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So I always hear about how every famous composer that came after Bach claim that Bach's compositions are the only thing one needs to study to learn everything there is to know about harmony and counterpoint, but how exactly does one `study' Bach?

I am currently most interested in learning how to harmonize a given melody effectively and how I arrange the harmony against the melody (for solo piano) so that it sounds good (if that makes any sense...); though to not get too tunnel-visioned, I guess I address my question openly to all skills that would be useful to a pianist/aspiring composer and arranger.

I certainly don't have time to study everything he's ever written, so which of his works are most educational to analyze? WTC?(not interested in writing fugues...) Chorales?(not interested in writing choral music either) Various other things that I've not played or heard about? How does one get the most out of studying Bach? Will reading books and articles on the net about Bach somehow teach me to be able to write like him? Help, advice, suggestions welcome.

What knowledge do you already possess? I've done some study of the chorales in the context of harmony theory I was studying at the time. Before getting at it, I had learned my theory rudiments, and had worked my way up some basic harmony theory like the so-called primary and secondary chords, cadences and such. It would be helpful to know what you do and don't know at this point, in trying to help answer your question.

You might also want to ask in the ABF. While it's called "adult beginner" it is actually for adult learners, and there is quite a variety of levels and experiences there.

First of all, you need to know basic harmony to understand even a little of how Bach uses harmony - even in his Two-Part Inventions, he uses lots of stuff (passing notes, suspensions, pedal points, modulations, cadences and the like) that require a fairly advanced knowledge.

Harmonizing simple tunes (like hymn tunes) in four-part harmony in the style of Bach chorales is the first step. But you'll soon notice that Bach breaks several rules quite often - but you need to learn the rules before you can break them.

Once you've acquired a good knowledge of harmony, it's easy to harmonize melodies in a manner that sounds good on the piano. If you know what harmony to use, you can do all manner of things to make the accompaniment interesting.

I'm going to be difficult and suggest that if you're trying to build 1 melody + accompanying harmony for piano, that you look instead at Mozart and Clementi sonatas/sonatinas. They write lots of single note melodies accompanied by chord based harmony, they use a lot of the same chord progressions as pop and theatre and other familiar modern-day music, and if you know your chords it's IMHO simpler to understand than Bach.

Bach is more about multiple lines with good voice leading so that the hearer can more easily keep track of the multiple lines. Harmony is very often taught beginning with Bach chorales and four-part chorale-like exercises, but that's assuming the goal of harmony study is to write music with multiple independent parts. That's not quite what you are trying to do.

It's a patently ridiculous thing to say. Harmony underwent plenty of changes and advancements after Bach. Bach is about voice leading, textures, counterpoint melodies and fairly rudimentary harmony. There are many developments in harmony after Bach that Bach's music does not prepare the student for. Saying that somebody composing in the first half of the 1700's is the last word in harmony is doing those composers who advanced harmony forward a great dishonour. Bach was a genius, but he was only the beginning of harmony, not the end.

Excellent advice !!!!!!!!

Bach typically operates according to triadic and chordal intervals of 3rds and 6ths and uses the major and minor scales almost exclusively, and so in that way anticipates the rest of tonal harmony. But his music is fundamentally contrapuntal in nature. He created and used probably dozens of his own rules for good voice leading as well as following the great contrapuntal tradition of the Renaissance including composers like Palestrina.

If you want to understand the underlying harmony, look for cadences and see what intervals are being formed. The progression of Bach's harmony is usually straightforward to understand in classical terms because his pieces (such as preludes and fugues) are so structural as to be almost mathematical (especially the inventions). Typically he moves forward to the dominant key, and/or the relative major/minor, uses deceptive resolutions to the vi, and ends up back in the home key. Keeping track of it is just a bit less straightforward than looking at the left hand chords - his cadences also tend to be brief and the pieces moves right through them (there's a name for this kind of cadence, and it escapes me).

Studying Bach though is certainly one of the most rewarding activities for a composer or just musician in general. Bach was a master of architecture serving glorious music.

