This contribution investigates the continuity between Neapolitan partimento training and early nineteenth-century keyboard pedagogy, asking how eighteenth-century galant schemata persisted—often implicitly—within formative piano and harpsichord (clavicembalo) methods during a period of rapid organological and didactic change. Through a comparative analysis of pedagogical sources and musical exempla—ranging from late eighteenth-century partimenti and conservatory materials to early nineteenth-century treatises and method books —the study reconstructs the transmission of harmonic, formal, and improvisational principles from the Neapolitan conservatory tradition into the emerging piano school.

Methodologically, the paper combines a close reading of written instructions and examples with schema-oriented reductions grounded in Gjerdingen's framework. Particular emphasis is placed on the "foundation" layer—bass and harmonic framework—as the primary carrier of syntactic information. This choice addresses a recurrent analytical problem in didactic textures: the harmonic skeleton frequently constrains the space of admissible melodic prototypes, whereas exhaustive surface-level schema labeling can become mechanically over-specific and analytically opaque. A bass-first workflow is therefore adopted to track schematic persistence across heterogeneous pedagogical repertoires while keeping the analytical claims replicable.

The main outcome is a mapped set of recurrent galant schemata—such as the Romanesca, Prinner, Fonte, and Meyer—recontextualized as modular training units for accompaniment, improvisation, and elementary composition. These results support two claims: (1) early nineteenth-century keyboard methods preserve a schemata-based "practical syntax" that remains structurally aligned with partimento traditions, despite changes in instrument, notation, and pedagogical rhetoric; (2) focusing on the foundation layer provides a robust way to connect technical drill with the internalization of harmonic-syntactic patterns, clarifying how "exercise" and "syntax" function as two faces of the same formative process.

Finally, the contribution argues that didactic keyboard literature can be read as a space of mediation between technical training and compositional competence, and that partimento-style heuristics remain analytically productive today—both for historically informed performance and for contemporary pedagogy. 

References

- Dell'Aversana, F. (2015). Le composizioni per strumenti a tastiera di Fedele Fenaroli e Domenico Cimarosa. PM Edizioni.
- Gjerdingen, R. O. (2007). Music in the galant style. Oxford University Press.
- Hess, A. (1953). The transition from harpsichord to piano. The Galpin Society Journal, 6, 75–94. https://doi.org/10.2307/841718
- Sanguinetti, G. (2012). The art of partimento. Oxford University Press.