Historically informed pedagogy of composition and the reconstruction of incomplete polyphony

Today, the importance of studying historical performance practice is recognized by all. In the same way, it is consolidated practice to extrapolate from direct and indirect sources (music, musical treatises, descriptions of performances, etc.) any useful information to obtain performance results ever closer to those of the past. What is less obvious is investing energy into recovering the skills of a composer from the past. Yet, in certain circumstances, recovering those skills can prove invaluable: for example, when we are faced with incomplete music – music that will not come out of oblivion until it is “restored” by reconstructing its missing part(s). To “recomplete” incomplete music, we need to re-learn to compose like a seventeenth-century composer; and those who have embarked on a path of recovering the compositional skills of the past know that this technical-stylistic immersion is extremely fruitful also for better understanding the compositional mechanisms of the music of past eras. In a similar perspective, the unfinished music, from a “B” finding, is transformed into a privileged observatory for the study of the compositional procedures of the past. After developing these premises, the article outlines a theory and methodology for the “historically informed” re-composition of incomplete polyphony.