions of surviving manuscripts of partimenti and solfeggi; and series like Monuments of Partimento Realizations (Visby: Wessmans Musikförlag, 2017–) and Gjerdingen’s own Monuments of Partimenti (partimenti.org), as well as publications, recordings, videos and online resources by performer-scholars like Robert Levin, Nicoleta Paraschivescu, Ewald Demeyere, L’Arpeggiata and the Scroll Ensemble, offer students, scholars and aficionados a trove of materials with which to explore this tradition. In his new book, Child Composers in the Old Conservatories, Gjerdingen takes a step back from the what of galant schemata to examine the how: how exactly did apprentice composers learn these tools of their trade? What was their curriculum, how were they assessed and how were the rules and norms transmitted (and modified) down the generations? In a wide-ranging study that encompasses source studies, archival documents and a generous helping of analogies from Charles Dickens to Pixar, Gjerdingen retraces the steps of composers working out and working through the formulae as they learned and taught musical phrasing. Along the way, he paints portraits of a host of noteworthy apprentices and masters in this craft. The geographical and temporal scope of Gjerdingen’s book is wide. He focuses primarily on the eighteenth-century tradition at the four boys’ conservatories in Naples, with a second focus being the Paris Conservatoire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This represents, as Gjerdingen notes, a largely unbroken tradition of some 250 years, extending from the late seventeenth-century intavolature of Gaetano Greco and partimenti of Bernardo Pasquini all the way to the chant donné realizations of Claude Debussy (1879) and the first-prize harmony realization of the little-known Colette Boyer (1938). The dual focus on Naples and Paris – with occasional detours to Bologna, Regensburg, Vienna and Montpellier – makes for frequent abrupt leaps between cities and centuries, and some recapitulation of concepts and themes across chapters. A timeline of sources, or map of the institutions and centres surveyed, might have been helpful for orienting the reader, as might a family