Music
Musical theory, genres, artists, production, and the music industry
Partimento: The Italian Method That Taught Music as a Language
A written bass line, usually figured, from which the student improvises all upper voices live at the keyboard — not a paper exercise but a prompt for real-time realisation. Graded series of hundreds taught a grammar of patterns rather than a repertoire, and masters deliberately removed written information as students advanced, which is part of why period scores look sparse. Declined in the 19th century alongside the rise of the Romantic myth of divine inspiration.
Mozart, Partimento, and 'Everyone Knew Piano': What the Claim Actually Says
The real thesis is that genius was the far tail of a teachable, widely-shared craft — not that everyone knew piano or that music was as common as reading, which is the popular flattening and also anachronistic since the parlour piano is a 19th-century phenomenon. Partimento trained music-streamed children at specific conservatories plus fee-paying pupils, and was used by private masters everywhere. Plus the Amadeus film's fictions: Salieri taught Beethoven, Schubert and Liszt, and Mozart laboured over drafts.
The Neapolitan Conservatories: Orphanages That Became Music Factories
Conservatory comes from conservare — to preserve — and the institutions began as charities training orphans into trades, of which music was one. Naples had four for boys; Venice's ospedali served girls, with Vivaldi teaching at the Pietà. Children entered around age seven for years of solfeggio then partimento. Four qualifications matter: not every orphanage, not every child within them, not only orphans (fee-paying pupils were admitted), and not only conservatories.
Galant Schemata: The Stock Patterns Behind 18th-Century Music
The conventional harmonic-melodic patterns forming the working vocabulary of roughly 1720–1780, reconstructed from period teaching materials by Robert Gjerdingen and named after the theorists who described them — Romanesca, Prinner, Fonte, Monte, Quiescenza. Understood in scale degrees rather than absolute pitch, so a schema is the same in any key. Tacit rather than secret, they were forgotten when the training method declined and had to be recovered.
Milli Vanilli: The Lip-Sync Scandal and the Super Mario Bros 3 Coincidence
Milli Vanilli never sang on their own records — the 1990 scandal led to the only Grammy revocation in history. A Super Mario Bros 3 episode featuring them aired one week before the scandal broke.
"Enchante" by Dirt Poor Robins: Lyrical Analysis
"Enchante" traces childhood wonder → rationalist disenchantment → defiant re-embrace of animal self. The fig leaf lyric references Eden and rejecting civilized shame.