Reconstructing Giuseppe Tartini's School of Nations: methodological issues and hypotesis on a biographical investigation

Through the example of Tartini's School of Nations (1728), the project aims to analyse how musical skills were transmitted from teacher to pupil in the 18th century. This research wants to shed light on how certain teaching methods spread, replicated and consolidated over generations of students. The project also wishes to investigate the network of relationships between patrons and Tartini's students in a pan-European context, in order to frame the socio-professional conditions within which educational action took place. The figure of Tartini is exemplary in that he was a provider of diverse skills: instrumental, compositional, theoretical. Outlining the identity of the School of Nations and mapping the European diaspora of its members means being able to follow the branches of a didactic tradition and understand the enormous influence it had on the musical chapels in the courts of the time and on the musical institutions of individual nations more generally.