Masters Take Up the Challenge

The early conservatories were trade schools. Over a period of about ten years they needed to transform orphans, then thought of as social outcasts, into skilled craftsmen who could earn a productive income and become self-supporting. So they developed practical methods to give boys the skills needed to become professional church organists, court composers, opera singers, orchestral musicians, or choir directors. The chapter surveys the historically most important music masters in Italy and the types of innovative lessons that they developed.

Learning Old Music in a New Age of Digital Reproduction

There are over four hundred genres of popular music known in North America, and many more if one includes the favourite musics of recent immigrants. Which of these should be singled out and taught to children? There is no good answer to that question. Classical European music is a good alternative, one that has a rich history and is known, at least a little, all over the world. But instead of teaching children just to reproduce what is written on a page of music, why don’t we teach them to make classical music—to improvise and compose it. The rediscovery of the lessons from the old conservatories shows us how improvisation and composition can be taught to ordinary children, leading to extraordinary results.

A Framework for Elaboration

The bass motions known in Naples as movimenti, and the contrapuntal collocations associated with them, would rarely be presented plainly in a real composition. Apprentice composers needed to learn how to decorate and embellish the plain melodies. Because this usually involved inserting notes with lesser time values, these embellishments could be termed “diminutions.” Lessons from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries present dozens of ways in which to “diminish” a given melody or bass. Counterpoint itself could be thought of as a way of embellishing a given musical subject.

The Contest Piece as a Probe of Memory

At the end of the school year at the Paris Conservatory each class or studio held a contest. How a student did in the contests could determine whether or not he or she could continue in that class, advance to a higher class, or be dismissed. In the harmony contests, students would be unlikely to win any sort of prize if they could not reproduce the contrapuntal schemas suggested by patterns in the given basses or melodies. That is, a student was provided with just one of the four parts (soprano, alto, tenor, bass) and required to complete the rest of the parts. The test typically lasted six hours, with the student shut in a room without any keyboard instrument. By being sensitive to the cues in the given voice, students could retrieve from their memories the other voices of the appropriate marches harmoniques. These were descendants of the movimenti (bass motions) taught in the Naples conservatories.

Counterpoint and Collocation

We know a lot about which words go together in our native language. In English we say “She caught a cold and then the flu.” We would never say “She caught the cold and then a flu.” Often we cannot articulate a rule for such knowledge—we just pick it up from hearing language in use. Counterpoint in music was learned the same way. Millions of combinations of tones were possible, but only certain combinations were preferred. Linguists call them “collocations,” meaning things co-located much more frequently than might be expected if combinations were random. The chapter surveys several contrapuntal collocations taught in Naples.

Partimenti and the Power of Improvisation

Like a lead sheet in popular music, a partimento gives a performer a single line of music to aid in the performance of a multivoice composition. Lead sheets provide a simplified melody and symbols for chords. Partimenti provide a bass and sometimes figured-bass numbers to indicate specific intervals. In both cases the reconstruction works well if the performer has a good knowledge of the style of music involved and a memory for the kinds of musical patterns needed. In Naples, children played the written partimento with their left hands at a small harpsichord. With their right hands they improvised the types of melodies, chords, and counterpoints implied by the bass. Beginners may have improvised mostly simple chords. Intermediate-level students improvised melodies and counterpoints. And advanced students developed highly contrapuntal realizations that included partimento fugues.

Solfeggi and the Acquisition of Style

In the old conservatories the equivalent of “music 101” was the class in solfeggio. This was where beginning students learned to read music, to distinguish the sizes of intervals, and to learn scales and arpeggios. Today syllables like “Do, Re, Mi” are connected with scale degrees (steps 1, 2, 3 respectively). This was not the case originally. “Mi,” for example, meant a tone with a whole step below it in the scale and a half step above it. Thus both “E,” “B,” and “F♯” were all “Mi.” Similarly, “F,” “C,” and “B♭” were all “Fa.” The chapter details how this worked and gives examples of lessons in the old style of solfeggio.

Affordance and the Musical Habitus

In the terminology of design, an “affordance” is what we perceive an object as inviting us to do. Thus a doorknob invites us to turn it, a button on a computer screen invites us to click on it, and so forth. For the students in the old conservatories, specific patterns in basses and melodies invited specific completions in four voices. Using four contestants in the harmony contest of 1877 as a sample, we can judge the perceived strength of the affordances of the given melody by noticing how similar are the contestants’ responses. If three or four of the contestants realized a short passage of the given melody in the same way, it probably means that their educations and experiences had led them to hear that passage in the same way and with a very similar meaning.

Little Masters, Real Masters, and Masterpieces

In the world of apprentices, journeymen, and masters, a masterpiece was a test piece completed as part of a claim to a master’s level of skill and status. In formal guilds there could be elaborate examinations, in which submitting a masterpiece was part of the process. In the Naples conservatories, advanced students could compose a large sacred work for chorus and instruments to demonstrate a professional level of skill. In between the masters who gave lessons to the conservatory children and the child apprentices who learned those lessons were a middle level of teaching assistants called “little masters” (mastricelli or maestrini). These were selected from advanced students who had passed qualifying examinations.

Dispositions and the Mastery of Complexity

What today we might term “orchestration” or “arranging” would have fallen under the term “disposition” in Naples. The same counterpoint, for example, could be realized as a “disposition in three voices” or “in four voices.” Each voice or instrumental part would be written on its own staff. Unlike in partimento playing, where small errors in counterpoint could be ignored, dispositions made every interrelationship visible and open to inspection and evaluation. The French four-voice realizations (realisations) in open score that figured so prominently in the contests for harmony and fugue at the Paris Conservatory were direct descendants of Neapolitan dispositions.