Thorough Bass

Ludwig van Beethoven famously stated that two things were not debatable for him: religion and thoroughbass. This statement has seldom been taken seriously. Research into the partimento and thoroughbass tradition in recent years, however, has revealed that »thoroughbass« in the 18th and 19th century was far more than a musical shorthand to support performance practice. Rather, it was the most important method for teaching composition, improvisation, analysis and music theory. Viennese thoroughbass theory in Beethoven’s time provides an excellent basis for a nuanced understanding of classical and early romantic har- mony and counterpoint. This article presents the basic elements of Viennese thoroughbass theory: Arabic numeral analysis, »Satzmodelle« (schemata) and »beste Lage« (outer voice frameworks). There follows an analysis of the first movement of Beethoven’s sonata op. 109 based on this methodology.

Over the past decade or so, historically informed theory, pedagogy, and (more recently) composition have emerged fully as outgrowths of the historically informed performance (HIP) movement, for which Bach’s music has been instrumental. In this light, “Bach in the music theory classroom” is a metaphor for a broader HI initiative, one where, in my own teaching, historically informed theory (HIT) becomes the basis for structuring a curriculum centered on period composition. In this article, I discuss the materials, process, rationale, and philosophical implications for a mini-curriculum that constitutes the first of a three-course HIT sequence. My aim with this first leg is to change students’ thinking from the “know-what” types of knowledge characteristic of present-day music theory curricula to a “know-how” mind-set consistent with eighteenth-century pedagogy.

The goals of music theory today approximate the reading knowledge of a language acquired in graduate school. Enough about its syntax, grammar, and vocabulary is learned to supply a translation, but without ever acquiring the knowledge and experience to speak, think, or write in the language itself. Score annotations and analyses, as ends in themselves, are like metalinguistic translations. In Bach’s day, on the other hand, music theory was the business of training musicians to speak the language, on the performance-improvisation-composition continuum that defined their daily activities. To implement a “know-how” curriculum in an environment designed for “know-what,” however, is not without its challenges, not least because of limited time and often resources.

I narrate how Bach himself offered me a solution through his own music and pedagogical materials. Rather than throwing students into the proverbial deep end, my mini-curriculum engages them actively and continuously in creative work. The goal is not to compose a self-standing composition, but to get students thinking in Bach’s language in terms of musical schemata, the everyday patterns and conventions of Bach’s day. I do so through a series of creative problem-solving activities that impart knowledge of schemata, particularly as they are used in Bach’s hands. Students are placed in Bach’s shoes as both a teacher and composer, by exploring the connections and differences among Bach’s figured basses from the Vorschriften und Grundsätze zum vierstimmigen spielen des General-Bass, the partimento-preludes of the Langloz manuscript, and certain preludes from the Well-Tempered Clavier as well as selected fantasias. Through realization, analysis, and (class) composition exercises, students encounter a number of recurring schemata as a familiar cast of characters in these materials, all fashioned together into a modern-day Notenbüchlein or zibaldone (musical notebook), which tells a story about Bach’s schema usage—his compositional strategies employing schema development, elision, nesting, extension, and expansion.
The story culminates with Bach’s unique canonic treatment of a particular sequence, the 9/7–8/6/5. After ten weeks, students are able to realize a complex Bach partimento (BWV 908) and compose a continuo part for the Sanctus of the Mass in B Minor, for which no figures survive. These advanced creative problem-solving activities fill the last pages of the students’ Notenbüchlein, which is organized nearly single-handedly by Leipzig’s beloved Thomaskantor himself.

The 18th-century tradition of partimento and thoroughbass exercises has come under intense scrutiny of historians, theorists, and pedagogues during the last years. Much less attention has been paid to the vivid persistence of this tradition in the 19th century all over Europe. Not only the education of organists but especially the training of pianiste-compositeurs proved to be fertile ground for the practical training in the partimento tradition: Performances of fantasies, improvisations of cadenzas, interludes, lead-ins and ornaments were part of their daily-business. 19th-century manuals and teachers imparting the skills necessary for this kind of improvisation rely on thoroughbass and partimento exercises almost exclusively. At the same time they refrain from contemporary theories of „modern harmony“. This shall be shown in this paper with the help of three examples: Friedrich Kalkbrenner, Friedrich Hiller and Frédéric Chopin. This 19th-century tradition is of interest not only for historians and theorists; romantic partimenti also open up new approaches and perspectives for a present music theory pedagogy, which in recent years has started to challenge the customary boundaries between theory, composition, improvisation, and performance.

A newly discovered source, containing a thorough bass method ascribed to Johann Joseph Fux, sheds new light on the role of thorough bass in Fux’ teaching and composing activities. It allows for a differentiated view of the relationship between the Gradus ad Parnassum and composi- tional practice in Fux’ time. The article demonstrates possible connections with the Neapolitan school, compares the schemata in the thorough bass method with excerpts from Fux’ musi- cal works and explores connections to treatises by Johann Baptist Samber and Matthäus Gugl, which are closely related to this source. A complete critical edition of the source is included.

