A Musical Disposition... or five

A Musical Disposition... or five

You know, in addition to my musical aspirations I do hope that one day I can produce titles half as clever (and cringe-worthy) as Michael Barone's. Until that day however, I can only work with what little originality I already have.

After having investigated open score C-clef reading for many moons, we've seen that it broadens and orders the mind when practiced and can reveal the true nature of contrapuntal music in a way not available by other means. After all, the music we know is made of intertwining lines of melodic force which, when assembled together, create a unique and harmonious whole. I can think of no better way to accurately represent this on paper than by assigning each voice its own staff and clef and binding them together. 

But... is that the only way? What if you have music written on the now conventional two staves? Is there something that can be done with this conventional notation that can break through the divide separating the true nature of the music's composition from its shallow surface?

Let's look at hymns. 

The priority of my daily practice nowadays is to make some inroads on the subject of improvisation. I consider myself fairly familiar with the subject, but unpracticed. The first step towards easy and successful improvisation is through the study of harmonization. I'm using Sol Berkowitz's book Improvisation through Keyboard Harmony at home so that I can use headphones and save myself the embarrassment of having someone hear me working on Camptown Races and one of my favorites: Grandma Grunts.  At the church, I am working with Dupre's treatise on improvisation and am currently ironing out my harmonic treads and creating smooth bass lines with the use of inversions. But that's a different discussion.

I've also set aside time to play from an old Presbyterian hymnal. I don't mean to talk on how to play a hymn with creativity, variety, and sensitivity to the text, but I should say that a couple of techniques for sprucing up your hymn playing involve in how you distribute the notes on the keyboards:

The first way we play these four part hymns is to play all four parts on the manuals, since we all started as pianists once. Then we learned to play the bass line in the pedals and play the remaining three parts on a manual. Finally, we may or may not have learned to play the soprano melody in the right hand on a manual with a solo registration, the bass in the pedals, and the alto and tenor parts in the left hand on an accompanying manual. You can call this the 'solo style'. It uses the organ's capabilities well without very much effort. This arrangement of playing is called a disposition, and there are others. I make use of 5 in my daily practice:

• Melody in the Soprano:  R.H. plays soprano on solo manual, L.H. plays alto and tenor on accompanying manual, Pedals play the bass line.
• Melody in the Bass: Pedal plays the melody, the hands play the alto tenor and bass on accompanying manual.
• Melody in the Tenor: L.H. plays the melody on a solo manual an octave lower than written, the R.H. plays the alto and tenor on accompanying manual, Pedals play the bass line.

You see after a little practice that we're dividing the four voices we see on the page into three groups: the Melody, the Bass, and the Middle Voices. The three above dispositions take turns putting the melody into our three main appendages, counting our feet as a single appendage. Additionally, we can play a little further with the four voices:

• Melody in the Alto (Soprano and alto switched): R.H. plays soprano and alto with the alto an octave higher than written, the L.H. plays the tenor line on the same manual, Pedals play the bass line.
• Melody in the Tenor (Soprano and tenor switched): L.H. plays the melody an octave lower than written, R.H. plays the alto and tenor lines with the tenor an octave higher than written, Pedals play the bass line. 

We could go further (and probably will in the future), but this is a good set to get started with. These dispositions will change the color of the hymn without actually changing the notes, so it's good for practical purposes to become familiar at least with the first three. Those last two deliver you already-written descants for your melody so are useful as well. What about this disposition, though?

• Melody in Soprano: R.H. plays melody in soprano, L.H. plays bass on accompanying manual with 8' and 16' stops, Pedals play 8' stops double pedaling alto and tenor lines.

Well, it requires some coordination, but it likely won't sound any different from our first disposition of Melody in the Soprano. So why on earth would we practice it? Also, the tricky maneuver of placing the melody in the left hand an octave lower could easily be substituted with playing our first disposition again with our right hand soloing out the melody, only an octave lower. The aural effect is identical. Why would we choose to play something in a way that's more difficult to play even though it sounds the same as the easier way?

If your scalp tingles while studying these dispositions, that means it's working!

The Point:

The point of these dispositions (at least, the reason I'm practicing them) is not to provide different sounds so much as it's to build my flexibility. While not all of these dispositions are very practical for use in playing hymns, we are preparing for the days when we will be creating our own music ex tempore, out of the moment. To quote from Michele Johns book, Hymn Improvisation:

"The object is to expand your options. When creating music it is likely that you will only use the techniques which are familiar to you. If your style is a simple one of playing the melody in the right hand, chords in the left hand, and long notes in the pedal, then that is the way your improvisations will sound."

In addition to this important goal, it also helps to break down the connection between notes on the page and the physical realization of those notes. The melody could be played by any appendage, not just the last three fingers of your right hand. No part of the music is attached to a particular part of your body. When you are at the point where you can play any part of the piece with any one of your hands or feet, you are a significant step closer to that mythical musical perfection, not in an aural and idealistic way, but in a real physical and tangible way. This flexibility is of great importance in successful improvisation and for a clear and ordered mind. This clarity and order gives fertile ground for freedom and creativity. 

Happy practicing!

