The study of eighteenth-century partimento practice has blossomed so rapidly and so prolifically that it has become common to hear references to a present-day ‘partimento renaissance’. While pedagogy in the conservatories of Naples (embodied most characteristically in partimenti) would just a decade ago have been considered the somewhat obscure interest of specialists, these traditions now occupy a position of central attention in eighteenth-century music scholarship. A three-day event that spanned European borders, this recent conference represented an opportunity for scholars working internationally and across varied specializations to convene, share developments and assess the state of affairs. The conference's subtitle (‘Theory, Sources and Reception’) indicates both the three broad areas of primary concern to partimento scholarship and the inherently interdisciplinary nature of the field. Presentations frequently blurred traditional (and increasingly outdated) lines between the domains of musicology, music theory and, in some respects, modern pedagogy.

Perhaps the most noticeable trend in recent research is a broadening international focus that considers the significant influence of Italian music-pedagogical traditions as they were disseminated across the European continent. This is especially evident in the case of Paris, where in the early nineteenth century musical culture was shaped by an influx of Neapolitan immigrant musicians fleeing the Napoleonic Wars. Partimento collections achieved fame in France through the publication of new editions, like Alexandre Étienne Choron's Principes de composition des écoles d'Italie (Paris: Auguste Le Duc, 1808–1809), examined in a presentation by Nathalie Meidhof (Hochschule für Musik Freiburg). Meanwhile the Bologna-trained Luigi Cherubini, who taught in the famous Conservatoire de Musique and served as its second director from 1822 to 1841, helped institute a curriculum that was modelled deliberately on Italian traditions, with didactic elements including partimenti (basses données and basses chiffrées), solfeggi (solfèges), the regola dell'ottava (règle d'octave) and those standard sequential bass motions known as moti del basso (marches d'harmonie). As I described in my own contribution (Sean Curtice, Northwestern University), these methods were used to train generations of musicians into the first decades of the twentieth century, including such figures as Berlioz, Saint-Saëns, Debussy, Satie and Ravel. The influence of Italian pedagogy was also felt in German-speaking regions. Johannes Menke (Schola Cantorum Basiliensis) described Wagner's studies with Thomaskantor Theodor Weinlig, a pupil of Stanislao Mattei, who assigned contrapuntal exercises bearing the mark of the school of Padre Martini. Bass models familiar from Italian regole collections, Menke demonstrated, can be found even in Wagner's late works. Ludwig Holtmeier (Hochschule für Musik Freiburg) similarly illustrated parallels between partimento practice and the thoroughbass exercises of Emanuel Aloys Förster. It is clear that much progress has been made since the 2012 assessment of Giorgio Sanguinetti (Università di Roma Tor Vergata) that ‘partimento sources outside Naples are still largely uncharted, and cannot provide a sound basis for a thorough account of non-Neapolitan partimento traditions’ (The Art of Partimento: History, Theory, and Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), viii).

At the same time that research moves beyond Italian borders, it has also become less restricted to partimento alone, with an increased focus on solfeggio. Nicholas Baragwanath (University of Nottingham) emphasized that the first three years of training in the conservatories of Naples were devoted to lessons in solfeggio, which even in the late eighteenth century continued to use solmization practices derived from plainchant. Paolo Sullo (Università di Roma Tor Vergata) and Roberto Scoccimarro (Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln) examined matters of compositional technique, with respective focuses on modulation (or cambiamento di modo) and on structural parallels between solfeggi and contemporary operatic arias. It has become apparent that solfeggi were not intended to teach singing alone, but represented a student's first exposure to two-part counterpoint (the indispensable skeleton of eighteenth-century music), modulation, musical form and numerous other elements of musicianship that would continue to develop through practice with partimenti.

Much present scholarship centrally concerns not the famous maestri themselves, but the host of humbler ancillary characters also essential to musical life in Naples and beyond: copyists, publishers, manuscript collectors, musical dilettantes, and professors and students who did not achieve lasting fame can now be counted among those receiving a measure of recognition. We may include in this category such figures as Raffaele Carli, a Neapolitan-born publisher active in Paris whose career was explored in a study by Rosa Cafiero (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore); Biagio Muscogiuri, an unknown student also described by Cafiero, whose apprenticeship at the Santa Maria di Loreto conservatory can be reconstructed with the aid of two recently discovered manuscripts; Luigi Picchianti, whose mid-nineteenth-century arrangements and realizations of the famous partimenti of Fedele Fenaroli were examined by Marco Mangani (Università di Ferrara); Jean Baptiste Mathieu, a professor at the Paris Conservatoire whom Martin Skamletz (Hochschule der Künste Bern) identified as the copyist of a manuscript source of Nicola Sala's Regole del contrappunto pratico (later published in Naples in 1794); and Rodolphe Kreutzer, the great violinist whose journey to Naples for the express purpose of acquiring scores for the Conservatoire's developing music library was scrutinized by Giulia Giovani (Hochschule der Künste Bern). The title of most distinguished musical amateur in late eighteenth-century Naples no doubt goes to Giuseppe Sigismondo, whose Apoteosi della musica del Regno di Napoli (Apotheosis of Music in the Kingdom of Naples) is perhaps the single most important source on the history of the Neapolitan conservatories and their maestri. The work appears in a new edition (published in both Italian and English versions) by Claudio Bacciagaluppi, Giulia Giovani and Raffaele Mellace (Rome: Società Editrice di Musicologia, 2016). The history and significance of Sigismondo's work, along with details of this new edition, were profiled in a presentation by Claudio Toscani (Università di Milano).