There's a book series called "An introduction to the performance of Bach" by Rosalyn Tureck. You might want to go through it. Many Bach pieces are analyzed in it. I didn't have a chance to go through it well, but I'm pretty sure the books will be very helpful for anyone studying Bach.

Bach's harmony was most certainly not rudimentary. He was way more advanced than most other composers to follow in the next 100 years.

Also, yes Bach is about voice leading, but so is harmony. Harmony is not about chords, it's about movement between chords. Movement between chords is all about voice leading. With proper voice leading any chord can follow any other chord, hence if you master counterpoint and voice leading, you are capable of anything when it comes to harmony (tonal harmony to be more precise, some modern harmonic techniques might require something more).

This is not to say that studying harmony is useless. There's no need to reinvent the wheel for every single chord progression when most of them can be learned from harmony text books or scores by earlier composers.

Yes, it was. It was ingeniously implemented, but still rudimentary compared to harmony from the romantic, impressionist and 20th century eras.



No, not "way" more. More than some, less than others. More advanced than Mozart, less than Brahms. A Bach disciple will not hear of it though.

Not sure what Brahms, Impressionism and 20th century has to do with "composers to follow in the next 100 years".

Of course harmony has developed since Bach's time, just saying that it's quite unfair to call it rudimentary when he was well ahead of his time. And it took quite a while for the rest of music history to catch up with him.

Well, that was your figure - I am not bound by your arbitrary number. I stated that there is a lot of music that came afterwards that is more harmonically advanced - and I stand by it.

I'm definitely with Roger on this one, and you people obviously have never studied these works very well. Bach's "experiment" with the 48, for examples, displays the most sophisticated and inventive use of common practice harmony that foreshadows every major musical style for the next 150 years.

1- As just one example, the b-flat minor prelude in the 1st book uses chromatic harmony just like Chopin does. As a matter of fact, it would not surprise me that Chopin got his idea about using chromaticism from Bach as he studied the works assiduously and made all his student study them long before they came back into fashion.

2- The subject in the b minor fugue at the end of the 1st book is a 12-tone tone row as strict as anything Schoenberg wrote.

3-The a minor prelude and fugue from the second book are almost atonal in the style of Stravinsky.

4- Many of the more simply constructed works foreshadow the homophony of the Viennese style

5- Bach's use of applied dominants, tonicization and altered chords became the standard procedures used by all Europe until Debussy.

6- Bach's pattern of modulations, even in the shorter works, became the game plan for the 18th century sonata of Haydn and Mozart, and...

7- Bach manged to frequently do these experiments successfully in the strict contrapuntal form, a feat of mastery that no subsequent composer ever accomplished again after him.

It is ridiculous to say Bach's harmonic style is "rudimentary". If anything, it is far too difficult at its most sophisticated for a beginner.

BTW, Brahms was not an innovator, harmonically or formally. He adopts his harmonic style almost directly from Beethoven with a very conservative use of chromaticism compared to his peers. Who all got it from Bach in the first place. He does nothing innovative with any of the musical forms available to him during his file, going no further with the sonata form than Beethoven.

You obviously think wrongly. I have two degrees on this stuff and I teach it for a living. I'm not a Johnny-come-lately to music theory.

One thing I have learned is that in the classical world, there are the Bach disciples (like you and Roger) who think he is the towering figure above all others, and there are the regular people who see a continuum of development through the history of music. I belong to the latter. I don't dismiss or fail to recognise Bach's enormous role in the development of music, but I don't take the view that he is the be all and end all like some of you disciples do. I'm aware of what Bach did and what his harmony entails. You give me a page of Bach, I'll tell you what's going on with it, no problem - so you don't need to worry that I don't actually understand it on a technical level, even if you think I'm missing the majesty of it.

By the way, I'm not convinced you know much about Brahms if you can dismiss his contribution that easily. No, he is not a Bachian figure, but he did advance music forward. Even if Bach was the biggest single contributor to the development of harmony, it's still a continuum and it has advanced considerably since Bach. I don't know why that is so hard to accept - you'd expect that. The nature of human endeavour is to advance.

