Channels, Spring 2017

25 Channels • 2017 • Volume 1 • Number 2 Page improvisation (see Ex. 1) . 10 Sanguinetti gives a thorough and concise definition in his book The Art of Partimento , “A partimento is a sketch, written on a single staff, whose main purpose is to be a guide for improvisation of a composition at the keyboard.” 11 Complementing the study of counterpoint, partimento’s pedagogical taught Neapolitan students composition through structured improvisation. EXAMPLE 1 Partimento No. 3, Book 5 (F. Fenaroli, collected by R. Gjerdingen. http://faculty- web.at.northwestern.edu/music/gjerdingen/partimenti/collections/Fenaroli/Book5/03FenBk5/03FenBk5.h tm.) Partimento as Tradition It is necessary to distinguish between partimento as compositional exercise and partimento as pedagogical tradition. Partimenti, the literal exercises existing as notated sketches on paper to be realized on the keyboard, were used in teaching composition well after the golden age of the Neapolitan schools. 12 But in the environment of the Neapolitan schools, partimento was more than just an advanced exercise in realization. In the absence of explicit theory instruction, partimento provided a plethora of contextual examples of seventeenth and eighteenth-century theory worked out in real compositions. As Ludwig Holtmeier notes, “If one takes partimenti as a didactic tradition. . . in which the accompaniment of unfigured basses is of fundamental importance, then ‘partimento’ also contains a theoretical approach that is inseparably tied to the principles of the Rule of the 10. Sanguinetti, The Art of Partimento , 10-11. 11. Ibid., 14. 12. Ludwig Holtmeier, “Heinichen, Rameau, and the Italian Thoroughbass Tradition: Concepts of Tonality and Chord in the Rule of the Octave,” Journal of Music Theory 51, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 25.