Minimum viable music

I'm still really enjoying partimento practice (an 18th century teaching method for musical composition – see my newsletter post for more than you want to know about it). The further I get into it, the more I appreciate how clever it is. I've been trying to understand what makes it so compelling and I think the main thing is that you're playing something that sounds like actual music at every step.

I'm working through Furno's rulebook (pdf), the recommended entry point for beginners. Furno starts you off learning the Rule of the Octave, which gives you a default chord to play against every note of the ascending and descending scale. See this video to hear what it sounds like. The scale in the bass and the chords are played above it on the harpsichord.

I've found that even this is weirdly satisfying to practice! Normal scales are pretty boring, and I only practice them because they're useful, but the Rule of the Octave is actually enjoyable.

This is because it's something like minimum viable music. Like storytelling, music unfolds in time and gets a lot of its interest from the creation and release of tension. The Rule of the Octave has this built in from the start. The details don't matter, but this diagram (screenshotted from the same video) gives you a rough idea of how it works:

The red squares are stable points in the scale, and you put a stable, solid chord on them (that's the 5 3 underneath, representing the 3rd and 5th notes in the scale above the given bass note). The green circles are unstable points, and you give them a less solid-sounding chord with a 6 in it. As you approach a stable point, you add more dissonance to the chord to add tension, which you then release at the stable point (this is why you need a different ascending and descending chord, as you approach the stable points from different sides). There's one extra complication, where position 3 in the scale is treated sort of half-stable, half-unstable – it gets a 6 chord like the other unstable points, but you also increase the dissonance as you approach it, like you would for a stable point.

This turns out to be enough structure for the Rule of the Octave to sound something like music. Even short sections of the Rule, going between two stable or half-stable points, sound pretty musical because they have some inbuilt creation and release of tension. In comparison, nothing much happens musically in a normal scale, so it feels kind of dull. It's something you do because you want to get better at playing music, not really music in itself.

After the Rule of the Octave, Furno introduces partimenti, basslines that move in more complicated ways than just a straightforward ascending or descending scale. For the simplest partimenti you can mostly just plonk down a Rule of the Octave chord against every note of the bass, though there are some listed exceptions where the default chord is a bit too showy and dissonant and you have to replace it with a simpler one.

I'm still working on getting the Rule of the Octave more fluent, but I'm at the stage where I can tackle these simple partimenti in easy keys. The final result is not the most exciting performance you ever heard, but again it does sound like (very basic) actual music. It's fun to play them and to tinker around with changing bits of the bassline or adding decorations and seeing what happens.

It looks like Furno keeps adding new rules in the later partimenti, but in a pared-down way that introduces a minimal version of each idea. For example, the next thing that's introduced are cadences, sequences that end a musical phrase. In real music of the time these can be pretty complicated and nuanced, and Gjerdingen's Music in the Galant Style has a long chapter devoted to cadences with lots of examples of different ways to finish a phrase.

Furno reduces all this complication to: there are three types of cadences. There's a short one that you play if the fifth in the bass lasts for one beat, a longer one for if it lasts two beats, and a fancy long one for if it lasts four beats. Stick the appropriate one into your partimento and you're done. This is not sophisticated, but it's still enough to let a beginner produce something that sounds recognisably like music.

This steady, carefully scoped increase in difficulty level gives partimento practice an almost gamelike feel. There's always an obvious next thing to work on, and you can work your way through them and make incrementally more complex music. As you get more advanced and build up a store of known patterns, you can do things that are less mechanical and more like something you'd actually choose to listen to. But at every step you at least get some sort of music.