Beginning Composition

Beginning Composition

This topic has little directly to do with the organ, but is still an important part of the Associate and Fellow exams for the AGO. This is another skill that takes a great deal of time to cultivate, and a lifetime to master, so it's best to get started as soon as possible. I've done some composition from time to time, mostly in connection with my church employment, but always at the last minute and quite rushed. A deadline makes for great motivation to write something even though it may not be exactly what you had in mind. If forces ideas to come out. However, I can sense the lack of a good fundamental understanding of writing music, so I'm trying to work from the ground up.

There are those that say that you cannot learn composition or improvisation, that it is something you are born with; either you have it or you don't. I want to assert my opinion that those assumptions are simply not true. The concept of originality, on the other hand is up to debate. It seems that Chopin was the only one who could have written Chopin's music because it is so individual and unlike anything else. It bears his stamp of originality in a way that very few have equaled. Perhaps you've noticed how some composers write music that is striking in its originality regardless of the medium in which they compose. There are other composers that write music of the highest quality, but lack the quality of originality. This is the first lesson for today:

We cannot learn how to be original, how to be a rare and unique snowflake. If you can learn this quality of originality, then I know of no method to increase it. What we can learn is the craft of composition, and constantly improve our ability to present our ideas (original or not) in whatever medium is desired. The skilled invention of well crafted music based on mediocre ideas sounds much better than a great idea which is expressed in a very poor and unskilled way. Just imagine what Schubert could have done if he had taken counterpoint lessons...

A final example is that of the Spanish language hymnal we use at our services (I won't mention the name of the collection). I have seen a great many examples of poor presentation in this hymnal. So many good ideas are presented in very rough fashion, so much so that the original idea gets lost in the poor presentation. Uncertainty of harmonization, accidentally irregular phrasing... there are a lot of problems. Even one at my skill level can see that these musical 'rules' are being broken through accident and omission rather than expressive purpose. 

The Plan

The process for practicing composition will be basically a three step process:

1. Copy
2. Imitate
3. Compose

In musical composition, as well as in painting, a time honored tradition is to study and emulate the works of the masters to learn about the process, adding to your mass of conscious and unconscious knowledge of creating. I've found that some people forget about the first step above, that of not just imitating a composer's work, but copying it directly.

Now, I agree that mindless copying of a piece, one note after the other, is a pretty fruitless exercise, although it will improve your penmanship. What I'm actually endorsing is attempting to co-compose a piece with Bach, or Mendelssohn, or Sorabji. Enter into apprenticeship with that composer and let him guide you to his successful realization of a musical thought. 

For instance, I'm beginning with the Bach Harmonized Chorales. Each one is a little study in harmonization and simple voice leading. I try to copy them out by hand in the manner that it was probably composed. We begin with a melody in the soprano and then we seek to harmonize it. We write in a complementary bass line, with the use of inversions to help us smooth it out, establishing cadences at the end of each phrase, and decorating the line a little more with non-chord tones of passing, neighboring, or suspension dissonance and consonance. Then we fill in the middle voices, filling out the background tread of chords and smoothing the leading with expressive lines. 

Of course, I doubt Bach had to take the trouble to compose each part completely before attempting another; I'm sure he could plan out and execute most of the chorale completely in his head before putting pen to paper. However, this is the basic process I am using since I am still a mere mortal. Along the way, I try to anticipate what he will do; what kind of motives will he juggle between voices? will there be an expressive voice crossing between inner parts to highlight the final cadence? will this tenor voice be so active that it will steal the activity of the alto? Often times I'm correct in my assumption; many times I'm wrong and his answer is much more artistic. 

The point is to try to comprehend all that you see while copying, and copy in the same way that you will later imitate and compose.

After copying enough that you feel somewhat secure in the basis of his style, then we try to write our own chorales in the style of Bach. Now we're on more uncertain ground and have to think, What would Bach do? 

...

These exercises will actually train us indirectly in our free compositions in our own style. We don't then compose our own style of chorales, because it's most likely that we have no reason to compose a chorale. We aren't of the Protestant Reformation generation and it serves no practical purpose, unless you just really like them. We will more likely be composing pieces to fit our own purposes, which are only faintly related to these old compositions. However, our study of style and our cultivated awareness of the elements of composition and how they work together means that when we require a section of music of a more harmonically balanced, rhythmically regular nature, we will be well prepared to execute our realization with good construction and presentation. 

Long story short, I'm copying Bach Chorales to see how they work. I've copied out 5. After 5 more, I'll try writing new chorales in his style. This is my first step in rigorous composition training. 

Good work!

Fundamentals Check: Time!

Time!

As time for the Colleague Exam slowly ticks away (5 months to go!), I've noticed one area that could use some work, personally. 

Rhythm.

Oh, I know how rhythm works and I know how to count. I chastise the choir for singing quarter note triplets as a pair of dotted eighths followed by an eighth. I know how to judge rhythm just fine... unless it's me that is playing it. 

