The past decade has witnessed groundbreaking insights into music practice in eighteenth-century Europe. Research into solfeggio, partimento, and counterpoint has shed new light on the ways that performers in the past also composed, and how improvisation was integral to practice. Music apprentices had to undergo several years of singing hexachordal ‘solfeggio’ before they were allowed near an instrument. In modern ‘classical’ music culture, by contrast, improvisation and composition are peripheral at best.

In this presentation, cellist Elinor Frey (McGill, Accademia de’ Dissonanti) and musicologist Nicholas Baragwanath (Nottingham Univ.) ask how these findings might be applied in practice by a professional modern performer. They discuss their collaborative project to develop a creative and historically-informed way to learn and perform Galant-style European music. By working together on a cello concerto by Neapolitan maestro Leonardo Leo (1694-1744), without a score, they seek to show modern performers how to experience a concerto (or sonata or solo) not as a fixed page of instructions but as a recipe for improvisation, in which they may ‘speak’ in their own musical voice, or compose their own works as a vehicle for their careers.

Singing and playing standard melodic formulas through the logic of hexachordal solfeggio, combined with exploring correlating harmonies and basses, has the potential to give today’s musicians a deep and intuitive sense of style, form, and balance, and shows how it was (and therefore still is) possible to learn and perform music by creating it on the spot.