Partimenti in Their Historical Context

Partimenti, or instructional basses, were central to the training of European court musicians from the late 1600s until the early 1800s. They had their greatest influence first in Italian conservatories, especially at Naples, and then later at the Paris Conservatory, where the principles of the "Italian school" continued to be taught far into the twentieth century. Because learning the Italian style of music was a priority for almost any eighteenthcentury musician, many well-known non-Italian composers, including Bach, Handel, Haydn, and Mozart, also studied or taught partimenti. The oldest Italian conservatories were not established to conserve music. They were charitable religious institutions for the conservation of orphans and foundlings. Different conservatories specialized in the teaching of different crafts or skills, one of which was music. In a society where family connections and social rank were all-important, an orphan needed a marketable skill in order to make his way in the world. It was not enough to learn "about" music. The child needed to become fluent in the courtly style so that he could eventually perform at church, in an aristocratic chamber, or at the opera theater. Thus training in partimenti was practical, not theoretical. By the eighteenth century, the best conservatories found that they could supplement their income by hiring out their well-trained young musicians. This income made possible the recruitment of ever more illustrious teachers, with the result that the Italian conservatories became magnets for talented students and teachers from all over Europe. The conservatories began accepting paying students, and slowly transformed into institutions much like the music conservatories of today. Even though the unfigured basses that constitute the bulk of eighteenthand nineteenth-century sets of partimenti were centerpieces in the training of musicians, today few know of this tradition, and fewer still can "read" these documents, in the sense of hearing the multivoice messages encoded in their patterns. In the journal Fonti musicali italiane (1997) Giorgio Sanguinetti noted that "while other European countries developed more rational [music] theories, Italy was an operatic monoculture whose theoretical basis was the time-honored Neapolitan tradition of the partimento." In terms of communication theory, the "rational" approaches privileged a "transmission" model amenable to reception by outsiders, while the partimenti favored a "ritual" model of shared symbolic practices performed best by insiders. Or in terms of the psychology of categorization, the rational approaches were "theory" driven while the partimenti reinforced the formation of "prototypes" through the rote learning of "exemplars." Confronted with a partimento, the insider heard a series of

musico-ritual messages rich in associations. The outsider heard just a bass part. This difference is reflected in the divergent national traditions of music treatises. Mid-eighteenth-century German-language treatises were largely directed toward the cultivated amateur. These books featured verbose, general descriptions of interest to music consumers ("outsiders" in relation to professional musicians). While it is true that the writings of J.J. Quantz, C.P.E. Bach, and Leopold Mozart contain a wealth of detail about eighteenth-century music, one can hardly imagine a young boy developing into a competent court composer through even the most careful reading of them. Collections of partimenti, by contrast, contained very few words and often hundreds of pages of music. A collection might begin with a statement of the rules or regole. Then there might be some pages of figured basses. The figures were like the training wheels on a child's bicycle; once the apprentice achieved a measure of competence, the figures were removed. The bulk of the ensuing partimenti were unfigured, and hence largely incomprehensible to musical amateurs. Even more restricted to insiders were the advanced, fugal partimenti that featured rapid changes of clef and required a knowledge of preferred contrapuntal combinations. Without access to a collection of the more explicit regole, like those of the great Neapolitan maestros Fedele Fenaroli and Giovanni Furno translated in this series, an outsider might never realize that an awareness of the scale degrees in each phrase or cadence was a prerequisite for understanding a partimento. The key changed rapidly in this repertory, and the partimentisto needed to be aware of conflicts and overlaps between local and more global contexts. Though it outwardly resembled the bass part given to eighteenth-century accompanists, a partimento was but one voice in a virtual ensemble that played in the mind of the student and became sound through realization at the keyboard. In psychological terms, the partimento, which as mentioned could temporarily change clefs to become any voice in the virtual ensemble, provided a series of stimuli to a sequence of schemata, and the conditioned responses of the student resulted in the multivoice fabric of phrases and cadences. From seeing only one feature of a particular schemaany one of its partsthe student learned to complete the entire pattern, and in doing so committed every aspect of the schema to memory. The result was fluency in the style and the ability to speak this courtly musical language. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the elite ranks of court composers across all of Europe were heavily populated with graduates of partimento instruction. Of course a student needed an insider, a maestro, as a guide through the labyrinth of partimenti, a point made in many of the regole. Partimenti

often intentionally posed musical problems that not every student could have solved independently. It was assumed that a maestro would be there to help the student over these more difficult musical hurdles. In the present series of partimenti, the editor will occasionally provide some commentary in lieu of the "the living voice of a well grounded maestro" [viva voce di ben fondato Maestro] (G.M. Bononcini, The Practical Musician, 1673). Viewing partimenti as traces of a lost culture of music training, one can see that while partimenti did provide students practice in keyboard accompaniment, harmony, and counterpoint, the more talented and devoted students also gained a rich training of the musical imagination. One might say, without too much exaggeration, that for the eighteenth-century court musician, partimenti were a mode of musical thought. Today the partimenti provide a window into the musical world of that time, and they can still help train young musicians who want an insider's understanding of this great musical heritage.