Livio Ticli  (University of Huddersfield, Palma Choralis, Early Music Department ‘Città di Brescia’),  «Basso Continuo»  as a «Concertato» Practice: Improvisation, Ornamentation and Counterpoint.

Basso continuo  owes its great success to many factors such as its extreme versatility, which stands out as to performance and editorial needs. The written forms, which the accompanying practices could take between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, are indeed abundant — from scores (more or less complete) to intabulations, alphabetic notation (e.g. in the case of the chitarrina), and even the simple bass line (more or less ciphered). Interestingly, these practices could be employed by both enthusiasts and professionals, clearly according to a different degree of music skills. The context could also influence the performance. Continuo players could accompany a voice or an instrument, but more often they sang to their instrument as in the case of  ‘integrated performances’ (Ticli 2020),  or they performed along with other multi-skilled musicians — singingplaying  in  concerto  either music works that formally did not contemplate any  basso continuo  part, or later pieces that usually included a part-book of  Bassus generalis. Musicology recently took a new interest in early  basso  continuo  practices by acknowledging that  contrapuntal and  chordal elements were features already to be found in the late 1580s, occasionally bringing up issues specifically on  Del sonare sopra ’l basso con tutti li stromenti e dell’uso loro nel conserto  (1607) by Agostino Agazzari (Nuti 2007, Dragosits 2012, Campagne 2014, De Goede 2014, Rotem 2019). While some scholars refers to Agazzari’s practice as a new and free kind of accompaniment, some others tend to highlight the relation between this practice and intabulations/written-out examples. Here, the concept of playing the thorough bass in  concerto  is explored as a series of complex techniques, which display elements of improvisation, ornamentation and counterpoint at the same time. The whole spectrum of possibilities will be assessed for both  bassisti  — so severely criticised by Adriano Banchieri and Girolamo Diruta — and for those expert musicians, who had skills in counterpoint and employed intabulations/spartiture. The second category will be the specific focus of this contribution, starting from Giovanni Maria Artusi’s account of what he witnessed in Ferrara and Ercole Bottrigari’s definition of concert as a dialogue. In particular, Anthony Newcomb (1978) argued that singing to one’s own instrument is a  concertato  performance in itself, and Laurie Stras (2018)  showed in her in-depth work on the  Concerto  segreto  and Ferrarese performance contexts that are no clear boundaries between concerted music and the so-called traditional polyphonic repertoire.  By  reconsidering  Newcomb  and  Stras’ conclusions and  giving  practical examples from treatises and repertoires of different instruments, this paper tests hypotheses in the field  and examines in detail the huge variety of practices presented by Agazzari.

The selection and evaluation of historical theoretical sources depend considerably on our interests and expectations. The importance of basso continuo remains underestimated today, while sources which seem to pave the way for chord-inversion, fundamental bass and 'modem' harmony systems are often overrepresented. This article attempts to show that many didactic writings from the 16th to the 18th century contain an implicit theory, which can be highly useful today for practical exercises as well as for analysis. This implicit theory is built upon general concepts orientated towards the "surface" of composition and not towards hidden structural strata. The metaphor of a musical surface as contrasting to depth and height is derived from Gilles Deleuze's philosophy and used as a global interpretation of the history of music theories. 'Musical surface' here designates the intervallic design of multi-part structures, above all the design of the outer voices, demonstrated prototypically by examples from Henry Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas". The art of designing the musical surface serves as the main criterion of a composer's craftsmanship in numerous treatises. The 'theory' documented in these treatises has to be reconstructed today, as it is often not entirely verbalized. The most common didactic tool in these implicit theories is the exemplum. The practical use of exempla helps to transform an implicit into an explicit theory and as a result might also help to reconstruct historic teaching methods. This is exemplified by the discussion of passages from treatises by Christopher Simpson ("A Compendium of Practical Musick", 1667) and Giovanni Paisiello ("Regole per bene accompagnare il partimento", 1782). This practically oriented approach makes today's didactics of historical musical styles similar to experimental archeology.

The 18th-century tradition of partimento and thoroughbass exercises has come under intense scrutiny of historians, theorists, and pedagogues during the last years. Much less attention has been paid to the vivid persistence of this tradition in the 19th century all over Europe. Not only the education of organists but especially the training of pianiste-compositeurs proved to be fertile ground for the practical training in the partimento tradition: Performances of fantasies, improvisations of cadenzas, interludes, lead-ins and ornaments were part of their daily-business. 19th-century manuals and teachers imparting the skills necessary for this kind of improvisation rely on thoroughbass and partimento exercises almost exclusively. At the same time they refrain from contemporary theories of „modern harmony“. This shall be shown in this paper with the help of three examples: Friedrich Kalkbrenner, Friedrich Hiller and Frédéric Chopin. This 19th-century tradition is of interest not only for historians and theorists; romantic partimenti also open up new approaches and perspectives for a present music theory pedagogy, which in recent years has started to challenge the customary boundaries between theory, composition, improvisation, and performance.

