ABSTRACT
In the early 16th century, the South German organist Hans Buchner wrote a large number of fundamenta that circulated widely in manuscript and evinced a far more systematic approach than Paumanns to teaching improvisation. Francesco Bianciardi was evidently the first author of a thorough-bass treatise to offer systematic examples of interval progressions in the fundamenta tradition. The fundamenta paradigm of thorough-bass instruction turns out to have been one of the most ubiquitous and resilient schools of keyboard pedagogy in the 17th and 18th centuries. Responding to Friedrich Erhardt Niedts strong advocacy of the General Bass as a foundation for compositional skills, Johann Mattheson inserted a number of editorial demurrals in the footnotes of Niedts Handleitung. For Mattheson, thorough bass was more mechanical Hand-Sachen, requiring only that the keyboardist play the harmonies designated by the chord signatures and have a good facility at the instrument.
