Counterpoint by Post

In 1757, Johann Christian Bach sent an eight-voice Pater noster from Milan to Giovanni Martin in Bologna. He called it a study piece and asked his teacher to correct it before Milanese musicians saw it. The score, the request and the surviving correspondence show counterpoint being taught through the post.

That exchange sits near the middle of a proposed line connecting Giacomo Carissimi with Johann Christoph Bach. MusicLineage records valid associations between the people on this route, including several teacher-pupil relationships. The route as a whole, however, is not a continuous teaching lineage. Some links lack supporting lesson documents, and its later stages run against the order in which the teaching occurred.

What connects the strongest parts of the line is a working method. A student began with prescribed material—a vocal passage, a bass, a fugue subject or a cantus firmus, meaning a fixed melody used as the structural basis of a composition—and built a complete polyphonic texture from it.

Giacomo Carissimi and Alessandro Scarlatti

MusicLineage records that Giacomo Carissimi taught Alessandro Scarlatti. Giacomo Carissimi was born in Marino, near Rome, in 1605 and died in Rome in 1674. Alessandro Scarlatti was born in Palermo in 1660 and died in Naples in 1725.

Modern documentary research is less certain about their connection. The Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani treats Alessandro Scarlatti’s study with Giacomo Carissimi as a historical tradition for which no supporting documents have been found. It considers study with other Roman musicians more likely.

No pupil register, letter, exercise, annotated score or copy in Alessandro Scarlatti’s hand has been identified as evidence of lessons with Giacomo Carissimi. Their work can be compared in its use of recitative, solo voices and counterpoint, but a similarity between works does not establish that one composer personally taught the other how to produce it.

The first link in the route therefore rests on MusicLineage’s teacher record rather than on a surviving lesson or teaching document. No particular work or technique can yet be shown to have passed directly between the two men.

Alessandro Scarlatti and Francesco Durante

The connection between Alessandro Scarlatti and Francesco Durante, born in Frattamaggiore in 1684 and dead in Naples in 1755, has a surviving musical object behind it. MusicLineage records Alessandro Scarlatti as Francesco Durante’s teacher. Durante also made twelve chamber duets from recitative passages in Scarlatti’s solo cantatas.

Recitative is a form of vocal writing shaped around the delivery of words rather than a regularly repeated tune. Durante took passages written for dramatic performance and rebuilt them as two-part vocal counterpoint over continuo, an accompaniment in which a bass line supports harmonies supplied by a keyboard or another chord-playing instrument.

A later title states what the duets were for:

Duetti per studio di maniera di cantare e per esercizio di accompagnare al cembalo — duets for studying singing style and practising keyboard accompaniment.

The arrangement gave students several tasks. They could study the delivery of Scarlatti’s melodic lines, coordinate two independent vocal parts and practise supplying the keyboard accompaniment. Material from finished cantatas had become a repeatable exercise.

The duets do not preserve a particular conversation or lesson between Alessandro Scarlatti and Francesco Durante. They do show Durante selecting named passages by Scarlatti and turning them into systematic teaching material.

Francesco Durante and Niccolo Jommelli

MusicLineage records Francesco Durante as a teacher of Niccolo Jommelli, who was born in Aversa in 1714 and died in Naples in 1774. The external institutional record is complicated. The modern biography of Niccolo Jommelli names Ignazio Prota and Francesco Feo during his first period at Sant’Onofrio, followed by Niccolò Fago, Andrea Basso and Giacomo Sarconi at the Pietà dei Turchini. It does not name Francesco Durante in that account.

Durante’s own teaching system is documented through collections including Regole, Partimenti numerati and Partimenti diminuiti. A partimento is a bass line used to teach composition, accompaniment and improvisation. The student had to infer the harmonies and upper voices needed to turn that line into a complete piece.

The curriculum began with rules and figured basses, in which numbers indicated intervals or chords above the written bass. It then moved towards ornamented realizations, unfigured basses and exercises in imitation. Students repeated cadences, scales and sequences in different keys, varied them and joined them into longer structures during performance.

Advanced partimenti also suggested how the upper voices should behave. They taught suspensions, in which one note is held into a new harmony before resolving, as well as diminutions, which divide longer notes into shorter ornamental patterns. Repeated use of the same construction in altered forms trained students to recognize and reshape it without relying on a fully written score.

No Durante partimento book owned or copied by Niccolo Jommelli has been identified. His contrapuntal writing belongs to the educational culture in which partimento operated, but the surviving evidence does not connect one Durante exercise to one passage in a Jommelli composition.

Giovanni Martin and Niccolo Jommelli

MusicLineage records Giovanni Martin, born in Bologna in 1706 and dead there in 1784, as another teacher of Niccolo Jommelli. This direction matters because lists of names can suggest the opposite order when Jommelli appears first.

A surviving object records the technical work involved. Niccolo Jommelli submitted a five-voice Sicut erat in F major for admission to Bologna’s Accademia Filarmonica. The autograph remains in the academy archive under the shelf mark I-Baf, capsa III, no. 70.