A slightly reworks English version has been published as "Romantic Thoroughbass: Music Theory between Improvisation, Composition and Performance" in: Theoria. Historical aspects of Music Theory, vol. 18 (2011). A PDF may be obtained from the author on request.

Manuscript textbooks from the first half of the 19th century are, in our judgment, predominantly non-original works deriving from specific printed models, of whose reception they are documentary evidence. In a number of instances there is also an adaptation of the printed models’ texts. We ascribe to Johanna Roth the authorship of the manuscript Primæ, Lineæ, Musicæ Instrumentalis (Fundamentals of Instrumental Music), focusing on piano playing and dating from 1816. In our paper we present a comparison of this textbook with Johann Samuel Beyer’s textbook on singing (Anweisung zur Singe Kunst, 1703). Detailed attention is devoted to the musico-genre characterisation of the works in the textbook’s practical section. To Johanna Roth we ascribe a possible authorship of a textbook of basic doctrine on music and the thorough-bass (Musikalische Frag-Stückh; Haupt-Regel des rechten General-Basses). This work is derived from a work by Daniel Speer (Grund-richtiger Kurtz – Leicht – und Nöthiger jetzt Wohl-vermehrter Unterricht der Musicalischen Kunst, 1697). We present the theme in the context of the development of music education and the diffusion of musico-theoretical writing during the first half of the 19th century in Slovakia.

Keywords: music education, musico-theoretical literature, piano schools, elementary doctrine of music, doctrine of the thorough-bass, Johanna Roth, Kežmarok, Spišská Belá

»Homage Only to the Ear« – The Fantastic and Key Relations in Domenico Scarlatti’s Works – Proceeding from the rule of the octave and the associated system of standardized changes to the scales directly related to the starting scale, the 18th century saw the gradual and defin- itive expansion of the concept of key through new key relations that went beyond relation- ships of diatonic proximity. Against this background, one can view Domenico Scarlatti as an avant-gardist who especially advanced the exploration of the lower fifth, the presentation of maximum distances and the testing of new expressive means in an experimental fashion. Modulation here no longer serves the purely structural manifestation of multiplicity within the unity of the starting key, but rather, as an »autonomous artistic device« (Ludwig Holt- meier), itself becomes an object of compositional creativity and innovation. Characteristic Scarlattian means for shaping the fantastic can also be described in this context: the en- trance of (pseudo-)improvisatory elements like the licence for dissonance from Italian recit- ative accompaniment into composed music, surrounded by drifting, ›wandering‹ harmony and a strategy of sudden expressive intensification unique to Scarlatti.

The Figured Bass Accompaniment in Europe – Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini (Lucca), Early Music Department “Città di Brescia” (Italy), Palma Choralis · Research Group & Early Music Ensemble.  Virtual Conference 9th-12th September 2021
REVIEW BY LIVIO TICLI (UNIVERSITY OF HUDDERSFIELD)

Johann Friedrich Daube bietet in seiner Schrift Generalbaß in drey Accorden (1756) erstmalig eine Modulationstabelle von jeder Tonart in jede andere an. Daubes erklärtes Ideal ist es dabei, über wenige Zwischenschritte auch bei weit voneinander entfernten Tonarten einen für ›das Ohr‹ ansprechenden Übergang zu gestalten. Seine Herangehensweise verweist in Teilen auf spätere, funktionsharmonische Modulationskonzepte voraus, da systematisch der Quintsextakkord der vierten und der Septakkord der fünften Leiterstufe der Zieltonart erzeugt werden. Originell bis hin zur Skurrilität ist Daubes Verfahren der allmählichen Verwandlung der Klänge durch Einführung neuer Töne über liegenbleibenden Anteilen des Ausgangsakkordes, häufig im Widerspruch zu den gängigen Dissonanzbehandlungsregeln.  Im Aufsatz werden Daubes Modulationen in nahe und entfernte Tonarten erläutert und in den Kontext ihrer von Daube vorgeschlagenen Anwendungen beim Improvisieren von Präludien und im liturgischen Orgelspiel eingeordnet. Zum Schluss erfolgt eine Reflexion über Redundanzen und Tabellen in Lehrbüchern, die auf eine Didaktik des Auswendiglernens verweisen. Diese ist relevant für das Erlernen des Improvisierens, da eine Art musikalischer Wortschatz aufgebaut wird, der ohne weiteres Nachdenken verfügbar ist.