Partimenti: The Missing Link in Classical Music

How I Came to It

I got serious about music in high school through jazz piano. I’d always taken piano lessons, but before jazz I struggled with classical piano. I didn’t enjoy being told exactly what to play and how to play it, and I especially disliked the feeling of sitting down at the piano and only being able to reproduce someone else’s notes.

Around the same time, I had a fantastic band teacher and joined the jazz band, playing baritone saxophone. I loved it. I became deeply interested in jazz, began studying jazz piano seriously, and for the first time music felt alive. Listening, improvising, collaborating — sitting down with friends to play a blues or a standard — all of that made music feel like a living language rather than a fixed text.

I even started a jazz studies program at university. But then something unexpected happened.

Rediscovering Classical Music

I discovered Bach. And Brahms. I remember listening obsessively to Brahms’s Fourth Symphony and being astonished at the architecture of the music. A Bach fugue felt like an extraordinary piece of musical engineering. Gradually, I realized that my musical sensibility leaned more toward classical repertoire than I had expected.

I wanted the tools my classical piano friends seemed to have: depth of expression, technical fluency, tonal control, and access to centuries of repertoire and stylistic diversity.

But as I leaned back toward classical music, I noticed something troubling.

The composers whose music I loved weren’t just interpreters. Historically, they improvised, composed quickly, and worked fluently within a shared musical language. They weren’t dependent on written scores in the way many modern musicians are.

And I didn’t have whatever tool gave them that fluency.

A Crucial Teacher

During university, I did have one hugely important piece of the puzzle: an exceptional theory professor who was also my piano teacher, Charles Horton. His historically grounded theory approach gave me a foundation that later made partimenti immediately intelligible.

Charles had a gift for connecting theory directly to repertoire. He would point out the theoretical ideas we were studying inside the music I was actually playing. That may sound simple, but it changed everything for me. Theory stopped being abstract analysis and became something alive — something you could play with compositionally rather than simply observe after the fact.

(If you’re curious, his book Harmony Through Melody, published by Rowman & Littlefield, reflects much of that approach.)

Discovering Partimenti

Later I studied at the European American Musical Alliance in Paris with teachers connected to the Nadia Boulanger tradition. One of the books we used was Paul Vidal’s A Collection of Given Bases and Melodies, collected and revised by Narcís Bonet. In it was a short essay mentioning partimenti — the first time I’d encountered the word.

Not long after, I came across Giorgio Sanguinetti’s The Art of Partimento in the library. Reading it felt like discovering something I’d been searching for without knowing its name.

The missing link I’d sensed as a piano student suddenly had a shape.

The Gap in Modern Training

Music theory can sometimes explain music after the fact. But what I needed wasn’t just explanation — I needed tools I could use in real musical situations: in the practice room, rehearsal hall, and studio. I wanted something that would help me understand the patterns I was hearing in repertoire and then use those sounds creatively.

As a pianist, I wanted tools that revealed what notes do — how they behave under the hands and within harmonic motion.

As a conductor, I wanted ways to help musicians feel structure and direction rather than simply execute instructions.

And as a composer, I wanted a working method that didn’t rely on waiting for inspiration but allowed me to generate musical motion, shape, and coherence efficiently.

Partimenti provided that.

What Partimenti Offers

Partimenti can help musicians improvise and compose using the same kinds of patterns that shaped the common-practice tradition, from before Bach through Brahms. They also provide a powerful lens for understanding repertoire because they reveal the conventions composers worked within.

But partimenti aren’t limited to historical styles.

I’ve used partimento-based thinking with whole-tone and octatonic materials, Messiaen’s modes of limited transposition, jazz-derived Lydian-dominant sonorities, and other modern harmonic languages. The underlying skill is not stylistic imitation but musical fluency — the ability to generate, shape, and hear coherent musical motion.

Hearing Patterns in the Repertoire

Just recently in a lesson we looked at the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Beginning around bar 6, Beethoven uses an extremely simple bass idea: alternation between scale degrees ① and ⑦ from the Rule of the Octave, followed by a move toward a half cadence (①–⑥–⑤). It’s astonishingly simple — and remarkably powerful.

Once you begin hearing bass lines as generative patterns rather than accompaniment, you start noticing them everywhere.

Connecting the Pieces

Partimenti don’t replace repertoire, theory, or technique.

They connect them.

They help musicians move from reading notes to speaking a musical language — hearing patterns, shaping phrases, improvising, composing, and interpreting with greater confidence.

For many musicians, that connection feels like the missing link.

A Question for You

So I’ll leave you with a question:

What tools feel missing in your musical life right now?

What would make music feel more fluent, more creative, or more alive for you — in the practice room, rehearsal hall, or studio?