Inventing Music at the Keyboard is a new resource designed to help beginner pianists move beyond simply playing notes toward understanding how music works from the inside out. Built around scales, intervals, listening, and creative exploration, the series aims to cultivate musical fluency, improvisation, and compositional confidence from the very beginning.

Music notation feels fundamental to how we learn and preserve music today, but it began as a practical solution to a specific historical problem. Looking back to Charlemagne’s empire and the early development of notation reminds us of an important musical truth: sound comes first, understanding follows, and notation serves memory — not the other way around.

What if musical understanding didn’t begin with notation, but with listening? This post explores how learning through sound, imitation, and musical conversation can build deeper fluency — and why this approach sits at the heart of partimenti practice.

Many great classical composers improvised, composed, and understood music as a living language. This post explores how partimenti can reconnect modern musicians with that fluency, bridging theory, repertoire, improvisation, and creative practice.

Imagining a correspondence with Joseph Haydn reveals how partimenti training shaped historical composers — and raises timely questions about listening, creativity, and musical fluency in today’s fast-moving musical world.

Partimenti began in the conservatories of Naples as a playful, listening-based approach to learning harmony, improvisation, and composition. Rediscovered today, this tradition offers powerful insights into musical fluency, creativity, and how musicians have historically learned to speak the language of music.

Quincy Jones’ extraordinary career spanned jazz, film scoring, popular music, and orchestral arranging — and included study with Nadia Boulanger, connecting him to the partimenti tradition. This post reflects on his legacy, musical versatility, and why his training still resonates today.