When I was younger and strictly playing the piano as a casual hobby, I sight-read through all the books of music that I owned, and if the piece was too difficult to play all the notes correctly on the first try, then I would fake it as best as I could. I learned early that one shouldn't stop every time you make a mistake (Please don't take that as an endorsement; when you are practicing, YOU MUST STOP when you make a mistake so that you may correct it. If you make the same mistake twice then you've already built a habit, a habit as bad as parenthetical interruptions. It took me a long time to learn how to practice.) so I made sure to keep going no matter what happened. Despite my playing bearing only a superficial resemblance to what was on the page, in my mind it was much closer. It was always exciting to take this music that you had only heard and to actually produce it yourself. It's a kind of beautiful delusion. 

As I've gotten older and take things a bit more seriously, I endeavor to make sure my mental conception of the music matches the actual realization of that impression. Since the organ I play on has a handy MIDI recording feature, I use it occasionally to listen to myself to help me with balancing my registrations since the console is in a terrible place for judging volume or balance. 

So anyway, last week I recorded some of the hymns for the upcoming weekend celebration and was shocked to hear an apparent lack of a steady beat to my congregational playing. A steady beat is a fundamental requirement for all music, and I wasn't convinced that the organist I was listening to understood that. I was instantly embarrassed and so downloaded a couple of metronomes onto my phone and am incorporating metronome practice into my daily routine. 

I think my beat has slipped lately indirectly because of my daily habit of reading open score C clef repertoire: Bach 4 part chorales, Frescobaldi's Fiori Musicali, and Bach's Art of Fugue. I'm treating them as exercises in sight-reading and am not carefully studying them as repertoire, so I end up playing through a set number of them everyday. I see in retrospect that I've not been maintaining a steady tempo the whole time, rather concerning myself instead with the task of reading the notes on the 4 different clefs and devising how they will lay under the fingers while I read. My tempo is affected by the independence and density of the scores. This lack of a steady rhythm has made its way into my other repertoire and I'm now using the metronome to correct this.

I've been often surprised as well at how a tempo that seems correct while I'm playing it sounds most often too fast when I listen to it on a recording. To help with this, before I play something, I try to hear it in my head at the proper listening tempo, then I tap that beat into the metronome (nice little feature), and then I follow the metronome through my practice of the piece. I'm often surprised at the disparity between my mentally conceived tempo and the physical sensation of playing it at that speed. 

There are many mental illusions that can be swept out of the way by the use of the metronome, as long as you remember that the metronome is only a tool for achieving this basic beat and ensuring the proper proportions between all the different rhythms in the piece. As soon as this surety of rhythm has been achieved, the metronome should be discarded so that the piece can breathe. Now we can incorporate breathing room at the ends of phrases, expressive and logical tempo changes to reflect the flow of the music, and rubato when permissible. 

As we work on more high level tasks, don't neglect the basics. Keep checking those fundamentals!

What is the opposite of Analysis?

Posing an unsolved question as a title reflects negatively on a blog that should be devoted to answering questions, but as it leads directly to the subject of discussion we'll permit it this time...

What is the opposite of Analysis?

Maybe we can discover the opposite if we know what analysis is, first off:

Analysis - detailed examination of the elements or structure of something.

               the process of separating something into its constituent elements.

Coming from old greek roots meaning loosening up, we take analysis to be the 'taking apart' of something so that we may examine how its constituent elements work, alone and together. This is what we do in school, working with our music theory and harmonic analyses. What we failed to do in school, however, was to rigorously do the opposite and put it back together into a cohesive whole. I hate to indulge in analogies (though I secretly love them), but we might be temped to think of musicians as medical students, learning about anatomy and physiology through dissection of other, until recently, living things. 

The Fourth Species of Counterpoint concerns ligatures (suspensions). I'm not sure what species concerns gizzards...

The analogy breaks down, of course, because we as musicians don't just dissect, but create our own life in music. You will 'not learn little' from cutting into Frescobaldi's Bergamasca to see how it works, but you learn even more through copying it, and then imitating it: creating your own Bergamasca in his style. 

This is how all great musicians get their start: analysis, copying, imitation, creation. And that is what I wanted to talk about today, the creative phase of work. 

Creativity is a tricky subject, but there a few small things to be said about it. First, no creation comes from nothing. Your taste in music has evolved from a lifetime of experience, and that lifetime of experience shapes the music that you in turn create. Glenn Gould pondered this role of experience with a hypothetical scenario in which children are raised in an environment that has no tonal music whatsoever and is instead filled with only serialistic tone rows and atonal tunes (Hindemith says there's no such thing as 'atonal' music but we'll accept the term for tradition's sake). Here's some Schoenberg as an example:

Gould theorized that children raised in such an environment wouldn't have the instant distrust and confusion this music evokes among those uninitiated in its rules and structures, but would rather sing all their nursery rhymes in tone rows rather than diatonic scales. I personally believe that the story is a little more complicated but we can accept on a simplified view that Gould is correct; we like what we know, and we know what is around us everyday. 

When we try to create something, we utilize the elements and techniques that surround us. This may be why we're seeing so many 3D street chalk tableaus and photorealistic paintings on the Facebook. These techniques may be 'jaw-dropping' and they may 'blow you away' the first time you see them, but being surrounded by them every day destroys their novelty and they become merely tools for artistic expression. This is as it should be. Novelty alone is not originality, or else the greatest composers and artists would be those who did the silliest things with their materials. 

