Lesson with SimenN (Counterpoint, Analysis)

Sorry for the delay!

I'll post my thoughts/etc ASAP. Don't worry.

Danke :D

Alright, first off, we were talking about making an invention in the same idea/structuring as Bach's, and therefore the idea was to pay close attention to motives and their usage.

The major problem that plagues this exercise is the lack of economy in motives. For example, already in measure 5 and 7 for example you're using motives that are very different from your subject's material. Also, it's worth pointing out that if you make an invention that has a subject+countersubject at the start, you should take the model presented best in invention 6 (BWV 777) for now.

The reason for this is that the point of our study is to grasp the basic forms of motive/thematic usage and the baroque simple form which is well represented in these examples.

To be more precise, my criticism is aimed at the usage of motives such as the 16th figures in measure 7 of the exercise. The arpeggios are completely uncharacteristic of the baroque idea of affect unity.

That is to say, in a baroque piece the main purpose of using the same material over and over is to avoid breaking the piece's "affect," or otherwise the intended emotion. In a baroque piece it is ideal to only have one single emotion throughout the entire piece, and no contrasts.

I also notice very vienna-classic influenced things in the exercise, such as the pauses at the end and the use of harmony in the cadence.

There's also a matter of structural clarity. In the exercise it's not clear what is the main motive material, how that works with the rest of the piece. You also avoid modulating to the dominant region, despite a few brief passes, there's no clear sign of a proper modulation (with a root cadence in A major, or minor.)

The counterpoint itself is very showy, but it's unnecessarily so. We're shooting for simplicity before complexity, which is why we're starting with inventions.

I want you to re-read the analysis on the 4th invention and make a new one, with the 4th in mind. That is, think of it as a 2 voice fugue, with subject, counter subject, episodes and modulations.

What I want you to learn is to be able to work with a small set of musical material, and through that produce a piece which structurally holds a coherent shape. Naturally, if you can do that you should be able to go on to more complex things.

Another thing to bear in mind, is that you shouldn't underestimate 2 voice instrumental counterpoint. The voice leading is relatively simple and I did go over this in the previous posts, but the overall clarity has to be maintained. It's very easy to be tempted to try to be fancy and do complex figures, but elegance and counterpoint maturity is our objective.

To illustrate my point on musical material conservation and economy, look at Invention 5 (BWV 776) and observe that the 16th line that starts from the beginning of the piece is always maintaining the same motives and besides changes in key and so on it seldom changes. It in effect brings the piece together and establishes a single unity of intention/affect.

The other elements in this invention are also noteworthy, like the theme itself which consists of the small figure in the right hand at the beginning, while the 16th figure is countersubject/counterpoint to the subject. In this case it's worth noting that the structure is not that of a fugue exposition, but it's close enough that we can use the terminology accurately. There is no answer like in a fugue, and instead the modulation happens right away.

Remember that it's crucial that you modulate to the dominant key, and the process of modulation is only really recognizable once you cadence in the new key. That is, if you're in D like in the exercise you'd need a cadence in A major/minor to complete the modulation to A major/minor.

Avoid introducing new motives, rhythms and figures which come in contrast to the initial material you start with, such as arpeggios, triplets, etc when there were none in the original material (the subject/countersubject, or start of the piece.)

You were asking me about voice leading before, well, we can also work on species counterpoint or strict vocal counterpoint if you want, but I think first we should probably get this out of the way because I don't think you'll find these other things very problematic if you can do this properly.

yes, ill make one, i have another try, i tryed to use the subject more and develope it, im sure its not much improvement, but i home its a step in the right direction, but what shall i look at invention 5 or 6?

About the voice leading, yes i realy want to learn that, but if you think its best to do that later, its fine :) you are the teacher :)

I shall compose a new one when i look at invention 5 or 6

but this is my new try :

- I tryed to use the subject more, and easy subject and i composed varations on the theme.

Midi:

[ATTACH]13136[/ATTACH]

Score:

[ATTACH]13137[/ATTACH]

did you take a look?

Workin' on it. Sorry for my slow-ness. :>

no problemo :D

Alright. Well, I can see you addressed the music material issue and you're working the entire time with the same motives and so on. This is good, I think you got the idea right.

But there are still problems such as the form. You had a small pass through A minor in the start, but nowhere is a modulation towards the dominant evident. You should have gone to G major instead of A minor, and you should've gone to A minor later on in the invention.

Stylistically speaking, it does work better than the other exercise but the harmony/form is still up in the air.

