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Going Old School: Using Eighteenth Century Pedagogy Models To Foster Musical Skills And Creativity In Today's Students, Monique Arar

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Recent research has illuminated a pedagogical approach to keyboard improvisation of the Italian conservatories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, namely that of partimenti: single-stave, multiple clef exercises in which students were trained to improvise (Gjerdingen 2007, Sanguinetti 2012, van Tour 2015). This approach was passed down through oral instruction until the mid-twentieth century, when pedagogical priorities shifted away from improvisation and compositional creativity towards virtuosity, technique and adherence to the printed page. Simultaneously, the tradition of decade-long musical apprenticeship was replaced with semester-long courses in music theory and harmony.

The existing research on partimenti presents a compelling historical narrative …