The piece is a fugue: a contrapuntal composition in which voices enter successively with the same or closely related subject. Writing for five voices required Jommelli to preserve the subject’s identity while coordinating five independent lines under the rules of harmony and dissonance.

Later reports describe Giovanni Martin giving Jommelli a fugue subject and expressing surprise at the result. Another account says that Jommelli brought an exercise in modulation and fugue over a canto fermo, another term for a fixed melody, and asked for corrections. These reports agree that the encounter concerned fugue and prescribed material, but their details cannot be combined into a secure lesson transcript.

The autograph establishes that Jommelli produced the five-part work and entered Giovanni Martin’s Bologna circle. Jommelli later acknowledged learning from him.

Giovanni Martin and Johann Christian Bach

The lessons between Giovanni Martin and Johann Christian Bach are the best-documented teaching relationship in the route. Johann Christian Bach was born in Leipzig in 1735 and died in London in 1782. He studied with Giovanni Martin during his Italian period and continued sending him compositions after returning to Milan.

Johann Christian Bach’s surviving letters cover 1757–1778. Giovanni Martin’s replies are lost, but the letters show that compositions came back with corrections. The eight-voice Pater noster sent in 1757 belonged to a wider course of work that included an Office and Mass for the Dead, an eight-voice Magnificat and a seven-voice introit based on canto fermo.

The exchange shows how the lessons worked. Johann Christian Bach wrote independent vocal lines around prescribed liturgical material, sent the result from Milan to Bologna and revised it after Giovanni Martin marked errors or weaknesses. Giovanni Martin also directed him towards music by Palestrina. Johann Christian Bach replied that such scores were difficult to obtain in Milan.

Teaching by correspondence joined composition, correction and repertory study. The works were exercises, but they were also preparation for scrutiny and performance within Milanese institutions.

Johann Christian Bach and Johann Sebastian Bach

MusicLineage records Johann Christian Bach and Johann Sebastian Bach as related. Their family relationship does not carry Giovanni Martin’s teaching backwards through the route.

Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach in 1685 and died in Leipzig in 1750. He taught his youngest son keyboard playing and music theory from an early age. After his death, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach continued Johann Christian Bach’s training in keyboard performance and composition.

No primer, exercise book or contrapuntal assignment has been identified as a surviving record of Johann Christian Bach’s lessons with his father. The biographical evidence establishes that teaching occurred, but it does not recover the daily material used.

Chronology sets a firm limit. Johann Christian Bach went to Italy and worked with Giovanni Martin only after Johann Sebastian Bach had died. The corrected Italian exercises cannot represent knowledge transmitted from the son to his father.

Johann Christoph Bach and Johann Sebastian Bach

MusicLineage records Johann Christoph Bach as Johann Sebastian Bach’s teacher and relative. Johann Christoph Bach was born in Erfurt in 1671 and died in Ohrdruf in 1721. After Johann Sebastian Bach was orphaned, he lived with his elder brother in Ohrdruf.

The 1754 obituary of Johann Sebastian Bach states that he laid the foundation of his keyboard playing under Johann Christoph Bach’s guidance. The Bach Archive places his brother’s instruction in organ playing during 1695–1700.

Two early manuscripts show the repertory Johann Sebastian Bach studied around the end of this period. He copied Dieterich Buxtehude’s chorale fantasy Nun freut euch, lieben Christen g’mein and Johann Adam Reincken’s An Wasserflüssen Babylon. The copies were made shortly before and during 1700 in Ohrdruf and Lüneburg.

Copying allowed a student to examine how a long organ work was built without requiring a printed edition. By reproducing every voice, Johann Sebastian Bach worked through the handling of chorale melodies and independent contrapuntal parts on paper.

The manuscripts do not prove that Johann Christoph Bach selected or supplied both works. One belongs to the transition between Ohrdruf and Lüneburg, and the Reincken copy contains evidence connecting it with Georg Böhm. Johann Christoph Bach provided the younger musician’s first keyboard and organ foundation; the surviving copies show Johann Sebastian Bach extending that foundation through difficult North German repertory.

A route of exercises rather than a single lineage

The documented middle of the route repeatedly turns fixed material into larger music. Scarlatti’s recitative passages became Durante’s vocal duets. Durante’s partimento curriculum trained students to expand bass patterns into polyphony. Jommelli wrote a five-voice fugue from prescribed material, and Giovanni Martin corrected Johann Christian Bach’s large liturgical settings by correspondence. In the Bach family, manuscript copying offered another way to study a complete contrapuntal construction.

These practices do not prove that one unchanged method travelled from Giacomo Carissimi to Johann Christoph Bach. They identify connected teaching cultures in which composers learned by rebuilding, completing, correcting and copying musical structures.

The date and circumstances of the first meeting between Niccolo Jommelli and Giovanni Martin remain unfixed. One later account begins with a supplied fugue subject; another begins with an exercise brought for correction. The surviving Sicut erat confirms the work Jommelli completed, but no document yet establishes which account, if either, preserves the order of the lesson.