Partimento and the Neapolitan school

What a partimento is

A partimento is a bass line, figured or unfigured, written on a single staff, from which the student must realize at the keyboard a complete composition: harmony, upper voices, imitations, sometimes an entire fugue. It is not just a figured-bass exercise: it is a method for internalizing harmonic and contrapuntal formulas until you can improvise and compose fluently. The method originated and was perfected in the four conservatories of Naples between the late seventeenth and the nineteenth century: Santa Maria di Loreto, Sant'Onofrio a Porta Capuana, Pietà dei Turchini and Poveri di Gesù Cristo.

The masters and the texts

Alessandro Scarlatti (1660–1725), Francesco Durante (1684–1755), Leonardo Leo (1694–1744), Nicola Fago: the generation that fixed the method; the partimenti of Durante and Leo are still used.
Fedele Fenaroli (1730–1818): his Regole musicali per i principianti di cembalo (1775) and his partimento books became the most widespread manual in Europe until the nineteenth century.
Giacomo Tritto, Nicola Zingarelli, Giovanni Furno: masters of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.
Pupils: Pergolesi, Jommelli, Piccinni, Paisiello, Cimarosa, Bellini, Mercadante. Through France (Choron, Principes de composition des écoles d'Italie, 1808) the method reached the Paris Conservatoire.
Modern studies: Robert Gjerdingen (Music in the Galant Style, 2007; the Monuments of Partimenti archive) and Giorgio Sanguinetti (The Art of Partimento, Oxford 2012) brought partimento back into composition curricula.

The ingredients, in the order in which they were learned

Cadences: simple cadence (bass 4–5–1 or 3–4–5–1 with regular rhythm), compound cadence (with the six-four and the 4–3 suspension on the V), double cadence (prolonged V with double suspension, typical of Durante).
The rule of the octave: the standard harmonization of the scale in the bass, ascending and descending.
Bass motions (sequences): formulas for recurring bass movements, with the figures that accompany them, for example:

bass rising by step with alternating 5–6 (C with 5, then 6; D with 5, then 6…);
bass descending by step with a chain of 7–6 suspensions;
bass rising by a fourth and descending by a fifth (sequence by fifths, with sevenths: 7–7–7);
bass descending by a fourth and rising by a step (the motion of Pachelbel's Canon and of the Romanesca);
bass rising by step with suspensions in the bass (2–3).

Dissonances (ligatures): 4–3, 7–6, 9–8 in the upper voices; 2–3 (bass suspension); how to prepare and resolve them.
Dispositions: the three positions of the right hand (third, fifth or octave in the soprano) and how to choose among them.
Figured partimenti, then unfigured ones, then fugal partimenti with imitations indicated by the bass alone.

Example: a partimento fragment in C major

Bass: C D E F G A B C | C B A G F E D C (scale ascending and descending).

Realization with the rule of the octave (ascending): C (5/3) – D (6/4/3, that is G7/D) – E (6/3, C/E) – F (6/5, Dm7/F) – G (5/3) – A (6/3, F/A) – B (6/5, G7/B) – C. Descending: C – B (6/3, G/B) – A (♯6/4/3, D7/A) – G (5/3) – F (4/2, G7/F) – E (6/3) – D (6/4/3) – C.

On this foundation the student adds diminutions in the right hand, imitations of the bass, suspensions.

Why it is still relevant

Partimento teaches what is still needed today: thinking in recognizable harmonic formulas (the schemata), knowing which chords "go" with a given bass motion, and improvising. A producer who knows five or six bass motions can harmonize any house, R&B or soundtrack bass line without hunting for chords at random.

Exercise for a producer

Write the bass C–D–E–F–G–A–B–C in quarter notes in the piano roll.
Realize it with the rule of the octave in three voices in the right hand.
Now write the descending bass C–B–A–G–F–E–D–C and realize it with a 7–6 chain (each upper voice holds a note that becomes a seventh and descends to the sixth).
Change the rhythm (shuffle, dotted eighth notes) and the timbre (Rhodes, pad): you have a neo-soul progression born from an eighteenth-century exercise.

Rule of the octave, Galant schemata, Figured bass (basso continuo), Fourth-species counterpoint (suspensions), Harmonic sequences.