Doctoral Colloquium (Music): Dorian Bandy, Peter Schubert, John Mortensen
The Doctoral Colloquium is open to all.
Doctoral Colloquium: Dorian Bandy, Peter Schubert, John Mortensen
Invertible Counterpoint for Kids: How Neapolitan Partimento Taught Advanced Musicianship to Beginners
The Italian partimento tradition of the 18th century was a comprehensive music curriculum that aimed to transform orphans into fully functional composers and performers. A central activity within the curriculum was the study of partimenti, pedagogical basses which appear to be continuo parts but are actually potential complete compositions. Embedded within them are clues not only for the realization of harmony, figuration, genre, but also highly sophisticated invertible counterpoint. An examination of the partimenti of Nicola Sala (1713-1801), Fedele Fenaroli (1730-1818) and others reveals subtleties of contrapuntal invention, and helps illuminate reasons why the conservatories of 18th century Italy produced so many musicians of high calibre.
Peter Schubert studied with Nadia Boulanger and received his degrees from Columbia University. He has published two textbooks on counterpoint and articles on Renaissance and 20th-c. music, and on music pedagogy. He conducts the Orpheus Singers of Montreal and recorded six CDs with VivaVoce. He has posted fourteen YouTube videos on Renaissance improvisation. In 2015 the Vierter Leipziger ImprovisationsFestival said “Peter Schubert gilt als großer Improvisations-Guru Nordamerikas,” and in 2019 he was awarded the Gail Boyd de Stwolinsky Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Music Theory Teaching and Scholarship.
Dorian Bandy is Assistant Professor of musicology and baroque violin at the Schulich School of Music. He is the author of Mozart the Performer (forthcoming in 2023 from The University of Chicago Press), and his other writings—on Mozart, on Beethoven, on Stephen Sondheim, and on bad movies, bad music, and bad novels—have appeared in publications including Early Music, Eighteenth-Century Music, 19th-Century Music, The Cambridge Opera Journal, the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and AestheticsforBirds.com.
John Mortensen is a leader in the international revival of historic improvisation. Appearing frequently as concert artist and masterclass teacher at colleges and universities in America and Europe, he is noted for his ability to improvise entire concerts in historical styles, including complex compositions such as Baroque fugues. He is the author of The Pianist’s Guide to Historic Improvisation (Oxford University Press, 2020), the world’s most widely-used book in the field of historic keyboard improvisation, now a course text at many leading conservatories. His newest book, Improvising Fugue: A Method for Keyboard Artists (Oxford University Press, 2023) became a #1 Best Seller in the Music Books category on Amazon three months before its publication date. In 2017 he was selected as a Fulbright Specialist by the US Department of State to serve as an international artistic ambassador on behalf of the American people. In 2018 he toured Europe for three months, performing and teaching improvised music at conservatories across the continent. In 2019 the State Department named him a Fulbright Global Scholar in Historic Improvisation, leading to performances and teaching at the national conservatories of Lithuania, Latvia, The United Kingdom, Denmark, and Canada. He serves as professor of piano at Cedarville University in Ohio. In 2016 he was named Faculty Scholar of the Year, that institution’s highest award.