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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.).

During the second half of the eighteenth century, the city of Naples had three music conservatories: the Conservatorio di Santa Maria di Onofrio, the Conservatorio di Santa Maria di Loreto, and the Conservatorio di Santa Maria della Pietà de’ Turchini. Through disciplines such as solfeggio, partimento, and counterpoint, the students at these institutions received highly professional training in singing, instrumental playing, and composition.

This study reveals new evidence that partimenti were used not only as exercises in keyboard playing, but also as exercises in written counterpoint. As counterpoint exercises, partimenti were used either as bass lines over which students wrote one or several contrapuntal parts, or as notational devices that facilitated the sketching of fugues.

Musicologists have previously encountered considerable difficulties in identifying and describing differences between the schools of Leonardo Leo and Francesco Durante, represented by the terms Leisti and Durantisti. This study shows that these schools are primarily defined through different methods of teaching counterpoint. Contemporary counterpoint notebooks show that the maestri at Sant’Onofrio and Santa Maria di Loreto followed Durante’s teaching methods, while the maestri at La Pietà followed Leo’s teaching methods. The school of Durante emphasized the writing of melodic lines over a hexachordal scale or a partimento bass, using different methods, such as the moti del basso and prescribed conditions. The school of Leo favored the use of invertible counterpoint, emphasizing skills in sketching and writing choral fugues from subjects and countersubjects.

For the first time, the partimento and solfeggio repertoire used at the Neapolitan conservatories has been systematically investigated through the creation of two research tools, the databases UUPart: The Uppsala Partimento Database and UUSolf: The Uppsala Solfeggio Database, published online on two companion websites.