Progress, of course, continues to be made with the musicological detective work aimed at clarifying the notoriously complex matter of partimento sources. Peter van Tour (University of Leuven), whose Uppsala Partimento and Solfeggio Databases have become essential resources for this task (www.musik.uu.se/research/projekt/uupart), argued that future manuscript research must include paper analysis in order to correct erroneous attributions and datings. Marilena Laterza (Università di Milano) similarly examined the textual problems that confront the creation of critical partimento editions. The discovery of a new source frequently offers more than simply the satisfaction of a mystery solved or the excitement of new partimenti for enthusiasts to try their hands at: such a source (or simply a previously neglected one) can contain insights that challenge assumptions and invite important reappraisals both musicological and theoretical. The survey by Lydia Carlisi (Hochschule der Künste Bern) of the roughly fifty harmonizations of ascending and descending scales in Gaspare Selvaggi's 1823 Trattato di armonia (Naples: Raffaele Miranda), for example, drew attention to the myriad ways to accompany the scale beyond the rule of the octave, which should not be viewed as a fixed, pedantic prescription, but as a fluid theoretical framework for understanding tonality. The incredible diversity of these harmonizations – which range from the ordinary to the intriguing to the positively eccentric, frequently dividing the octave into two sequential tetrachords or employing canonic upper voices – reveals a spirit of bold experimentation within the ostensibly limited confines of the scale.

There remain still deeper theoretical questions for partimento scholars to contend with. Menke's presentation on German partimento reception described a revealing polemical exchange in the mid-nineteenth century between Siegfried Dehn and Adolf Bernhard Marx: after the former wrote favourably of Italian teaching practices, the latter sharply criticized any music theory that prioritizes practical Generalbass-playing over the systematic ‘theory of chords’ offered by Harmonielehre. This tension between Generalbass (which, of course, includes the principles taught in collections of regole and partimenti) and Harmonielehre (which shaped the theoretical systems that endure in most modern curricula) is equally relevant to the present partimento renaissance. Modern partimentisti often have little choice but to resort to something like the strategy undertaken by the geneticists of Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park (1993), who filled in the gaps in fragmentary dinosaur DNA with the genetic material of surviving modern species. Historical sources simply do not address every matter of interest to modern scholars; if we are to resurrect partimento practice today – whether as performers improvising our own diminutions, as theorists reconstructing an entire system of musical thought, or as pedagogues attempting to introduce historical perspectives into modern music-theory classrooms – we must supplement our incomplete understanding of the past with knowledge from the present. Markus Neuwirth (Technische Universität Dresden), for example, examined issues of Formenlehre in the solfeggi of Fedele Fenaroli. Though there are no known treatises, regole collections or zibaldoni (commonplace books kept by apprentice musicians) to shed light on the ways musicians conceived of formal structure in the conservatories of eighteenth-century Naples, it is not difficult to identify recurring formal archetypes in Neapolitan solfeggi and partimenti. Musical form, like many elements of Neapolitan pedagogy, was probably a subject that was communicated orally to students, and it should certainly not be overlooked in modern scholarship simply for lack of written testimony. Presentations over the course of the conference employed such diverse modern theoretical methods as the identification of galant schemata after Robert Gjerdingen, form-functional analyses after William Caplin, the sonata theory of James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, Roman-numeral analyses, and even Schenkerian voice-leading reductions. Suffice it to say that opinions on these individual methods vary, but most partimentisti seem willing to agree that operating with a wealth of heterogeneous theoretical approaches offers the advantage of a diversity of perspectives, potentially yielding new and varied insights (so long as we remain frank in our presentation of the historical ‘authenticity’ of any given method). The synthesis of historical modes of thought with those modern theories that prove most applicable has significant implications for analysis in the coming years.

After an initial period of rebirth and infancy, partimento scholarship appears to be entering its years of maturity, experiencing the processes of disciplinary professionalization and differentiation. As theoretical ideas and cultural perspectives derived from the study of partimenti increasingly inform eighteenth-century music scholarship at large, it is clear that the traditions of Naples have much to teach us about the relationship between pedagogy and the compositional practices of great maestri across Europe. If the curiosity and tenacity of recent research is any indication, the field is well prepared to meet the challenges ahead.