Who did what with the what, now? --Jackson Pollock

True, often art's value is influenced by its story; that's why a scribble by an elephant or a Chopin Etude played by a 6 year old garner attention, but let's not get sidetracked with caveats, exceptions, and redundancies. I have a book... which I can't find, that describes the differences between originality and invention much better than I can so I won't attempt to do so here. We can continue the conversation with the fact that creativity is not the true act of creation that intuition tells us it is; it is rather the synthesizing of what we already know into something new, or unique. 

All of this preamble was meant to mention this point: the practical application of creativity. Say you want to create a piece of music. Since we're all organists, we have two ways to do it:

1. Compose a piece on paper, working at the desk. 

2. Improvise a piece at the keyboard. 

Each approach has its own virtues, but require a common approach to the work that is the opposite of analysis. Let's take a simple example:

You are given a chorale melody and you seek to harmonize it in four voices. The way we were taught to do it in our first Music Theory course was to: 

1. Analyze each note in turn, writing down all of the possible chords that could harmonize that note.
2. Examine the what is likely 50 or so chords that you've written down and draw lines connecting from one chord to the next so that it forms a reasonable harmonic progression. 
3. Using this progression, write in a complementary bass line that fits the chosen chords.
4. Now just fill in the inner voices making sure to avoid parallel or hidden octaves and fifths. 
5. Voila! Hand it in to your professor. 

This rigorous process assures you of success! 

An academic success.

A success of limited value.

Ok, it's technically correct but will likely be lacking in the musicality department. 

Which one of these expressions defines your success?

We could take a similar approach to harmonizing at the keyboard to ensure a probably technical success as well, by either writing in a similar analysis under the notes, or practicing each stage in turn if we have the time. Our results will be similarly successful and similarly lacking in living musicality. 

Now, I'm not one who believes in a certain undefinable something, what the French call a certain I don't know what. Je ne sais pas exactly how all of the minutiae would appear in list form, but I do know that all these musical elements are real and can be accessed through the proper approach. The failing of the above approaches is that it treats the act of creation like it does analysis. Treat each element separately, in turn, moving from one note to the other, filling in blanks as we go. My experience at the keyboard and in reading tells me that this is the wrong approach. That's why I want to know what the perfect antonym of analysis is. Synthesis? Simultaneity? A bit of both?

In either case, the correct process is to, as much as possible, perform the many smaller tasks of creation simultaneously, rather than one at a time. If you are studying counterpoint, most books continually remind you to try to imagine the entirety of the counterpoint to be set against the cantus firmus before touching pen to paper. Never proceed one note or one voice at a time. 

Contrapunctus V (excerpt) from Die Kunst der Fuge by J.S. Bach 

Bach wrote many fugues over his lifetime, and when you study some of them, you come to realize that he couldn't have composed them one voice at a time. So great is their textural and structural unity, the multiple voices could only have come to exist simultaneously. This is one of the secrets to great music making:

Though we study music through taking it apart and examining each element and melody on its own merits, we cannot create good music through the separate creation of each element and melody on its own. They must be created, as much as possible, simultaneously. 

Knowing this gives us further guidance in our studies. Practicing our harmonization skills, we know that there are several things that need to be done, such as creating a complementary bass line, choosing good harmonies to create a coherent and intelligible progression from the beginning of the phrase to the end, and perhaps using knowledge of ornamentation to add to the original melody. We can practice each of these on their own, but our training is incomplete unless we acquire the skill to do all of these simultaneously. 

 Marcel Dupre's first volume of his treatise on the Art of Improvisation provides practical exercises with harmonizing scales in various dispositions but I never really understood why they were there or exactly what we were practicing. I see now that the first exercise was to grow comfortable with the modest task of harmonizing a scale in the soprano voice with set harmonies. The question of the bass line was dispensed with at this stage to give the player a minimum of tasks to perform simultaneously. The next exercise uses inversions of the triad to allow the player to create a well-shaped bass line moving in contrary motion to the soprano scale. The next, harmonizing the scale in the pedals, the role of the soprano now is to act as a countermelody, moving in contrary motion to that of the bass; now the roles are flipped. The next exercise, harmonizing the scale in the tenor, adds another complication, like building a watch. In addition to fitting harmony to each note of the scale and creating a complementary bass line, we now consider the soprano as a sort of rudimentary countermelody to the tenor.

After these, we begin harmonizing short phrases, using our own discriminating taste to pick our harmonies and how to move from one to the other. Following this, we harmonize complete 'chorales' which involve some small modulations (or tonicizations, technically) and some differing cadences, giving us more problems to solve simultaneously with those we already know. 

Gerre Hancock steers us in a similar direction in a larger scale in his method of studying musical forms, using written outlines. We start with a musical outline of the entire form writing in all the important moments and leaving most of it blank with some basic directions of which key we will proceed to and what techniques will be used. We practice first writing in the blank spots and performing our written work. Then we practice further by leaving the spots blank and practicing those spots at the keyboard, arriving at a satisfactory passage of music. Over time, we discard the musical outline in favor of an outline that has no musical notation, but rather just a verbal plan for the improvisation. Over time, even this outline is discarded as we grow accustomed to handling all of these details entirely mentally. 

