Portrait of Fedele Fenaroli. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Between 1650 and 1800, four orphanages in Naples produced most of the composers of Europe. Santa Maria di Loreto, Sant’Onofrio a Capuana, the Pietà dei Turchini, the Poveri di Gesù Cristo. Out of those rooms came Pergolesi, Piccinni, Paisiello, Cimarosa, Zingarelli, and out of Zingarelli came Bellini. Not one of them, in ten years of boarding school, ever opened a harmony textbook. Harmony textbooks did not exist yet.
What they had in place of textbooks was called the partimento. It is a single line of music, the bass, written on a single staff, sometimes with figures above it and sometimes with nothing at all. The boy sits down at the harpsichord and draws a whole piece out of that line, with its voices, its imitations, its cadences in the right places. He does not write it: he plays it. The piece exists only while he is doing it, and the proof that he has learned it is that the next day he will do it differently.
The difference from the way music is taught today is total, and it is best put in practical terms. A modern harmony course starts from a general rule and then applies it: the scale degree, the function, the resolution. The partimento starts from the opposite end, from what the hands are doing. The bass rises by a whole tone, so this happens above it. The bass falls by a fifth, so this other thing happens. The bass stays put, so something else again. These are formulas of motion, not concepts, and the Neapolitans called them the motions of the bass.
The load-bearing structure of the whole edifice is the rule of the octave: one scale, eight notes in the bass, and for each of the eight a set chord. Whoever knew it could harmonise anything that moved by step, which in eighteenth-century music is most of it. It appeared in print in France, in a guitar treatise by François Campion in 1716, but in Naples it had been taught in the workshop for longer, and without a book.
The materials survive, thousands of sheets of them. The collections of Francesco Durante, who taught for decades and was the true architect of this method, include numbered partimenti, diminuted partimenti in which the bass itself starts to run, and fugal partimenti, that is, entire fugues to be reconstructed from the lowest voice alone. Fedele Fenaroli, who had been Durante’s pupil, published his rules in 1775, and that little book remained in use in Italian conservatories well into the nineteenth century.
Alongside the partimento there was the solfeggio, which then did not mean reading notes aloud. It meant singing a melody written expressly over a bass that the teacher realised at the harpsichord, and the Neapolitan solfeggi are real compositions, often beautiful ones, built to pass into the boy’s throat the same formulas his hands were learning on the keyboard. The method worked because it arrived by two roads at once.
Then there was time, and time is the part no institution could afford today. A boy entered at eight or ten and stayed ten years. He slept there, ate there, studied, sang in church to pay for his keep, and in the meantime taught the little ones, because the system ran on the mastricelli, the older pupils who gave lessons to the new arrivals. When he left he had behind him several thousand hours of composition done with his hands, and not a single written exam.
The consequence shows. The speed with which these composers wrote is not an anecdote about genius, it is a technical effect: they had a repertoire of ready-made solutions in their fingers, and when composing they did not decide note by note, they chose among patterns they had known since they were ten. Cimarosa and Paisiello delivered operas in a few weeks because their training had been built for exactly that.
The method died in the nineteenth century, and not for a musical reason. It died when conservatories became schools with classes, timetables, separate subjects and ministerial syllabi, that is, when harmony, counterpoint and composition became three different courses taught by three different people. The partimento was exactly the opposite: one single thing, done seated at the instrument.
For some twenty years research has put it back in circulation. Robert Gjerdingen reconstructed its models in Music in the Galant Style, published in 2007, and Giorgio Sanguinetti published The Art of Partimento in 2012, which is to this day the standard reference. In Italian conservatories the partimento has returned in a few programmes, as a subject. That is, once again, as a course.