Inventing Music at the Keyboard
A Milestone in the Workshop Redevelopment
I’m excited to share a milestone in the Partimenti Workshop redevelopment.
This week I put the first edition of Inventing Music at the Keyboard, Book 1 into students’ hands, and we worked through the very first exercises together. It’s very much still a working draft, but seeing it used in real lessons has already been energizing.
These books are a compilation and expansion of activities I’ve been developing with students for several years. It’s been genuinely exciting to gather them into a more coherent series and begin testing them in a structured way.
Who These Books Are For
Inventing Music at the Keyboard is designed primarily for students working at approximately a Grade 1–2 level and beyond — students who are comfortable playing with both hands and can coordinate independent rhythms.
At that stage, students often have basic technical skills but are ready for deeper musical fluency: understanding harmony, shaping melodies, and beginning to improvise and compose.
Scales and Intervals as Creative Tools
To begin understanding harmony and counterpoint in a practical and creative way, students need two essential tools: scales and intervals.
These books explore both not as abstract theory or technical drills, but as hands-on musical building blocks for invention.
Across Books 1 and 2, students:
play major and minor scales
approach scales as musical material rather than technical exercises
create melodies and songs using classical forms and scale degrees
develop a physical and aural sense of intervals under the hands
move musical patterns around the keyboard by interval
notice how melodic fragments create feelings of “home” and “away,” “open” and “closed”
compose short pieces
improvise simple contrapuntal textures
Moving Toward Historical Partimenti
In Inventing Music at the Keyboard, Book 3, students will begin engaging directly with historical partimenti.
They’ll learn three foundational harmonic and contrapuntal patterns and start improvising, composing, and creating over a partimento bass line. They’ll also play intavolature — short pieces that demonstrate how those bass patterns can be realized musically.
This begins the transition from foundational creative musicianship into classical partimento practice.
Listening as a Core Practice
Throughout the series, students are guided through repertoire listening activities. The goal isn’t simply to play music, but to understand how it works from the inside out — hearing structure, recognizing patterns, and developing musical intuition alongside technical skill.
Where This Fits in the Bigger Picture
Looking ahead, this book series will become a resource within the Partimento for Piano Teachers course. It’s part of a larger ecosystem of tools designed to help teachers support students in inventing, exploring, and understanding music creatively.
This work is still evolving, but it’s exciting to see it starting to take tangible form.