Partimento, que me veux-tu?

Abstract

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, eighteenth-century French author and philosopher, was first a musician. As a youth he had been unable to find a qualified music master and hence lacked the training required to excel in his chosen field. He did read carefully the harmony treatise of Jean-Philippe Rameau, but that study neither advanced his compositional abilities nor later shielded him from the scorn of Rameau himself. Had Rousseau found a master of the then fashionable Italian style of music, he would have studied exercises in partimenti and solfeggi. Solfeggi were studies for voice with bass accompaniment. Partimenti were instructional basses from which an apprentice was expected to recreate complete compositions at the keyboard. The prodigious mental powers developed through the study of partimenti, which greatly facilitated improvisation and composition, gave a competitive advantage to composers so trained. Though an old, nonverbal method of craft instruction, partimenti were nonetheless a cognitively optimal means of developing fluency in a complex, multivoice style of music. In memorizing exemplars of small contrapuntal schemata, fitting them to the matching locations in a partimento, and then realizing them in a current style, the apprentice was training himself to think in "free" counterpoint.

Music in Evolution and Evolution in Music

“…As this implies, such modelling, or description, often takes the form of regulations, or prescription, for what is permissible in some pedagogical or critical system. While there are exceptions to this principle of practice-theory asynchrony -perhaps most notably in traditions where continuity and craft are privileged, such as the school of sacred polyphony crowned by Palestrina and codified by Fux (Fux, 1965); and the Italian partimento tradition (Gjerdingen, 2007a;Gjerdingen, 2007b) -for much of post-Renaissance European musical history concerns have been raised by theorists about composers' perceived deviations from "correct" procedures and their alleged breaking of "rules". 219 In retaliation for this perceived intrusion, some composers have defended what they see as their right to set the terms of reference for their work, articulated perhaps most famously in the statement attributed by Varèse to Debussy, that "works of art make rules but rules do not make works of art" (in Albright, 2004, p. 185).…”

Partimento as improvisation pedagogy: renewing a lost art

“…Students of partimento learned musical exemplars, or schemata, and then adapted them into new but similar contexts (Gjerdingen, 2007). Through an intense sequential study and practice of the regole and schemata, a student mastered the art of improvising partimento, and consequently gained an incredibly complex understanding and facility of the musical style at hand.…”

“…The anthology is composed of musical examples of improvisatory practices preceded by an historical introduction. Partimento does not earn a place within the many musical illustrations however, illustrating a lack of knowledge within the field until relatively recently.Music theorists and scholars Giorgio Sanguinetti, Robert Gjerdingen, Rudolf Lutz, and Thomas Christensen have been largely responsible for our increased understanding of the craft and art of partimento(Gjerdingen, 2007a, Sanguinetti, 2012Christensen et al 2010). Sanguinetti's recent publication, The Art of Partimento, serves as the most important source for understanding the techniques (2012), and Gjerdingen's website "Monuments of Partimenti" likewise provides an instructional model for learning the skill(n.d.).…”

Counselling a better relationship between mathematics and musicology

“…1. Can 'cluster analysis' or some similar technique show a sound empirical basis for theories of catalogues of patterns underlying styles of music, such as 'topics' in Classical and Romantic music [14,15], the importance of partimenti as models for Baroque and early Classical composers [16], or the idea of reusable contrapuntal 'modules' in Renaissance polyphony [17].…”