Over enough time, and careful study and practice, we can see the entire scope of a composition or improvisation at a glance of creativity. The only thing remaining then is to fill in the details, either on paper, or at the keyboard. What a wonderful tool to have, this spontaneous, simultaneous, synthesis. 

Transposition as Ear Training

The Other Kind of Transposition

 

After all this talk of transposition using substitution of clefs, imaginary key signatures, and courtesy pseudo-accidentals, I wanted to say what this kind of transposition is meant to do, and how else you can use transposition for your musical health.

 

First of all, this transposition I've been studying recently with all the clef substituting is meant for a special kind of situation: playing music that you have never seen before in a different key than written. It is transposition at first sight. It technically requires no knowledge of the sound to be produced in order to perform it, though an inner sense of how the music will sound can only help. As sterile as this process can be, it guarantees sure knowledge of what note will follow another, and that is what is required from transposing at sight.

 

Contrary to this typographical approach, there is another approach to transposition with a different goal entirely, that of cultivating your inner musical ear and strengthening the association between the inner sound and how it is expressed on the keyboard. The common term for this skill is: playing by ear.

 

You could also just get a pair of these.

 

The method for training is pretty simple, but quite different from our clef transpositions. The method calls for one to play exercises in many different keys. These exercises can be melodies, chord progressions, or phrases from larger musical works. If you allow the memorized sound to guide you instead of the interval relationship from the old key to the new one, you will get a lot of good practice in reproducing the sound at the keyboard.

 

I have a book which is chock full (how full is a chock anyway?) of exercises that can be used in this way: A New Approach to Keyboard Harmony by Leo Kraft and others.

 

Remember that transposition is just one musical subject that can be used in different ways to strengthen both practical skills as well as fundamental musicianship. Always look for how these subjects can help you in more than one way. 

Transposition Update

Clef Substitution in Transposition - Update

 

After a few chaotic weeks, I have a new practice schedule incorporating Ear Training, Sight Singing, Keyboard Harmony, Improvisation, 16th Century Counterpoint, Open Score C-Clef sight reading, Accompaniment from Thorough-Bass, and Transposition. Today I'll just mention what I've been doing with transposition.

 

Since I've been starting the day with C-Clef Open Score reading every morning for months now, I'm getting pretty comfortable with the clefs, and have started using them to learn my transpositions.

 

Just so you know, the method I'm using for transposing at sight is to substitute clefs and key signatures a reading the notes as they appear. For instance, if I want to transpose this piece in F major down a whole step, I add two flats to the signature (for Eb Major), and instead of Treble and Bass clefs, I use Tenor in the right hand, and Alto in the left. Additionally, I'm playing the notes as they appear in the new Tenor clef an octave higher than they would be literally, and the Alto notes I'm reading an octave lower. Once you get used to this, at first, dizzying procedure, it can be readily applied to any music that comes across your rack.

 

But how should this be practiced?

 

The way I've been doing it is this:

 

1. Find a hymnbook. A hymnbook with traditional hymns makes for great material because it's fairly simple, is consistently 4 parts (for the most part), and everything's pretty vertical, not much counterpoint. I chose the St. Gregory Choir Book that I found in a dusty corner of the church.

 

2. Choose either the right hand or the left, and read through the hymn book using the clef of choice for the chosen transposition. I started with the Step Down transposition so I began with the right hand using tenor clef an octave higher than written. I played my way through the hymn book at the pace of 25 hymns a day (most are pretty short).

 

3. After you get through the book or once you feel comfortable, start through the book again, this time practicing the other hand using the other complementary clef; in my case, this clef was the alto clef an octave lower than written.

 

4. After this has been done, start through the book one more time putting the hands (and clefs) together. My first day was quite a stumble when I tried this, but it's become almost second nature now.

 

5. After finishing the hymn book, start looking at more challenging repertoire to sight transpose. In my case, I've moved into the 371 Harmonized Chorales of Bach. After this I'll probably wander into the 2 part Inventions, 3 part Sinfonias, and then probably into the 48 Preludes and Fugues. That's my rough plan right now.

 

 

There are a total of 6 transpositions, each with a pair of clefs that will achieve them. I will attempt them in this order:

 

1. 2nd Down - Tenor over Alto

2. 2nd Up - Alto over Mezzo-Soprano

3. 3rd Down - Soprano over Treble

4. 3rd Up - Bass over Baritone

5. 4th Down - Baritone over Tenor

6. 4th Up - Mezzo-Soprano over Soprano

 

I've gotten a good start on the first transposition and I believe it is good enough already for anything I may find on the Colleague Examination. I've started working on the second transposition but I've had to do some extra work on that one. I'm having to learn the Mezzo-Soprano clef (middle C is on the second line).

 

Now, since I've learned three C clefs already, I find that I'm learning this one much faster than the others since I've done it before. To learn it, I'm just reading through the hymn-book with the left hand playing everything in Mezzo-Soprano clef with two sharps added (for a whole step up rather than a half step). Today I'm finishing the hymn-book and plan on combining this clef with the Alto in the right hand next week. If this is successful, then I will probably not have much trouble learning the final clef: the Baritone (middle C is on the top line; or F is on the middle line, depending on your point of view).