Think your form through before you write, that will help keep things organized. I think you should write yet another invention, but this time don't have both voices start at once, but do the subject -> answer model as see in the inventions 1, 4, etc. Keep in mind that the answer should be at the octave and you should make a subject that also would work in a fugue.

Ahh yes, I see, the from bugs me to!, but could you be more specific with the harmony issues, what is wrong and what could I do to make it better.

I will make another invention with a fugal subject and i will go on to the dominant, and one question about the counterpoint, can you point out errors etc.

I going on vecation this week, ill be back in 7 days. So you can take a rest while im gone!;)

but I will start on the new invention as soon as possible when I get home.could you be so nice to write something to about these themes when im gone?

- Harmony ( what i do wrong and what i do right )

- Counterpoint.

- Voice leading.

- Structure. ( is there a strict structure in the baroque music, like the classical sonata form)

Thank you very much :)

Enjoy your vacation, and I'll post more info for you on what you asked.

Well, let's get the show on the road. For the sake of being practical, this post is also addressed at other students of mine which will probably find a couple of things here useful or interesting as well.

With that out of the way, let's talk a little about Baroque harmony and how that works and what should be understood when we're talking about baroque "harmony."

First off, the first thing to understand is that the most important thing for looking at baroque harmony is understanding the importance of figured bass in the practice of baroque music. There is where we find the main meat & bones of baroque harmony as well as what sort of things were typical and for what.

Figured bass is the practice of writing figures under a designated bass line which gave the anatomy of each chord that should be played over the bass line. It's in no way a system of functional harmony like what know by Rameau and later with names like "dominant" or "tonic", etc.

Instead, it's simply the anatomy of each chord and that's it. The player was supposed to improvise with this information in mind and that was it.

Now, there are several schools for this, and we can split them by country. But for the sake of being practical let's address the French tradition and the German tradition. There are obviously a lot of similarities but there are certain things that come by the french tradition that you won't get in the german one in the same way, like chords with the major 7 and so on.

So, what does this have to do with harmony in practical terms? Well, everything. It also has to do with form.

If we were to ask a theorist in 1716 about what "forms" there were in baroque music, he's say pretty much only one. One part of the piece is in the starting key, the other is in the dominant. The reason for such a simple generalization is that indeed practically all baroque pieces follow that simple model.

And there's also something much more important we can't overlook, the baroque affects. The main musical conception of the usage of affects by baroque music is that a piece cannot have more than one "character", that is to say, one emotion that goes through it.

So, if we're dealing with something in E-minor, the baroque affect tradition indicates that key is a key of pain, guilty, and sadness. It's no surprise that many pieces in E minor contain chromatic movement and symbols such as the famous Bach cross and so on. Knowing this, if we set out to write something in E minor, a lot of the work is done for us. We know what we have to do to make it "fit" with the preconceived baroque affect.

***Note: I'm strictly talking about historical recreations! This is completely and totally optional, but good to know nonetheless.***

Another thing we know from the get go, is that our piece in E minor cannot have sudden shifts in affect, tonality or anything that would compromise it's "character." Though this is difficult to put in rules, it means there should be an economy of motive usage and rhythm contrast. It's acceptable to have passages in major as a modulation or a contrast so long as the affect is still present (in our E minor example, the chromatics, and other such motive materials.)

So, not only do we know a great deal about what we should be writing just by picking a given key, but we have plenty of examples of how it was done at the time to get an idea of what we want it to sound like. Obviously, it's not so simple as to just copy Bach or Pachelbel or any other composer, we have to understand how it works first.

Picking a key is extremely important in baroque music for the above reasons, as you can't just write anything in just any key if you want it to all fit within the aesthetics of baroque music.

However, remember how I said that baroque music can be separated in 2 simple parts if we just looked at the harmony? Well there's more to it. Say we write our piece in E minor, and we have, by tradition, to modulate to either B major or minor as the dominant key somewhere in between.

B major and B minor have themselves different characters and different affects, so how does it work when we have to keep just one affect through the entire piece? And here is where the interesting part of baroque harmony starts, as each piece has to maintain it's "character" in spite of modulations, so it becomes a constant fight between harmony and actual motive development.

If our piece modulates to B major (having started in E minor,) even if the modulation is to a major key, it still will be felt as painful, sad, etc despite the major characteristic. This is what separates Bach and the other amazing baroque composers to any other ringer. How to carefully balance each piece and still maintain a sense of continuity in spite of whatever harmonic contrasts may happen.

So, anyways, this is the major outline for explaining how harmony in the baroque period should be understood. I will probably be more thorough later since this topic is huge and it's hard to sum it up like this. I need to show examples and all that jazz.

