Learning to think in music
The Partimenti Workshop
Unlock your creativity like the greatest composers
Receive a short email most weeks with updates on what’s happening in the Partimenti Workshop, along with reflections on musical creation, improvisation, and composition.
What is Partimenti?
At the heart of partimenti is learning by doing. By internalizing patterns with your voice, at the keyboard or your instrument and understanding them through simple, practical tools, musicians develop fluency rather with than dependency on rules. And with fluency comes freedom: imagination has room to take flight.
This approach shaped generations of composers across Europe. Many major figures—from Baroque masters through twentieth-century musicians—studied and often taught within traditions shaped by partimento-based training. When the Paris Conservatory was founded, Italian pedagogical methods were deliberately imported, led by Luigi Cherubini and other Italian musicians. Through this lineage, partimento-informed teaching continued well into the twentieth century, notably through Nadia Boulanger and her influential students.
Partimenti can be understood in four closely related ways. First, they are a body of purposely unfinished repertoire — often simple bass lines meant to be realized and expanded by the musician. Second, they represent a musical practice: improvising, composing, and performing from those bass lines using learned harmonic and contrapuntal patterns. Third, partimenti function historically as a teaching tool, especially in the conservatories of Naples, where students learned by listening, copying, and creating rather than beginning with abstract theory. Finally, partimenti offer a powerful way of understanding music itself. By working from the inside — through sound, pattern, and gesture — musicians develop fluency that connects theory, repertoire, improvisation, and composition into a single living musical language.
Learn more here.
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Why This Workshop Exists
This workshop exists to help breathe fresh air into the partimenti tradition — to recover a more humane, sound-centered approach to musical learning, one that invites curiosity, creativity, and deeper musical understanding.
Historically, musicians trained differently. They learned by listening, copying their teachers, internalizing patterns, and developing those patterns at their instrument through making music.
Partimenti serves as the connective tissue between the vast canon of classical repertoire and musicians’ own creative capacities, supporting both deeper understanding of repertoire and fluent musical invention.
As an oral tradition, partimenti largely faded in the early part of the twentieth century. Today, many musicians who have studied music theory still feel disconnected from musical sound. They can name chords, analyze scores, and explain forms, yet feel blocked, confused, or unsure when asked to improvise, compose, or develop musical ideas of their own. Theory often explains music after the fact, but it doesn’t always teach musicians how to think musically in real time.
This workshop aims to help reconnect musical understanding with musical experience — bringing creating, understanding, and playing back together.
Who Is This For?
This workshop is for musicians who want to be creatively engaged with music at their instrument, whether through improvisation, composition, or exploratory playing.
If you can read treble and bass clef and have a late-beginner to early-intermediate playing level at the keyboard (or your instrument), this workshop is for you.
This workshop is equally for advanced and professional musicians who want to deepen their creative fluency and reconnect musical thinking with sound.
It is especially well suited to pianists and keyboard players.
It is relevant for performers across disciplines, including film and media composers who want practical ways to generate, shape, and develop musical ideas at the keyboard.
It is relevant for music teachers and educators who want humane, sound-based tools for their own musicianship and for their teaching.
The work you’ll do here can support composition and improvisation, while also helping you understand and interpret repertoire more deeply.
This workshop is for anyone who feels fluent in musical theory but wants to become more fluent in musical sound—moving from analysis toward embodied, responsive musical thinking.
What’s Coming
Coming Soon
A free online introduction to partimenti. This course will offer an entry point into the practice through listening, responding at your instrument, and working with musical patterns.
You’ll be guided through partimento basses that invite you to apply what you hear and learn, supported by a mix of written explanations and short video demonstrations.
Up Next
The Partimenti Workshop will open as a subscription-based learning space. This will be a place to study and practice the core materials of the tradition—foundational harmonic patterns, the Rule of the Octave, sequences, and cadences—at a pace that supports fluency rather than memorization.
The focus will remain on composing, improvising, understanding repertoire and developing musical ideas at the keyboard or your instrument.
Over Time
Over time, the workshop will grow to include learning paths for beginners, intermediate, and advanced musicians. Areas of study will include realizing partimento basses, working with harmonic and melodic patterns, melodic elaboration, counterpoint, and practical drills to support long-term development.
Optional cohort-based projects will explore focused creative goals, and the workshop will continue to evolve in response to participants’ needs.
Join the Mailing List
Receive a short email from me most weeks with updates on what’s happening next in the Partimenti Workshop, along with reflections on music creation, improvisation, and composition.
If you are curious, I’d love for you to learn more!
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 taught the partimenti workshop with Dr. Joseph Sowa’s Wizarding School for Composers.
I’ve spent a decade teaching, researching, and studying partimenti and developing what I call partimneti thinking.
You can learn more about me here.
“Ian's natural instinct to unlock and reward students' creativity!”
— Eric Heidbreder
https://www.ericheidbreder.com/
bassoonist & content creator
“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.”
— Stacy Fahrion
https://www.whimsicallymacabre.com/
pianist & composer
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.