Frescobaldi’s Toccate e partite … libro primo (1615–1616) as a pedagogical text. Artisanship, imagination, and the process of learning

Girolamo Frescobaldi’s Toccate e partite…libro primo (1615–1616) was a milestone in the emerging stile moderno of early seventeenth-century Italy. It codified a new understanding of keyboard instruments that relied above all on an idiomatic approach to composition and performance. Because of the novelty of its contents, it was required to serve a pedagogical purpose as well as a musical one. Unlike earlier texts like Girolamo Diruta’s Il Transilvano, which assumed an overtly pedagogical purpose, Frescobaldi’s Toccate e partite asserted the legitimacy of artisanship as a legitimate form of learning. The toccatas in the volume require not only an intellectual understanding of Frescobaldi’s musical vocabulary, but also virtuosity at the keyboard, attained through repeated practice of the bodily movements exemplified by the composer at his instrument. The variation sets in the Toccate e partite speak to another kind of learning, also essential to the early seventeenth century. In these works—and in variation sets as a whole, which proliferated widely in notation for the first time during this period—composers provided models for the engagement and reengagement with a single idea, a single musical “object”—from multiple perspectives. The recognition of a multiplicity of approaches to a single phenomenon—whether in nature or in art—was a key concept for philosophers, patrons, and amateur academicians of the early seventeenth century. The revisions that Frescobaldi made to his Romanesca variations between the first and second printings of this volume provide a focal point for consideration of such malleability of perspective. In its cultivation of the performer’s artisanal skill and creative musical imagination, and in its enactment of the process of learning within the variation sets, Frescobaldi’s Toccate e partite served as a pedagogical tool. The volume was itself an instrument for the learning of the stile moderno.