What is Partimenti?
Partimento was once a common way of music thinking. Partimenti were figured bass training exercises for music students. Through these exercises, students learned harmony, improvisation, rules for composition, cadences, voice leading, and more. The Partimenti style of teaching and learning music is based on a completely different way of thinking about music than today’s music teachers and music students think about music.
When was Partimenti used?
Partimenti exercises were widely used as learning tools from the 1600s to the 1800s. After that, they were brushed aside as the focus turned onto mere performance, with improvisation and rules being considered less important.
Why does Partimenti matter?
This way of thinking about music produced the greatest technically skilled composers in known history. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Hadyn, Handel, and multitudes of lesser-known musicians “grew” out of the environment of Partimenti thinking.
What is the difference between Partimenti and today’s music teaching?
Partimenti began with the foundation; students learned rules of music first, and through practice of those rules built an enormous base of practical patterns. In effect, they filled their minds with a library of rules about music that they could access at any time for improvisation and composition. They were given the tools to make their own music. Today’s music teaching focuses almost exclusively on performance. Students rarely learn the foundational rules behind music, and as a result may be able to perform complicated pieces, but do not have the tools to improvise and compose with knowledge. Today’s students primarily memorize and play what others have composed. When composition happens, it is based on feelings rather than rules. The scope of most music teachers and students today is very limited compared to Partimenti thinking. The music theory of today is not Partimenti.
No one today uses Partimenti, so why should I care?
Partimenti has been “lost” to several generations of musicians, but is being revived in small corners. One family experimented with Partimenti by having their two daughters trained in it from an early age. Alma Deutscher, the oldest daughter, is regularly composing and improvising beautiful music, and from an early age has been compared to Mozart. Her music ability, combined with the knowledge provided by Partimenti exercises, enabled her to compose many pieces for violin, piano, orchestra, and opera by the age of 16. This is one reminder that even today, Partimenti plus ability can produce amazing compositional results.