Anyway, I'll leave you guys to it because it's clear this thread is for the Bach disciples and not for people like me. But I'm fine with that. I've had my say. I don't need you to come over to my side - and I know you never would. Bach disciples are disciples for life!

Lol, so the definition for Bach disciple is "person who thinks the word rudimentary isn't a good word to describe Bach's harmonic language"?

I think you read quite a bit more into my words than there actually was. But if you want to call me a Bach disciple who thinks he is the be all and end all, then fine. All I can say is that on that point you are definitely wrong.

For the record, I think that there is quite a few composers whose harmonic language cannot be described as rudimentary, but I do not think that any one of them is the be all and end all who is towering above all others.

Hi Ando,

I have 2.5 degrees and have taught at the university level of on and off for years. So there.

You are certainly entitled to your opinion. But let's not pretend you're not going to get an argument for it, please. It's perfectly fine if you think Bach was not a giant, or that he had little influence, but it's strictly your personal viewpoint. I certainly hope you don't tell your students that, because many scholars disagree with you. And I'll say again that the only way to form an opinion like that is because you don't know the output well enough.

Re: Brahms. He and Clara Schumann were the conservative reaction to Liszt and his school. Now, those people were innovators! It makes me think if Liszt's sketch for the symphonie sans tonalité, his development of melodic transformation, and his dissolution of formal structures. Even Chopin, as conservative as he was, made much more out of chromaticism and formal disintegration in his mature works, and very beautifully I might add. Brahms was entirely against that kind of experimentation. Structurally his lieder could have been written by Schubert, his sonatas and symphonies by Beethoven, albeit with better melodies by and large.

If you have any thing to say in contrast to that, I'd like to hear it.

Honestly Greg, why would I discuss anything with you after this offering?



Are you 5 years old or something? I only mentioned my 2 degrees on the subject because you suggested that anyone who disagrees with your viewpoint mustn't be educated enough in Bach's output. My degrees studied Bach in great detail and I mentioned that to dissuade you from the view that ignorance is the only way somebody could disagree with you on this. My mention of my degrees was not to say I am more educated than you or anybody else - only that I am sufficiently educated on the subject and entitled to form an opinion on it that isn't labelled "ignorant". For you to retort with such a childish response like "I have 2.5 degrees, so there" speaks volumes about your character. This isn't the first tangle I've had with you, mind you. I'm sure you don't remember because I imagine tangling with people is a way of life for you.

Anyway, grow up a little and you might have better interactions with people.

I'm pleased to hear it. Rudimentary is a relative term of course, in this instance. That later composers built on what Bach did puts them at an advantage in terms of the variety of harmonic devices available to them. Perhaps rudimentary was a little unfair. I'll say it was less developed in some respects - contrapuntal style not being one of them, Bach is an undisputed master of that.

(Quibble: not exactly true. The fugue theme does use all 12 tones, and my friends and I therefore jokingly called it "the twelve-tone fugue" in college, but some of the tones repeat, so it's not a tone row. (Lack of repetition in the Schoenberg tone row is important, since this is what ensures that no tone is favored over the others.))

-J

Listening to the third movement of the Waldstein Sonata, and then thinking of a Bach Prelude and Fugue, I'm struck by the fact that composers are being distinguished here by the harmony they use, and not by how they use it. In the end all great composers have access to the same chords that every other composer does, and they could all probably anticipate and intuit to some degree whatever was not in their particular 'popular toolbox' at that time in history. Or, just as likely they simply didn't care to use everything they could conceive of, and what they could conceive was influenced by what was around. Even with late 19th and early 20th century 'innovations' like the whole tone scales, pentatonic scales, 12-tone rows, and modes (although it's funny how these things have seemed to be around for thousands of years anyway), one can see the finitude in what is available for all.

To see the greatness of a composer, I think its useful to ponder instead the infinite variety of what is possible with the same common toolbox.