Child Composers In The Old Conservatories

Download or read book Child Composers in the Old Conservatories written by Robert O. Gjerdingen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-10 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In seventeenth century Italy, overcrowding, violent political uprising, and plague led an astonishing number of abandoned and orphaned children to overwhelm the cities. Out of the piety of private citizens and the apathy of local governments, the system of conservatori was created to house, nurture, and train these fanciulli vaganti (roaming children) to become hatters, shoemakers, tailors, goldsmiths, cabinet makers, and musicians - a range of practical trades that might sustain them and enable them to contribute to society. Conservatori were founded across Italy, from Venice and Florence to Parma and Naples, many specializing in a particular trade. Four music conservatori in Naples gained particular renown for their exceptional training of musicians, both performers and composers, all boys. By the eighteenth century, the graduates of the Naples conservatories began to spread across Europe, with some 600 boys formerly in residence beginning to dominate the European musical world. Other conservatories in the country - including the Paris Conservatory - began to imitate the principles of the Naples' conservatory's training, known as the partimento tradition. The daily lessons and exercises associated with this tradition were largely lost-until author Robert Gjerdingen discovered evidence of them in the archives of conservatories across Italy and the rest of Europe. Compellingly narrated and richly illustrated, Child Composers in the Old Conservatory follows the story of these boys as they undergo rigorous training with the conservatory's maestri and eventually become maestri themselves, then moves forward in time to see the influence of partimenti in the training of such composers as Claude Debussy and Colette Boyer. Advocating for the revival of partimenti in modern music education, the book explores the tremendous potential of this tradition to enable natural musical fluency for students of all ages learning the craft today.

Download or read book Music in the Galant Style written by Robert Gjerdingen and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2007-10-05 with total page 527 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Music in the Galant Style is an authoritative and readily understandable study of the core compositional style of the eighteenth century. Gjerdingen adopts a unique approach, based on a massive but little-known corpus of pedagogical workbooks used by the most influential teachers of the century, the Italian partimenti. He has brought this vital repository of compositional methods into confrontation with a set of schemata distilled from an enormous body of eighteenth-century music, much of it known only to specialists, formative of the "galant style."

Download or read book Child Composers in the Old Conservatories written by Robert O. Gjerdingen and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Telling the compelling story of the seventeenth century Naples orphans who emerged from the city's conservatori as masters of the European musical world, Child Composers in the Old Conservatory explores their training in the partimento tradition, and advocates for its revival in modern music education.

Download or read book The Solfeggio Tradition written by Nicholas Baragwanath and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this first-ever book on the solfeggio tradition, one of the pillars of eighteenth-century music education, author Nicholas Baragwanath illuminates how performers and composers developed their exceptional skills in improvising and inventing melodies.

Download or read book The Art of Partimento written by Giorgio Sanguinetti and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-03 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the height of the Enlightenment, four conservatories in Naples stood at the center of European composition. Maestros taught their students to compose with unprecedented swiftness and elegance using the partimento, an instructional tool derived from the basso continuo that encouraged improvisation as the path to musical fluency. Although the practice vanished in the early nineteenth century, its legacy lived on in the music of the next generation. In The Art of Partimento, performer and music-historian Giorgio Sanguinetti chronicles the history of this long-forgotten Neapolitan art. Sanguinetti has painstakingly reconstructed the oral tradition that accompanied these partimento manuscripts, now scattered throughout Europe. Beginning with the origins of the partimento in the circles of Corelli, Pasquini, and Alessandro Scarlatti in Rome and tracing it through the peak of the tradition in Naples, The Art of Partimento gives a glimpse into the daily life and work of an eighteenth century composer. The Art of the Partimento is also a complete practical handbook to reviving the tradition today. Step by step, Sanguinetti guides the aspiring composer through elementary realization to more advanced exercises in diminution, imitation, and motivic coherence. Based on the teachings of the original masters, Sanguinetti challenges the reader to become a part of history, providing a variety of original partimenti in a range of genres, forms, styles, and difficulty levels along the way and allowing the student to learn the art of the partimento for themselves at their own pace. As both history and practical guide, The Art of Partimento presents a new and innovative way of thinking about music theory. Sanguinetti's unique approach unites musicology and music theory with performance, which allows for a richer and deeper understanding than any one method alone, and offers students and scholars of composition and music theory the opportunity not only to understand the life of this fascinating tradition, but to participate in it as well.

Download or read book The Pianist's Guide to Historic Improvisation written by John J. Mortensen and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book is for pianists who wish to improvise. Many will be experienced performers - perhaps even veteran concert artists - who are nevertheless beginners at improvisation. This contradiction is a reflection of our educational system. Those who attend collegiate music schools spend nearly all time and effort on learning, perfecting, and reciting masterpieces from the standard repertoire. As far as I can remember, no one ever taught or advocated for improvisation during my decade as a student in music schools. Certainly no one ever improvised anything substantial in a concert (except for the jazz musicians, who were, I regret to say, a separate division and generally viewed with complete indifference by the classical community). Nor did any history professor mention that, long ago, improvisation was commonplace and indeed an indispensable skill for much of the daily activity of a working musician. I continue to dedicate a portion of my career to "perfecting and reciting" masterpieces of the repertoire, and teaching my students to do the same. That tradition is dear to me. Still, if I have one regret about my traditional education, it's that it wasn't traditional enough. We have forgotten that in the eighteenth century - those hundred years that form the bedrock of classical music - improvisation was a foundation of music training. Oddly, our discipline has discarded a practice that helped bring it into being. Perhaps it is time to retrieve it from the junk heap of history and give it a good dusting off. I love the legends of the improvisational powers of the masters: Bach creating elaborate fugues on the spot, or Beethoven humiliating Daniel Steibelt by riffing upon and thereby exposing the weakness of the latter's inferior tunes. The stories implied that these abilities were instances of inexplicable genius which we could admire in slack-jawed wonder but never emulate. But that isn't right. Bach could improvise fugues not because he was unique but because almost any properly-trained keyboard player in his day could. Even mediocre talents could improvise mediocre fugues. Bach was exceptionally good at something which pretty much everyone could do at a passable level. They could all do it because it was built into their musical thinking from the very beginning of their training"--

Download or read book Counterpoint and Partimento written by Peter van Tour and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: