Harmony Counterpoint Partimento

A new method of music theory education for undergraduate music students, Harmony, Counterpoint, Partimento is grounded in schema theory and partimento, and takes an integrated, hands-on approach to the teaching of harmony and counterpoint in today's classrooms and studios. A textbook in three parts, the package includes: · the hardcopy text, providing essential stylistic and technical information and repertoire discussion; · an online workbook with a full range of exercises, including partimenti by Fenaroli, Sala, and others, along with arrangements of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century compositions; · an online instructor's manual providing additional information and realizations of all exercises. Linking theoretical knowledge with aural perception and aesthetic experience, the exercises encompass various activities, such as singing, playing, improvising, and notation, which challenge and develop the student's harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic imagination. Covering the common-practice period (Corelli to Brahms), Harmony, Counterpoint, Partimento is a core component of practice-oriented training of musicianship skills, in conjunction with solfeggio, analysis, and modal or tonal counterpoint.

This is the first volume of Harmony, Counterpoint & Improvisation, a textbook which offers each of these three facets as one organic course of study. The harmony section covers the whole technique of common chords and their inversions. Counterpoint is initially discussed as a vocal art and the early exercises explore the art of Palestrina and the English Tudor composers. In the improvisation section many keyboard techniques are introduced, such as transposition, chord progression and simple harmonisation.

At the height of the Enlightenment, four conservatories in Naples stood at the center of European composition. Maestros taught their students to compose with unprecedented swiftness and elegance using the partimento. In The Art of Partimento, performer and historian Giorgio Sanguinetti provides students and scholars of composition and music theory an historical chronicle as well as a practical guide, offering them the opportunity not only to understand the life of this fascinating tradition, but to participate in it as well.

This volume reflects a multidisciplinary approach, with the accent on the interplay between music performance and music theory. Thomas Christensen, in his contribution, shows how the development of tonal harmonic theory went hand in hand with the practice of thoroughbass. Both Robert Gjerdingen and Giorgio Sanguinetti focus on the Neapolitan tradition of partimento. Gjerdingen addresses the relation between the realization of partimenti and contrapuntal thinking, illustrated by examples of contrapuntal imitation and combination in partimenti, leading to the "partimentofugue." Sanguinetti elaborates on the history of this partimentofugue from the early eighteenth until the late nineteenth century. Rudolf Lutz, finally, presents his use of partimenti in educational practice, giving examples of how reviving this old practice can give new insights to composers, conductors, and musicians.

-- Stanley Persky, City University of New York

Music in the Galant Style is an authoritative and readily understandable study of the core compositional style of the eighteenth century. Gjerdingen adopts a unique approach, based on a massive but little-known corpus of pedagogical workbooks used by the most influential teachers of the century, the Italian partimenti. He has brought this vital repository of compositional methods into confrontation with a set of schemata distilled from an enormous body of eighteenth-century music, much of it known only to specialists, formative of the "galant style."