To Örebro University

Research into the repertoire of Italian partimento has undergone rapid development in just a few decades. This phenomenon is unprecedented in the history of Western art music, as a vast and previously unrecognized body of repertoire has accumulated extraordinary interest within a short timeframe.

However, how did this surge in interest occur, what direction is this development taking, and why have certain aspects of partimento teaching garnered attention while others have remained overlooked?

In this keynote address, I argue that the increased interest in partimento pedagogy provides a compensatory solution to challenges encountered in traditional written harmony and counterpoint instruction. It introduces a curriculum where counterpoint and harmony are taught as a unified and practical subject. Unlike conventional textbooks and methods, which focus extensively on rules about inversions, chord doublings, voice leading, and species counterpoint, Neapolitan pedagogy emphasizes practical learning through the performance of cadences, scales, and sequences—referred to by Neapolitans as contrappunto pratico.

Many of these developments have been propelled by the digital revolution. Today, video learning, podcasts, and Zoom lessons stimulate new groups of students all over the world to imitate common patterns of these elements and learn to vary and combine them to create new phrases, akin to how young children learn to construct sentences from learned vocabulary. As such, partimento has become a new form of digitally communicated music theory. 

Consequently, it’s unsurprising that new analytical approaches such as Robert Gjerdingen’s Schemata Theory, with its cognition-based approach to music analysis, have become integral to this reinvigorated approach to practical musicianship.

Furthermore, this lecture will explore various challenges associated with these developments and propose ideas for future research in partimento.