 

 

I am mostly concentrating on one transposition at a time, instead of trying to learn all of them at once. However, I'm not working to complete mastery individually before moving on. I think once I have some facility so that Bach Chorales are pretty easy, then I've reached the point where I can attempt the next transposition. I hope to have all 6 transpositions well in hand and sight reading fugues in any key by the time the Fellowship exam arrives.

 

The one thing that was a real bear to get used to was the accidentals. The meaning of the accidentals changes depending on the key you are transposing it into. Sharps can turn into naturals; naturals can turn into flats; flats can turn into double flats! With some time, it becomes apparent what is going on, but what really bothered me were courtesy accidentals. You know the fellows: an accidental sharpens a note and then a bar line occurs which cancels out the accidentals of the last bar, but they still put a natural sign next to the note just to remind you that it was cancelled. These will trick you into thinking you need to alter that note, but you have to learn to spot them and then summarily ignore them.

 

Anyhoo, it's exciting to me to see the end of learning clefs in sight. I'm doing well with the Mezzo-Soprano, so when I hit the Baritone clef with the 3rd Up transposition, I'll have learned all the clefs. There are no others except the French Violin clef (just like reading Bass clef two octaves higher) and Contrabass clef (just like reading Treble clef two octaves lower). I'll have comprehensive practical knowledge of a subject. Neat!

 

 



Figured Bass for Beginners

 Figured Bass for Beginners

After some study of the subject and how to wade into it, I’ve decided it would be good to attempt a treatment of the subject of Accompaniment From Thorough-Bass in a form useful for beginners. I know that when I started trying to work on Figured Bass exercises I had almost no idea how to proceed and a lot of trouble would have been saved if I had known a few little things that don’t seem to be well documented in the books I started with. So let’s begin with…

Intervals

An interval, as you may or may not know, is the difference in pitch between two notes. The two notes may be one after another, in which case it is a melodic interval, or they can occur at the same time creating a harmonic interval. The numbers in a figured bass, the figures, are simply the harmonic intervals that occur above the bass note, that when played together form the desired sound, or sonority.

As an example, here we have the bass note C.

Underneath the note, we have the figure 5-3. This means that the notes needed to complete the chord lie a fifth and a third above C. These notes, if you count up to them, are: G and E respectively. So let’s write those in.

Those of you with a little bit of theory under your belt will recognize this as the most basic three-note chord, or triad: C major chord in root position. While it is of some use to recognize this fact, it is good to keep in mind that during the time period when these figures were invented and used extensively, these terms such as ‘root-position’ or ‘chord inversions’ weren’t used. For now, let’s just acknowledge that this 5-3 figure happens to sync up with our idea of a root position triad.

So we plotted out the intervals and made a chord, but we’re not quite done. A 53 chord doesn’t have to look like the one we wrote down. That E doesn’t have to be down there, it could appear up here in the treble instead.

And we don’t have to limit ourselves to just one G or any other note of the chord. Any one of the notes described by the intervals can be doubled or duplicated. We can have as many C’s, E’s, or G’s as we want!

We can see now that while the figure is describing specific notes to us (C E and G), it isn’t telling us which C, E, or G to use, nor how many. The sonority (the C major root position triad) is being described precisely, but its disposition (how widely spaced, how many notes are duplicated, which note’s on top) is left to the discretion of the performer. If we only restrict ourselves to what is physically playable by two hands at the keyboard, we still have a LOT of different ways that we can play that one figure of 5-3.

So now we reach the first stumbling block that I found when working on this subject. Without any experience or professional discretion, how do we know what to play? There are a couple of ‘rules’ we can follow to get us started.

1.       Limit yourself to 4 voices.

Yes, 4 voices. While that may sound kind of arbitrary (Why not 5? Why not 3?) and counterintuitive (Shouldn’t we start with 1 voice and work our way up to 4?), I swear that it is the best thing to do. Here’s why:

First off, think of the chords that we are going to be playing. Triads have three unique notes per chord. Seventh chords have 4. We need to play with at least three or four voices just so that we can play complete chords without leaving anything out.

Secondly, when you play with only three voices, you will find it a little more difficult than with 4 voices because all three notes will be busy trying to form complete chords. Unless you have a great amount of skill, you will have much less freedom in your voices. (That’s part of why Bach’s trio sonatas are so miraculous, because he could create such freedom in the voices despite there being so few to create a full texture.)

When you use 4 voices, if you play a triad then one of the notes must be doubled. Choosing which note is doubled actually gives you a lot more wiggle room to make good and musical progressions.

Lastly, 4 voices fit pretty well under the hands, unlike 5 voices. One hand can accommodate 2 voices without much difficulty (with practice, of course!), but three voices in a hand leads to great difficulties in keeping all the lines separate and smooth. 4 really is the magic number when it comes to the hands, and theory.

Now we’re playing with more limitations. Keep in mind that limitations are good in the beginning because too much freedom can lead to aimlessness and confusion. We’re using a more manageable number of notes, but where should those notes be?