About voice leading, we really just need to look at Fux's work and at the Palestrina style choral writing to see what the voice leading rules all look like. However, there's a distinction in vocal and instrumental counterpoint. Instrumental counterpoint is much more forgiving about this than vocal, in a strict sense.

So, I will "outsource" my work and post these pages so you can look at them in detail and see what I'm talking about:

article: ntoll.org: Species Counterpoint

A good article that explains most of what you should know about voice leading in general in the baroque period. Once you've read this and digested all there is to see in this page, we can address voice leading in more detail. But first, I need to make sure you are familiar with this.

Something important to talk about is the different styles of baroque songs, such as menuets, gigues, sarabandes, fantasias, preludes, and other such things. There's tons of little rules and standards when writing any of the above, except for the free forms such as fantasias or preludes. I won't go into all of them since most of this info is easy to find if you look it up. It's also really helpful if you take Bach's french suites for example as a guideline for what is typical though you can also look at Couperin and so on.

But even so, the main core of what constitutes a baroque "form" is basically a harmonic conception that pieces will go to the dominant, and other pivotal keys and then back to the tonic. It's not the same as romantic forms like the sonata form or adagio form, it's all much simpler and in some way more free.

I would also like to address something else on the specific topic of fugues, which is probably one of the most interesting free baroque forms. People often think that Bach is the guideline to follow concerning fugues and indeed while Bach was far from the only to write fugues, he gave practically invented his own way of writing them in very specific ways. However, let's not overlook all the other thousands of composers who also wrote them, and specially people of great influence to Bach such as Buxtehude, Bruhns or Froberger.

Why do I say fugues are a sort of baroque free form? Because simply put, a fugue is not a song form at all, it is simply a counterpoint technique based on older imitation and canon techniques of pre-baroque. What happens after the very defined exposition is really up in the air and up to the composer, therefore free form. What Bach does with his fugues has nothing to do with what Buxtehude did or Pachelbel.

So, I generally want to teach the overview of the entire style, not a specific "let's write like Bach!" view. It's good to have Bach as an example, but let's not forget everyone else who is just as interesting and often overlooked.

That concludes this particular lesson textwall for now, I will try to write some examples of typical baroque harmonic progressions and so on later.

wow, thanx this was an awesome lesson

Think of this as a little field-trip to the wiki:

The Fugue and The Sonata: Reconciling the Two Worlds

Pertinent to our study here, of course.

You still around? I've seen you post but nothing here...

I was planning to elaborate on what I've posted and maybe we can work on some other stuff, but if you're not around that'd be sort of hard. If you've lost interest also please do say so. I'd rather know than be left up in the air, yea?

Bump? If you have no more interest in the lessons, please do say so. I haven't heard anything from you in a while, so just sayin'.

Im still interested! what is my next task?

Im still interested! what is my next task?

I want to go over figured bass, so I'm preparing a lesson/examples on this since it's a really important part of the whole baroque thing. Plus, it's fantastic to learn about the harmony of the period.

Do you have already some experience with figured bass?

No, i dont even know what it is! im a wonderd about it the other day, so if you could teach me what it is and what is does that would be fine!

Basically, figured bass is the ground basis for everything to do with baroque harmony and the backbone for baroque improvisation principles.

In reality, it's very simple. It's simply a number that stands under a given bass note, to which you simply "fill" the chord that the number means. Say for example, a 6 means 638, if the 6 stands under a C, you get C E A C as your chord that you must "fill out."

There are many variations between figures and what the numbers mean by each tradition in the baroque period, so when you're studying this you must pay attention to what country the piece/etc is from. Also, different traditions had different ways of using different chords, it's all very evident if you compare, say, Bach's figured bass lines to Couperin, etc.

As an example of how it represents harmony of the period, Schubert learned harmony by studying figured bass. There's no secret that this is how it worked before we had books and "rules" and so on, it is a simple practical thing. It remains even today a good way to study baroque harmony and how composers used different chords in various ways.

So, it's a very practical way to both learn how to improvise and both how to write out your harmony in that style. It's recommended if you're interested in learning baroque harmony obviously. I want to post a bunch of examples I have of that, so let's see if I can fish'em up later when I have time. There's a lot to look at, but I have some good examples singled out of what it looked like.

I've been thinking for a while on what could be helpful, and I think that it'd be pretty nice if we looked at some Francois Couperin scores. Specially concerning what happens harmonically there. And, of course, Rameau though he's a little harder to analyze.

Are you familiar with both these composers?