Peter van Tour

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The 189 Partimenti of Nicola Sala

This edition presents the complete partimenti of Maestro Nicola Sala (1713-1801), composer and teacher of counterpoint at the Conservatorio della Pietà de’ Turchini in Naples. The initial impulse to create this edition arose after I encountered Sala’s partimenti in Alexandre-Étienne Choron’s three volume treatise Principes de Composition des Écoles d’Italie (1808-09). The pedagogical sophistication of Sala’s keyboard exercises in the first volume of Choron’s Principes immediately caught my interest: the exercises invite the student to hone their skills in counterpoint and fugue experimentally through a series of progressive keyboard exercises. These partimenti not only address practical skills in realizing thoroughbass, they are also designed to develop the student’s understanding of the exercise’s thematic material and to exploit its implications in the art of practical counterpoint. As such, Sala’s partimenti reveal what most counterpoint treatises fail to address, that is: how to develop contrapuntal fluency systematically at the keyboard.

(From Peter van Tour, “Introduction”, The 189 Partimenti of NICOLA SALA. Complete Edition with Critical Commentary, Volume 1).

Vol. 3 is available OpenAcess online in the DiVA portal. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-310891