The subjects of counterpoint and harmony have been gradually changing over the past few decades. While these subjects had been passed over to us in printed textbooks with titles such as Kontrapunkt, Fyge, or Harmonielehre, leading us to solve hundreds of progressively ordered written exercises to be solved and corrected, it has become increasingly clear that the composers we are playing learned these skills very different from what we do. Skills such as figured bass, improvisation, embellishment have been gradually been removed for our curricula.
It is no surprize that the subjects of Music Theory is now restoring such skills. Particularly the subject of partimento plays a significant role in this effort to restore a more playful and improvisatory approach to counterpoint and harmony.
Since 2017, Wessmans Musikförlag has been publishing an impressive series of partimento editions under the editorship of one of the leading experts in the field, Peter van Tour (Örebro University). With the help of an international team of scholars, among them Nicoleta Paraschivescu (Basel), Matteo Messori, (Bologna), and Ewald Demeyere (Brussels),we will publish some of the most important collections of partimento realizations.
Partimenti are exercises, mostly notated in F-clef, to which students improvised the upper parts with the help of thoroughbass figures; such exercises thus functioned somewhat similar to lead sheets in jazz music. The realization presented in this series will provide the modern musician with some of the best available examples of how such shorthand notations could be developed by students or professional musicians.
Giambattista Martini
Libro per Accompagnare (Bologna, 1737-38)
Edited by Peter van Tour
Stanislao Mattei
Scales and Verset in all Major and Minor Keys (Bologna 1788)
Edited by Peter van Tour
Carlo Cotumacci
Regole, e Principj di sonare lezzioni di partimenti (Naples, ca. 1751)
(2 volumes) Edited by Peter van Tour
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