Channels, Spring 2017

Page 24 Longnecker • The Partimento Tradition instructors graded the all-male students (according to the costume of the Neapolitan conservatories 4 ) by a hierarchy of levels. During their ten years of instruction, the students progressed from young junior to older junior to senior. The young junior students (aged 10 to 14) studied solfeggio until their voices broke. The older juniors took singing class, instrumental class, and partimento and theory class while the seniors added counterpoint to these last three subjects. 5 At the top of the hierarchy was the primo maestro who oversaw all the other maestri. The maestri taught only senior students and selected the most talented of them to be maestricielli, students who taught the junior students who, likewise, taught the less advanced students. 6 Unfortunately, not all the students progressed to the senior level of the hierarchy. Yearly examinations determined if students could remain in the conservatory. 7 The Neapolitan schools were known across Europe for the quality of their teaching of composition, which was built on the study of counterpoint and partimento. Although counterpoint was important in the Neapolitan schools and its various teaching methods distinguished the conservatories from each other, partimento was a distinctively Neapolitan pedagogical method. The method was related to the concept of thoroughbass, which originated and flourished in the Neapolitan conservatories’ unique environment. 8 One of the first uses of the term partimento occurred in 1634 within Giovanni Filippo Cavalliere’s Il scolaro principiante de musica . In his work, Cavalliere refers to the bass of a composition as partimento, using the term as a synonym. Likewise, in other sources from the early seventeenth century, partimento refers to the basso continuo part of a composition. At this point, it was essentially another word for thoroughbass, although some writers defined it more particularly as an unfigured bass intended for the player to realize. However, near the turn of the eighteenth century, the word partimento began to acquire a narrower, more focused definition than simply “unfigured bass”. Many partimenti written at that time were not exclusively composed of a bass part but included other clefs or even other parts as well. Composers wrote these partimenti students as practice in contrapuntal realizations of accompaniments. Interestingly, this usage of partimento bears several similarities to basso seguente, an Italian practice of the time. A basso seguente is a summary of a piece of music, often a choral fugue, 9 and consists of one staff that contains the lowest voice played. The bass is often the lowest voice played; however, in compositions such as fugues, this is not the case. Even this seems to be an accurate description of partimento itself, there is a major difference between basso seguente and partimento that highlights an important feature of partimento. The basso seguente is written with reference to an existing composition, while the partimento is written as a seed from which the composition will be developed through 4. Ibid., 32. 5. Peter Van Tour, Counterpoint and Partimento: Methods of Teaching Composition in Late Eighteenth-Century Naples (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Usaliensis, 2015), 89. 6. Sanguinetti, The Art of Partimento , 42-43. 7. Van Tour, Counterpoint and Partimento , 89. 8. Sanguinetti, The Art of Partimento , 45-46. 9. Van Tour, Counterpoint and Partimento , 214-215.