Partimenti


I have always wanted to learn to improvise. I don't really care which genre of music I learn to improvise in, but I want to learn some improv skills. Baroque and Romantic are probably my favorites, but Jazz and Classical are also nice. There are also some random 20th-Century pieces that really knock my socks off. I could happily learn to improvise in any of those genres. I noodle around a little on my piano, but my regular practice takes much of my playing time. As a result, making things up on the fly only gets a few minutes a day. 

Much of my improvisation is based on some mistake I made during my warm-ups. My mistakes are much more interesting than the exercises. When I play an off note in the midst of my Hanon or Philipp, I will usually play around and see what I can make of it. The results are often satisfying, but none of these pieces is much more than a little ditty,  and they typically lack organization. I want to get better at this.

I stumbled across a mention of partimento when I was looking for new ways to learn how to play, and I found it intriguing. The Baroque and Classical masters were all taught how to improvise from the bass. (Why do we not learn this nowadays as a matter of course?)  A partimento is an unfigured bass, from which the player can either improvise of compose. In the seventeenth century, a few conservatories started teaching their students to compose using a simple bass line and a few rules for the basic chords that could accompany it. These chords could be blocked so that the bass line would be the melody of the piece, or they could be arpeggiated or incorporated into any number of runs and elaborations to make a melody of their own over the top of the bass line. This is the classic school of improv, straight from Naples in the seventeenth century. I am learning the basics right now. When I have that part down, I'll get to play and write to the bass lines (the partimenti) that the maestro provided for his students all those centuries ago.

Who knows? Maybe I'll be a Baroque master by the time I'm done!

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