Скачать или смотреть Ep. 138 | Italian Solfeggio Explained: Nicholas Baragwanath on 18th-Century Music Training

🎥 Recorded using Ecamm Live — my favorite all-in-one Mac app for podcasting, recording, and live streaming.
👉 Try it here (affiliate link): https://bit.ly/4osrvBk

Interview Date: February 2022

In this deep-dive episode of the HMA Podcast, Nikhil Hogan welcomes back Professor Nicholas Baragwanath, author of The Solfeggio Tradition, for a wide-ranging conversation on Italian 18th-century hexachordal solfeggio — a system that radically reshapes how we understand melody, improvisation, rhythm, and historical music education.

Baragwanath explains how Italian solfeggio functioned as a spoken musical language, taught over years through singing, imitation, and embellishment, and how it underpinned the melodic fluency of composers and performers from Mozart to Bach to Paganini. The discussion explores how solfeggio interacts with partimento, counterpoint, chant, rhythm, cadence types, and even the historical conception of key itself.

Topics include:
• Why solfeggio uses overlapping six-note scales
• How melody was improvised before notation dominated music training
• The relationship between solfeggio, partimento, and counterpoint
• Why modern chant performance is historically inaccurate
• How Mozart, Bach, and Paganini reveal solfeggio thinking
• Why rhythm in the 18th century was not meter-bound
• The decline of Italian conservatory training and its consequences
• How this knowledge can reshape modern music pedagogy

This episode is essential listening for anyone interested in partimento, historical improvisation, music theory, counterpoint, early music, or elite 18th-century training methods.

Chapters:
00:00 – Introduction & the rise of Italian solfeggio
01:00 – How The Solfeggio Tradition has been received
06:10 – Elevator pitch: what Italian solfeggio actually is
10:50 – Why children didn’t sing early (and chant’s real role)
14:00 – The myth of “medieval-sounding” Gregorian chant
18:00 – Sharps, hexachords, and the birth of tonal keys
22:00 – Demonstration: solfeggio, improvisation & melody
29:45 – Bach’s Air and why melody is the real art
36:35 – Rhythm without barlines: how 18th-century rhythm works
45:00 – Mozart, solfeggio, and improvisation for beginners
52:40 – Italians vs Germans: why solfeggio was a “trade secret”
58:45 – Did solfeggio survive into the 19th century?
1:05:40 – What a “key” meant in the 18th century
1:16:10 – How to study solfeggio today & future research
1:27:50 – Final reflections: making historical music live again