The Partimenti Workshop
Unlock your creativity like the greatest composers.
Trust your musical ideas!
Create music quickly and efficiently!
Have fun creating music!
ENROLMENT CLOSING SOON
Program starting Feb 2024 – Spots are limited
You are capable of composing or creating amazing, fascinating, incredible, stunning and surprising music.
Music theory can leave you feeling stuck or unable to create. Music theory doesn’t train your ear and can make creating music feel difficult. It might feel like you lack an intuitive sense of harmony. There is a disconnect between your thinking and your listening.
Partimenti will make your ear the driver of your music making. Step by step you will figure out how to experiment, play around with music and have fun while creating!
Are you interested in joining the workshop? Let’s talk about your goals and how The Partimenti Workshop can help you.
Is this you?
- You are a good musician, but composing or creating feels frustrating.
- You don’t feel like you have an intuitive sense of harmony or melody.
- You have trouble generating ideas or trouble fitting your ideas together.
- You know some music theory, but it leaves you drawing blanks as you compose.
- You love making music, but you get bogged down with a pencil and manuscript paper or with Dorico, Sibelius, or Finale.
Partimenti can help!
- Partimenti helps you create ideas in real time.
- Partimenti can help you create more musical ideas faster than ever before.
- By creating music in real time your ideas will be coherent and connected to each other.
- By using basic tools—scales and intervals—you will end up using fewer tools to create more music.
- Learning partimenti will give you an intuitive sense of how harmony works and what note, chord, or harmony comes next.
You can trust the music that you write.
Some people have trouble generating musical ideas, the blank page stares back at them.
Some people have trouble connecting ideas, filling the whole page with ideas that don’t fit together.
Some people just can’t get started because composing is too frustrating or confounding.
Here is the partimenti paradox: by creating ideas faster, but listening to them deeply and with fresh ears, you will create more musical ideas, faster, and they will intuitively fit together.
“I highly recommend Ian as a fantastic teacher with an infectious passion for partimenti. His kindness, encouragement, and expertise create a supportive learning environment from the outset. As a composer and educator committed to fostering composition and improvisation skills in my own students, I consider the study of partimenti to be a vital yet often overlooked component in music education. I’m a classically-trained pianist with some experience in jazz and Indian classical improvisation, and through my studies with Ian, I discovered that partimenti was the crucial missing piece that I was seeking in my own education journey.”
You can create music quickly and efficiently and get more music written.
Get your music in front of performers faster!
Compose more!
Make more money from composing!
Get more commissions!
Have players and audiences fall in love with your music!
Hi, I'm Ian
I’m a composer, pianist, conductor and teacher and I will be your teacher and guide through partimenti.
I discovered partimenti when I went to France in 2013 to study with students of the legendary teacher Nadia Boulanger.
Partimenti changed how my fingers interact with my instrument, how my brain thinks about music, but most profoundly partimenti has changed how I listen to music and audiate—or listen in my head to the music I’m creating.
I teach partimenti privately and teach the partimenti workshop with Dr. Joseph Sowa’s Wizarding School for Composers.
I’ve spent a decade teaching, researching, studying partimenti and developing what I call partimneti thinking.
"Ian's natural instinct to unlock and reward students' creativity!"
— Eric Heidbreder
bassoonist and content creator
Try This!
Receive “Try This!” in your inbox every Friday.
You will receive:
- a 1-2 minute bite-sized partimenti video lesson
- and a guided practice video for keyboard players and single-line instruments
- every 4 to 6 weeks we will put the elements together and create a musical phrase.
- plus news, updates, and blog posts from The Partimenti Workshop
Let’s talk!
Are you interested in joining the workshop? Let’s talk about your goals and how The Partimenti Workshop can help you.
ENROLMENT CLOSING SOON
Workshop starting Feb 2024 –Spots are limited
How does the program work?
- The Partimenti Workshop is a 14 week program
- two 1-hour live Zoom workshops per week hosted and lead by Ian Campbell
- access to all of the materials, content and assignments
- weekly meetings with your peer accountability partner
- access to a private community where your peers and I will provide feedback and encouragement
- To get the full benefit from the Partimenti Workshop you will need to commit between 3 to 6 hours outside of the workshops
By the End of the Partimenti Workshop You Will...
- compose about 50 short pieces in our weekly assignments
- improvise dozens more short pieces
- be able to quickly and efficiently be able to assemble a piece of music
- have a stronger harmonic intuition
- have tools to reliably create compelling melodies
- have tools to reliably create harmonies with direction and purpous
- have put into practice all the tools we have learned into your creative practice
Weeks 1-11: Fingers 🖐️, Brains 🧠, and Ears👂
In the Partimenti workshop we will develop your skill and craft with
- the Rule of the Octave
- many different types of cadences
- several of the most common sequences including the descending 7-6, ↓4 ↑2, ascending 5-6, and ↓5 ↑4
- creating simple melodies
- embellishing melodies
- two, three and four voice counterpoint
- accented dissonance like the suspension and rhthmic displacement.
Counterpoint and Partimenti are two tools and methods that work together. Counterpoint is the exploration of melodies—the horizontal; harmony is the exploration of the sonority—the vertical. Partimenti brings the melodiy and the sonority—the horizontal and the vertical—together.
As soon as you are comfortable with a contrapuntal device or a harmonic pattern, we will bring them together using partimenti to explore and create!
Weeks 12-14: Find Your Own Voice With Partimenti
- Composing a piece: Creating your own partimenti to help you compose quickly and efficiently. You could use partimenti to create a new piece for piano, or string quartet or choir.
- Deconstructing a style: such as a prelude, minuet, or toccata—and reconstructing the style in your own voice, using partimenti. Learn to compose or improvise in that style!
- Understand a composer: Use partimenti to understand a piece of music from Ravel, to Scarlatti or Jennifer Higdon and create music in their style.
BONUS: Two Free Books
As part of the program you will receive my two books: Learning the Rule of the Octave: Fingers, Brain and Ears and Creating a Figuration Prelude at the Keyboard for free. Learn more about these two books here.
FAQ
The Partimenti Workshop is a 14 week program that will help you create music faster and be more confident in your craft.
For the first 11 weeks of the workshop we will meet for twice weekly for a 1 hour counterpoint workshop and a 1 hour partimenti workshop.
The final three weeks / six sessions of the workshop will focus on integrating the tools and techniques you have learned throughout the program in a creative project of your own design.
The Partimenti Workshop will run between February and May 2024. Exact dates will be forthcoming.
We will be having two live weekly workshops (that will be recorded and made available to you). You should be prepared for 3 to 6 hours of work outside of the workshops.
You should be familiar with major and minor scales, harmonic intervals, and be fluent with western music notation.
The workshops will be recorded and made available to all participants shortly after each session.
Are you interested in joining the workshop? Let’s talk about your goals and how The Partimenti Workshop can help you.
ENROLMENT CLOSING SOON
Workshop starting Feb 2024 – Spots are limited
