Artisanal knowledge as a cognate music theory: Reading a par timento

In Chapter 5, the author explores how Neapolitan partimenti (basses to which a performer supplied one or more upper voices to create an improvised keyboard composition) were part of “artisanal”-practical-knowledge, a largely unwritten tradition taught through demonstration and repetition of stock musical patterns. By means of a thick description of actual melodic and harmonic practice and by taking analysis to the realm of improvisational composition, this chapter approaches partimenti in much the same way as eighteenth-century Neapolitan apprentices-who began studying music when they were hardly literate in their own language-would arguably do. The theoretical implications lead to the historical understanding that figured-bass figures often provided cues to the movements of upper voices, not just chords; that the object of study was, in reality, directed toward learning specific collocations of stock voices, not a set chord progression.