The new style of music, fashionable from about 1730 to 1770, was called Galante music. It consciously simplified contrapuntal texture and intense composing techniques that realized a pattern on the page and substituted a clear leading voice with a transparent accompaniment. Progressive musicians of Bach's own generation weere seeking a fresh, immediate emotional appeal.

The rejection of so much accumulated learning and formula in music is paralleled only by the rejection in the early 20th century of the entire structure of key relationships . Not every contemporary was delighted with this revolutionary simplification: Johann Samuel Petri, in his Anleitung zur Praktischen Musik (1782) spoke of the "great catastrophe in music" (Blume 1970).

The change was as much at the birth of Romanticism as it was of Classicism. The folk-song element in poetry, like the singable cantabile melody in galante music, was brought to public notice in Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient poetry (1765) and James Macpherson's "Ossian" inventions during the 1760s.

Telemann's later music, Bach's sons, Quantz , Hasse, Giovanni Battista Sammartini, Giuseppe Tartini, Galuppi, Stamitz, Domenico Alberti, and early Mozart are exemplars of Galante style.

This simplified style was melody-driven not constructed, as so much classical music was to be, on rhythmic or melodic motifs: "It is indicative that Haydn, even in his old age, is reported to have said, 'If you want to know wherther a melody is really beautiful, sing it without accompaniment.'" (Blume 1970 p. 19)

The affinities of Galante style with Rococo in the visual arts are easily overplayed.

Reference

• Blume, Friedrich, Classic and Romantic Music : a Comprehensive Survey, translated by M.D. Herter Norton, 1970