Partimenti

The secret grammar of the Neapolitan School

Musical progress

The idea that music advances through progressive improvements, from imperfect systems to perfect ones, is a nineteenth-century fantasy, a kind of Darwinism applied to the arts. It does not work that way. The medieval tetragram is not inferior to the modern pentagram; open-field notation is not primitive; and four, six, or eight lines are not stages on the way to a presumed perfection of five. Every age has the writing it deserves, in the sense that each system is perfectly suited to express what was required in its own time. Notation is a tool, not an Olympic podium. The same holds true for partimenti, which are not a rudimentary predecessor of modern harmony, but a different system, conceived for different purposes and extraordinarily effective in its context. The fact that in 1750 someone copied Scarlatti’s treatise in order to bring it to Germany demonstrates something very simple: it worked, and it worked well enough to be exported half a century after it had been devised.

What a partimento really is

Partimento does not mean “basso continuo.” The basso continuo is a low part written on a single staff, with numbers indicating the chords, and it serves to accompany. A partimento may be written in several clefs, because it is not merely a bass. It often has no numbers at all and functions as a framework for improvising and composing. For practice, it is recommended to play it in all keys. If in basso continuo the focus lies on realizing harmony, in partimento the focus lies on the moving parts themselves, as the name suggests.

Singing first of all

In Scarlatti’s system our G becomes “Do” for a precise reason: to facilitate vocal intonation. At the foundation of the Neapolitan school lies singing. The musician must first know how to sing, must feel the semitones, and internalize melodic motion before even playing it. The solfeggi (diminutions) found in partimenti are not mechanical exercises. They are living melodies, with underlying basses that teach how to accompany a given melody, because one does not begin from chords but from the voice. This is why B disappears in the hexachordal system: the sounds are six, not seven. The Guidonian inheritance, after seven centuries, thus arrives intact in eighteenth-century Naples.

Formula, cadence, memory

The partimento is a compendium of formulas. Three figures, a cadence, two progressions, another cadence, which one may reuse as desired, trying them out in different keys. It may seem tedious to an outsider, but for a student at the Conservatory of Naples it was a powerful training ground, where one learned to modulate, to construct fugues, to improvise in double and triple counterpoint. To improvise does not mean “to invent at random.” One must know how to combine internalized formulas. As in the commedia dell’arte, the scenario does not limit freedom; it makes it possible.

The lost key

After 1850 the oral tradition of partimenti was interrupted. The manuscripts remained, but the Master was gone, and without the Master the partimento became an enigma. The numbers that sometimes appear do not refer only to chords; they may indicate cadences, rules of the octave, imitations, entries of the subject. Without living transmission, everything becomes flattened, and many eventually conclude that basso continuo and partimento are the same thing. They are not. Basso continuo is a subcategory of this complete compositional system.

The galant style and formulas

Robert O. Gjerdingen, in his book Music in the Galant Style, identified recurring formulas in eighteenth-century music, which he calls, for example, “Monte,” “Fonte,” and “Romanesca.” His work convincingly showed that this repertoire relies on recurrent patterns. One possible limitation, however, is that these formulas are largely derived from finished compositions rather than from the pedagogical sources of the Neapolitan school. Partimenti, by contrast, reveal the compositional workshop before the masterpiece.

The great revolution

A partimento must be played in all keys. This is not a technical detail, but a pedagogical principle. It challenges the nineteenth-century historiographical idea that the systematic treatment of all keys in a didactic sense began with Bach. In the Neapolitan conservatories, exercises, fugues, and formulas were transposed into all keys even before Bach published his books. And this not for theoretical reasons connected to temperament, but for practical pedagogical purposes.

Two opposing models

If we compare partimenti with contemporary German pedagogy, substantial differences emerge. In the Neapolitan tradition, the center of the system is singing: learning is oral and practical, harmony arises from the movement of the parts, and the keyboard becomes a compositional laboratory. In eighteenth-century German tradition, the center of gravity is rather the chorale, and harmony is treated as a vertical structure, particularly suited to being fixed on paper. Improvisation does not constitute the core of the method. The Neapolitan school forms the composer-improviser; the German school forms the writing harmonist. They are two different mentalities, even if boundaries are never absolute: improvisational practices certainly existed in German areas as well, but the pedagogical axis remains distinct.

The question of tonality

A partimento must always be played in all keys as a pedagogical principle. The student must internalize formulas at a relative level rather than an absolute one, recognizing their functions. Unlike The Well-Tempered Clavier, a finished artistic work, the partimento is a generative tool. If Bach offers models to be admired, the partimento offers mechanisms to be used. In the first case the student studies the result; in the second, the process. In the German world, basso continuo remains primarily a practice of accompaniment, whereas in Naples the partimento includes basso continuo, counterpoint, improvisation, and systematic transposition. To claim that partimento and basso continuo are equivalent means failing to grasp the difference between accompanying and generating music. Basso continuo sustains; the partimento creates.

Vertical versus horizontal

Nineteenth-century harmonic pedagogy, largely influenced by the German area, organizes musical thought in terms of chords. The Neapolitan school organizes thought in terms of the movement of voices. This difference is still reflected in modern manuals, which explain harmony as a succession of triads or seventh chords. In partimenti, instead, we find a practical compendium of formulas composed of cadences, progressions, suspensions, and imitations. It is not a list of chords, but instructions for moving the parts.

The myth of the “age of Bach and Mozart”

Reducing the eighteenth century to the “age of Bach and Mozart” means viewing the musical world of that time through a German-centered lens. The choice is ideological, given that between 1685 and 1791 European music largely spoke Italian. German princes sent their musicians to Naples to update their training. To call that period the “age of Bach and Mozart” is equivalent to calling the Renaissance the “age of Dürer and Holbein” while ignoring Leonardo and Michelangelo. The point is not to diminish anyone, but to restore historically valid proportions.

Partimenti: Method, Singing, and Transmission

The invented “ban” and the paradox of New York

According to a now entrenched narrative, unfortunately repeated in textbooks, in 1961, during a congress of the American Musicological Society in New York, the Neapolitan School was allegedly “banned.” The verb is revealing, since in reality the discussions concerned operatic style and were limited and circumscribed. There was no official resolution, no historiographical decree, and certainly no formal abolition. The real issue is not what happened in New York, but what was not yet known in academic circles at the time. In 1961 the patrimony of Neapolitan partimenti was still largely unfamiliar, and partimento was casually confused with basso continuo. Scholars debated operatic style without considering the pedagogical system that had generated it. They discussed the fruit while ignoring the root. There is also an irony worth recalling. In New York itself, the city where the Neapolitan School would supposedly have been “denied,” Philipp Trajetta, son of Tommaso Traetta and trained in the Neapolitan tradition, had founded a Conservatory at the beginning of the nineteenth century on the Neapolitan model, exporting a method to the United States. While in the twentieth century the existence of the School was being questioned, in the nineteenth it had already crossed the Atlantic.