2.       Play in a Close Position

Let’s be clear on this one. Our four voices have four names. From highest to lowest, they are: Soprano, Alto, Tenor, and Bass. When we talk about an open or close position, we are talking about the spacing between the top three notes, the Soprano, Alto, and Tenor. Bass is exempt. If the top three notes are in a range greater than an octave, like this example….

…then they are considered in Open Position. If they are spaced in a range smaller than an octave, basically as close as they can be squeezed together…

…then they are in Close Position. This last style is the one we will be using almost exclusively at the beginning. You see, once we start putting one chord in front of another, it will suddenly matter that we follow the rules of good voice leading and avoid parallel fifths and octaves between any voices, as well as hidden fifths and octaves for that matter. It’s a lot to think about if you are a beginner. However, if we play in close position with three voices in the right hand, and the bass note in the left hand, you will find that for the most part, voice leading will just take care of itself. It’s the magical short-cut solution we’ve been searching for!

There’s one little tid-bit I should tell you before we move further. That figure we looked at before, the 53? Well, don’t expect to see it written under any of the bass notes; they’re invisible. What I mean to say is that if you see a bass note in a figured bass line that has no figure underneath it, you can take it for granted that the actual figure is 53. It’s our default chord, so to speak. You can have a whole bass line that’s made out of these root position triads. Like this one:

Now let’s take stock of how to realize this ‘figured’ bass. Using our two limiting rules, we restrict our chords to 4 voices, counting the bass, and we play them in a close position. Just so we know what’s possible, let’s jot down all the possibilities:

(Though each of these chords could be played in another octave, there are nonetheless only three unique chords...)

So….not a lot of possibilities. That’s actually a good thing at this stage. Just three chords! Now this is where we should pay attention. We want to make these three chords our friends. Each one is wonderful and unique and we need to get to know them and find out what makes them each a beautiful snowflake and how proud we are of all of them…

How to recognize a unique disposition

First, look at the shape of the three note chord being played in the right hand. We see the first one is three notes nicely stacked on top of each other, like a snowman. Easy to identify. Look at the second one; now snowman has lost his head. And the third, um… he lost his… Well, in any case, these three shapes are very recognizable and distinct from each other. Notice how each shape has a different feel to it when you play it on the keyboard. Those of you with some theory knowledge will possibly see each as a root position, first inversion, and second inversion triad respectively, but I encourage you just to see each shape as it is.

Now, this recognition of shapes doesn’t really do us any good without another piece of information: how far away from the bass is it? More specifically, which interval from the bass is represented by the soprano voice?  Well, in the snowman’s case, the top of the complete snowman is a G, which is a fifth from the bass note C (It doesn’t matter that it’s several octaves away. A fifth is still a fifth.). Now, knowing this, we can make a shortcut.

Here’s the way we realized a figured bass note in the beginning:

1.       What’s the bass note?  C

2.       What note is a third above C?   E

3.       What note is a fifth above C?  G

4.       Since I’m in four voices, I’ll have to double a note, so let’s throw in another C.

5.       Spell out C, E, and G on the keyboard and play them all together.

We were basically figuring it out from scratch every time we saw a new bass note. Here’s the new way.

1.       What’s the bass note? C, and I know a chord shaped like a snowman that goes a 5^th above C

2.       Put a snowman shaped chord with it’s head a fifth above C and play them all together.

Suddenly, we’re not building the wheel every time; we’re using our already discovered knowledge of relationships to cut straight to the answer. It’s totally cheating! In the same way that memorizing your multiplication tables before a math exam is cheating.

Moving on, we see that the snowman-sans-head is placed with his missing head an octave (or multiple octaves) above the bass. And finally, the third is placed with the top a 3^rd above the bass.

So suddenly we’ve reduced the multitude down to three simple chord shapes and an interval for each to make sure it’s placed correctly. For convenience, we will call this chord-shape-plus-interval amalgamation a  disposition.  Now we can use this knowledge to realize that bass line. Start by just picking one of our three dispositions, whichever one is your favorite, and plugging it onto the first bass note. I’ll go with this one:

Now, where do we go? Well, we know that we have three basic possibilities:

A simple rule will guide you well: leave a note unchanged whenever possible. By this we also mean to say that it is usually best to move to the chord that is the closest to the one you just played. There are reasons to jump around, but not at this early stage. We find that the closest choice we have is this one:

 

Now we’re cookin’ with gas! And we use the same simple rules to get us all the way through the bass line. Just one more simple rule for the ending: end with the soprano either one the octave, or the third above the bass, but not the fifth. In the interest of building sensitivity, let’s be sensitive to this old bias that a cadence should not be ended on the fifth.

 

You can see now that there’s no one right answer. A given bass line can be realized in multiple ways, some better than others. Sometimes there is a realization that is clearly the best, and sometimes you just have to let your sensitivity guide you. Try realizing a given bass line in as many different ways as you can. This would be agonizingly tedious on paper, but at the keyboard it’s quick and easy.

So we’ve gone this far and can now realize a simple bass line with the simplest of figures. We now know the basic process of realizing a figured bass but where do we go from here?

