Lessons in Composition from the Eighteenth Century

During the second half of the eighteenth century, generations of young musicians at the Conservatorio della Pietà dei Turchini in Naples received the art of composition from the hands of Nicola Sala (1713–1801). After completing his own eight-year course of study at La Pietà in 1740, Sala enjoyed a celebrated teaching career spanning roughly six decades, eventually becoming secondo maestro in 1787 and primo maestro in 1793. A student of Nicola Fago and Leonardo Leo, Sala was a champion of the so-called Leist school of composition, which enjoyed a notorious rivalry with the more progressive "Durantist" school established by Francesco Durante. His students included Giacomo Tritto (another influential teacher whose pupils included Vincenzo Bellini) and Gaspare Spontini, as well as lesser known names like Carlo Lenzi and Giuseppe Gherardeschi, two successful church musicians whose surviving student notebooks under Sala offer profound insight into the pedagogical practices that produced many of the finest composers in Europe. After extensive training with solfeggi (accompanied vocal exercises that offered students their first encounters with two-part counterpoint), students at La Pietà completed written contrapuntal exercises, many of which emphasized adding (often invertible) voices above and below scales and cantus firmi in the successive Fuxian species. Concurrent with these written assignments, students developed facility in composition, thoroughbass accompaniment, and improvisation (categories that may not have been so distinct) through practical exercises known as partimenti.

The term "partimento" is generally understood to refer to a figured or unfigured musical exercise intended to be realized at the keyboard, written on a single staff using predominately the bass clef, but also commonly changing clefs. Partimenti were a central element of instruction at the four renowned Neapolitan conservatories established in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and have become increasingly familiar to modern musicians following such works as Giorgio Sanguinetti's The Art of Partimento: History, Theory, and Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) and Robert Gjerdingen's Music in the Galant Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Sala's partimenti are among the most sophisticated and pedagogically valuable in the repertory, and Peter van Tour's The 189 Partimenti of Nicola Sala makes them easily available in a single collection for the first time. This new critical edition represents an important addition to the libraries of partimento enthusiasts and music theorists, as well as those of period performers, improvisers, and composers interested in learning via the methods actually taught in eighteenth-century conservatories. As the author of a highly regarded three-volume Regole del contrappunto pratico (Naples: Stamperia Reale, 1794), Sala enjoyed a reputation as an especially skilled counterpoint teacher that transcended the borders of the Kingdom of Naples. In van Tour's words, Sala's partimenti "invite the student to hone their skills in counterpoint and fugue experimentally through a series of progressive keyboard exercises" (vol. 1, introduction, [p. i]). The simplest of...