What is the best way to teach a student figured bass? Dr. Brian Marks, Associate Professor of Piano, Director of Keyboard Studies, Baylor University Figured bass is a great way to help students understand and hear the relationship between between line and harmony. I think it is under-valued in today’s music education community and needs to be a bigger part of theory training at the pre-collegiate and collegiate levels. Keyboard players, in particular, can benefit from gaining a hands-on familiarity with realizing figured bass parts. Most of us probably associate figured bass with the Baroque era and rightly so. Figured bass is arguably the defining musical element of that musical era. But as a practical tool for training musical proficiency, the teaching of figured bass has extended far beyond that time period. Beethoven, for example, not only studied figured bass with Albrechtsberger, but preserved and annotated his figured bass notebooks (called partimenti) for posterity. The famous twentieth-century pedagogue Nadia Boulanger trained many a famous composer from the tradition of partimenti, including such diverse names as Aaron Copland, Philip Glass, Astor Piazzolla, and Quincy Jones. Instructional texts devoted to figured bass can be daunting. There are many rules, and the details can be overwhelming. Fortunately, there are now a number of free online tools that can help introduce students to figured bass, as well as exercises that teachers can create for their students from easily available resources. A wonderful free online course based on the theory exams for the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM) is available at mymusictheory. Grades 6 and 7 have sections that give an excellent basic introduction to figured bass, including some basic do’s and don’ts, but not so many as to be discouraging. Another, even more basic explanation of figures can be found at musictheoryhelp.co.uk For more advanced students, the San Francisco Conservatory has made a sequence of figured bass exercises freely available on their website: sfcmtheory/figured_harmony/figured_harmony.htm. These exercises do presuppose a certain level of theoretical knowledge, but provide a useful source of practice material. Perhaps an even better way to help a student gain familiarity with figured bass is to “reverse engineer” an existing piece. Simple four-part, choral-style compositions are ideal for this exercise. I typically use four-part arrangements from a hymnal (such as the 1956 edition of the Baptist hymnal, which I prefer for its predominance of simple but well-constructed, four-part arrangements). For a more easily accessible example, I will use Schumann’s “Ein Choral,” number 4 from his Album for the Young, Op. 68. This piece is a straightforward, four-part arrangement of the old chorale melody “Freue dich, o meine Seele,” (“Rejoice, my Soul”). To reduce it to figures, remove the two inner voices, leaving the bass line and soprano. Add the figures implied by the harmonic structure below the bass notes and you’ll have a manageable figured bass exercise for your students! The first phrase of the Schumann example has the following bass line (in G major): G-F#-G-F#-E-D-A-D. Keeping in mind that root-position chords need no figure, the figures for each bass note here would be: none-6-none-6-4/3-none-none-none. Since the melody is given, the number of possible “solutions” is quite limited. And if there is any doubt, the student can refer to the original piece for the “correct” solution of the realization. A more challenging version of the above exercise is to use one of the J. S. Bach chorale harmonizations (most well known in the U.S. in the Riemenschneider collection of 371 chorales published by G. Schirmer). Due to the many passing tones and other non-harmonic melodic elements in Bach’s harmonizations, determining the figures that express the entire musical texture and then recreating those is definitely an advanced exercise. The Riemenschneider publication has an additional 69 chorale melodies with figured bass (sometimes referred to as the “Schemelli Songbook” because of the 1736 publication in which they first appeared) that make excellent figured bass practice material. They are more complex than a reverse engineered hymn, but since the notation contains both bass and soprano, the realization is not as difficult as it might otherwise be. The difficulty of creating a realization of these melodies can be further reduced by aiming for a predominantly three-part texture instead of four parts. A little known “secret” of accomplished continuo players is that many keyboard realizations work perfectly well in three parts. A fourth part can be freely added in the right hand when needed (to satisfy voice-leading requirements, for example, or to fill out a seventh chord), but three parts will suffice most of the time. Since both soprano and bass are given, adding only one (and occasionally two) parts makes the task much more attainable. Figured bass realization can be a fun and creative way to engage students in the process of understanding and hearing voice leading in chordal textures. It is a great “antidote” to the tendency of some modern piano methods to rely on right-hand melody and left-hand block chord textures. For non-keyboard players it is a useful tool for developing harmonic awareness. It is no accident that figured bass has been a cornerstone of musical education in Western art music for over 400 years now. It is worth keeping in our educational toolbox!
Posted on: Mon, 07 Jul 2014 14:02:56 +0000
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