Building a Vocabulary

Well, when I said we just had three dispositions for our basic invisible figure? I might have been lying just a little bit. You see, each of those three dispositions have something in common with the others, they are all doubling the bass. If C is the bass, then you can bet there is another C in the chord in each of those dispositions. We don’t have to double the bass; we could double the third instead. There are two shapes that appear if we do this and keep it within the span of one hand:

The first has two of the exact same note, which is totally acceptable in chorale or instrumental writing but a bit silly on the keyboard. Instead of four voices, we effectively have only three. For that reason, the other chord shape is the better one for the keyboard. We see that it’s a an octave wide and the soprano lies a third above the bass. Great! A new shape with a placement interval. What’s the point?

This particular shape is a good one because it can get you out of a little problem you might run into. Say you have this bass line and have played these chords:

 

What comes next? Well, you should always be wary when the bass moves up or down by step because that’s a great way to run into some parallel fifths or octaves. The easiest solution is to move the right hand in the opposite direction of the bass line. If the bass steps up, the right hand disposition moves to one that is down from where it was. It’s really very easy if you just look one chord ahead while you’re playing. However, we have a problem here because the top note of the right hand happens to be the leading tone and it really really wants to move up to that C. If you follow that impulse and move your chord shape up, then you will get parallel 5ths and parallel octaves. Your theory teacher will stop putting ice in their drinks. If you go the other direction, you get a frustrated leading tone in the soprano which is deeply unsettling for our musician nerves. So…

We try a different chord shape and it saves us! Hooray, it has a practical use!

So we have three different dispositions where the root is doubled and they’re good for normal busy-work, we have one where the third is doubled which gets us out of some hairy deceptive cadences, do we have any with a doubled fifth?

There’s a couple, and it’s the last one that’s keyboard friendly again. I’m sure we can find a use for it.

And that there is the point of what we should be doing. We should be building a vocabulary of dispositions for a given figure and finding out how they can be used to good effect. We must begin by becoming acquainted with the 7 fundamental figures : the Triad and its 2 inversions, and the Seventh Chord with its three inversions. (Those figures are 53, 63, 64, 753, 653, 643, and 642. They are abbreviated as: (blank), 6, 64, 7, 65, 43, and 42 respectively.)  For our explorations of these figures, we should be armed with this plan of attack:

1.       Hey, a new figure! What intervals and notes are implied by the figure?

2.       If I squeeze the soprano, alto, and tenor together, what different chord shapes can I make that fit within one hand. (For triads, some note will have to be doubled so start with doubling the bass.)

3.       I see new shapes and old shapes. What intervals link the top of them to the bass?

4.       Now what shapes can I find if I double the other notes, instead of the bass?

5.       Now that I know all the different ways I can play this figure, which ones are useful for normal situations? How about special situations?

Hopefully after enough study and experimentation we will know how to handle that particular figure whenever it pops up. In this manner, we are building a vocabulary of chords. Our hands will eventually build a muscle memory of the sensation of the proper chord to fit over a figured bass note. As time goes by, more exotic figures can be found and assimilated in the same manner. Eventually it would be well to examine the usefulness of open position dispositions.

To practice these new-found dispositions, one should put them in some sort of context. Play cadences and sequences that incorporate these chords in every key and you will quickly learn the physical sensation and build the mental associations necessary. For cadences and sequences, I would say that you can write your own, but it would probably help to find a book on figured bass that has that sort of thing already written out. I like Figured Harmony at the Keyboard: Part 1 by R.O Morris. He treats each figure with its own chapter and at the beginning presents varied cadences and sequences using the figure, before moving on to exercises resembling proper bass lines. He also writes in a preferred soprano line so all you have to do is fill in the inner voices. This affords one good practice at knowing just what disposition to use, since often only one or two will fit. If you have this book or one like it then I have a suggested plan of attack.

In Going Forward…

… it is my belief that one should as quickly as possible, write down all of the practical dispositions available to all of the fundamental figures. Use this list to aid you in working out the cadences and sequences that involve them. Once you can play the cadences and sequences without difficulty, exercises can be worked involving the figures already learned.

One goal is to take each of those cadences and sequences and write them out in all playable dispositions (e.g. Beginning with the soprano a third above the bass, or a fifth above, or an octave above) and then practice each one in all 24 major and minor keys. This is great exercise for the mind and body. Practicing one of these every day means that it will take a lot of time, over a month for just the root position chords.

A further suggestion is not to wait for that to be completed before moving on to the next section! If you work at that snail’s pace, you will master cadences and sequences but will be getting no experience in that other important sphere of study: Realizing Figured Basses! Therefore, I suggest doing both concurrently. Make your slow but steady progress up Parnassus mountain by practicing all dispositions of cadences and sequences in all keys as it will aid you in the studies of harmonization, improvisation, and composition; continue at the same time with practicing playing from figured basses as soon as you can play the cadences and sequences involving a particular figure with some proficiency. Don’t wait for your slow practice to catch up; keep each study separate and unaffected by the other.

As you go through each figure, you will discover (from the book hopefully) that there are certain preferences for doublings and usage that will reveal many of the rules of harmony as you go. Be open to the reason and method behind the music and I feel confident you will find a deeper connection to the music you hear and the music you create.

Happy studies!