Channels, Spring 2017

Page 32 Longnecker • The Partimento Tradition EXAMPLE 4 Heinichen’s conception of the règle de l’octave ( 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), 28, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40283107. ) The partimenti as exercises did not cease but, rather, continued in Italy through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Likewise, in the twentieth century, partimenti spread to France and Parisian conservatory pedagogues, such as Nadia Boulanger, used partimenti as exercises. As seen in Example 1, Federe Fenaroli originally wrote a partimento exercise and, later, Boulanger’s student, Walter Piston, realized it into a fugue. 39 However, though partimento exercises themselves are useful compositional tools no matter what theoretical background accompanies them, their full import was lost with the ascendance of Rameau’s theory of harmony. As Rosa Cafiero says, “Today, we can see that the Neapolitan tradition, when fully functioning in its world of close-knit teachers and students, was indeed a highly systematized process for developing skills in improvisation and composition. But when taken out of its native context and reduced to ‘treatises’ read by students unaware of the tradition, it began to transform into part of the nineteenth-century study of harmony. . . .We can detect subtle shifts of concepts as partimenti leave their homeland of an essentially oral tradition and are subsumed into a foreign, more literary tradition of printed harmony books.” 40 Thus, the forces of history soon laid the system of partimento pedagogy to rest. Rameau built his approach to pedagogy on a few explicitly stated theoretical rules. On the other hand, the Neapolitan schools subtly wound their theory around the preponderance of assorted exercises, culminating in implicit knowledge at the end of training. Though the individual partimenti themselves survived, 41 partimento’s role as an interactive exporter of implicitly stated music theory soon became obsolete, eclipsed by the burgeoning popularity of Rameau’s theory of fundamental bass. 39. Robert O. Gjerdingen, “Partimento, que me veux-tu?” Journal of Music Theory 51, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 127-128. 40. Rosa Cafiero, “The Early Reception of Neapolitan Partimento Theory in France: A Survey,” Journal of Music Theory 51, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 154-155. 41 . Gjerdingen, “Partimento, que me veux-tu?” 128.