A Beginner's Guide
Eighteenth-century students learned partimenti at the keyboard, and today that is still the best method. You do not need to be an accomplished keyboard player. It is enough to be able to play, slowly and at your own tempo, a one-note bass in the left hand and one, two, or three notes in the right hand. You will be training your ears more than your fingers. Start by learning the "Rule of the Octave," or as the Italians called it, the regola dell'ottava. By that they meant the most common chords to play over each note of the the ascending and descending scales. An illustrated guide to the "topography" of the Rule of the Octave can be found by clicking here. You can find descriptions of how to perform the Rule of the Octave under the headings Hand Positions in the rule books or regole of Fedele Fenaroli and Giovanni Furno. Learn these patterns in all the major and minor keys, at least those having up to three or four sharps or flats. The Rule of the Octave, as depicted in the rule books, demonstrates sonorities, not the movements of four or even five independent voices. That is, do not attempt to apply the rules of part writing to the inner parts of the Rule of the Octave. Think of it more like playing a reduction of an orchestral score, where a number of parts may be doubled in other octaves. As you progress to real partimenti, thin the texture to two or three parts (including the bass) and begin to think of them as real voices.

Work your way through the rule books, playing each musical example in several keys, both major and minor. Furno's and Durante's regole contain small partimenti suitable for beginners. Your central task will be to study each partimento to see where you might employ three types of patterns: (1) segments of the Rule of the Octave, (2) cadences, as specified in the regole, and (3) special moves or movimenti either required or optional for various sequences. If you find yourself thoroughly perplexed by, for instance, one of Furno's partimenti, you may wish to consult the editor's sample realizations found in the Appendix to that treatise. This should be a last resort. Even simple partimenti change key frequently. Often you may be able to change keys through one of the three types of patterns mentioned above. Try to know the scale degrees of the three or four upcoming tones in the bass. When there is a conflict between the old key and the new key, favor the new key. As you become more comfortable with simple partimenti, begin to learn the typical right-hand patterns of decoration laid out in Franceso Durante's Embellished Basses, or Partimenti diminuiti. In imagining an ideal texture, think of Domenical Scarlatti's harpsichord sonatas, not J. S. Bach's chorales. A variety of small partimenti, many with chromatic passages, can be found in Mattei's Piccolo Basso ("Little Bass"). Each poses an interesting musical problem for the performer. Their brevity, however, helps to limit their difficulty. They also provide practice in reading more complex figures. As you experiment with various partimenti on this website, you may begin to notice passages where the bass performs a motive and then pauses on a long tone. This is often a cue to repeat that motive in the melody. The higher levels of partimenti presume a polyphonic give and take between the bass and melody. Among the most advanced partimenti are the partimento fugues. Though we have relatively little historical information about how these works were performed by students, the best advice may be to keep the texture thin. Do not attempt to perform a four-voice fugue with all four voices sounding all the time. This is bad practice even in written-out fugues, and almost surely fatal for improvised partimento fugues.

An Illustrated Guide to the "Rule of the Octave"

The chart below shows in abstract and greatly simplified form how eighteenth-century musicians conceptualized the relative stability or instability of the different scale degrees across an octave in the bass. The red boxes represent positions deemed stable points of arrival, and the green circles indicate positions felt to be unstable and more mobile.

As a first approximation of the rule of the octave, we can imagine that the stable scale degrees receive a 5/3 chord (as in do-mi-sol) and that the unstable degrees will take some form of a chord with a 6, perhaps 6/3 (as in re-fa-si). This simplified version highlights the great continuity in the traditions of polyphonic music, inasmuch as the chart below is almost indistinguishable from late Medieval and Renaissance presentations of fauxbourdon singing in cathedrals.

Like the melodic minor scale, the rule of the octave is not quite the same ascending and descending. So for a better approximation, let us examine movement up and down separately. Below is the ascending version. Dissonances (a clash between a "6" and a "5") were added to the scales degrees that precede the stable positions. So as one ascends the scale in the bass, maximum instability comes just before a return to stability.

The same principle applies when descending, though the dissonances are now between a "4" and a "3." In the descent from the sixth to the fifth scale

degree, the "6" is raised a half step to create a leading-tone (F in a C-major context) to the stable fifth scale degree, thus giving scale degrees two and six the same sonority.

There is still one more complication. The third scale degree was deemed partly stable, partly mobile. Following the principle of dissonance before stability, musicians often added a "4/3" dissonance to a rising second scale degree, and almost always added a "4/2" dissonance to a descending fourth scale degree.

"The" rule of the octave is thus not a fixed set of chords, but rather a summary or norm of the fluid and highly contingent practices of eighteenthcentury musicians. In this series, the maestro Giovanni Furno details several further and more particular contingencies dealing with departures from simple scalar movement (click here to go to Furno's presenation). Both Durante, Furno, and Fenaroli present the basic rule of the octave, for both major and minor scales, in their respective Regole (Rules), and in this series their prescriptions are given both verbally and in musical notation.