Day Twelve: Four Voice Reduction of Bach Cello Suite No. 4: Prelude

The purpose of this kind of analysis is to aid in the search for how the musical structures impact us, and then to go for it.

How to benefit from this lesson

Step 1: Listen to the harmonic reduction that I made on Soundcloud. There's enough musical material in a single Bach prelude to write an entire symphony for string orchestra.

Step 2: Download the PDF below to understand how each level of reduction and analysis was created. Each of the notes in the original score is expressed in a slightly different arrangement, allowing you to hear the piece more thoroughly. 

Keep the PDF as a resource guide. Use it for chord progression and understanding how harmony works at the level of an entire piece.

Compiled Pdf Of Bach Cello Suite 4 Prelude Harmonic Analysis

955KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Step 3: Listen to the cello version of the Bach Suite No. 4 with a new set of ears. 

The rest of the article goes into how I created it, what I found most interesting, and how you can use this practice to take your composition and performance where you want it to go. 

Analytical Bach Ground

The Suites for Solo Cello, together with the solo violin Sonatas and Partitas, represent some of the finest music ever composed. They seem to allow a single instrument to transcend its own unitarity and sing in 2 or 3 or 4 different voices at once. 

There are six cello suites in total, and they seem to progress in increasing musical complexity and difficulty, though it's not certain if Bach intended it that way. Each suite has six separate movements and begins with a Prelude. I began learning the first prelude on my instrument when I was 8 years old. The Suite No. 4 Prelude, the object of our focus today, was the last one that I began to include in my study, over 19 years later. 

At first, the music of the Fourth suite prelude appears highly abstract on the page, visually devoid of anything to hold on to except a few contrasting passages here and there. It looks oddly like an etude, and there is a slight temptation to play it that way, unfortunately. I knew that there had to be something deeper. 

In the Fourth prelude, Bach thought of the harmony as not 1 but 4 moving voices, very similar to his Chorales. Harmonically it's the most simple, and most striking. 

In the beginning, all of the notes of the harmony are arpeggiated, and the musician plays the full chord one note at a time. It is through this motion of enormous intervallic leaps and expressing entire triads that the harmonic parameter unfolds within us and moves us in such a powerful way. The performer has to stay connected to the note that the same voice was singing in the previous harmony to connect the motion of the lines horizontally. The voices, just as in the chorale, are determined by their register (the dimension of high and low). Performing a 4 voice harmonic reduction helps reveal so much about how the music articulates, and is an absolutely incredible resource for harmony students. Creating it was an incredible experience.

Through harmonic reduction we're able to make the hidden order of the prelude more apparent. In it, you'll find everything that we've discussed before: cadences, modulation, the progression of chords in different keys. The genius of Bach as a composer comes from his ability to unite all of the elements into a cohesion that leads on a journey with the 12 tones in a way that is reducible in your own living experience. 

What was my method of analysis?

The most important thing to remember is that each piece of music must be analyzed differently. That is the reason in fact why learning the fundamentals about the smallest structures of music is critical to learning harmony: so that your knowledge is fluid and can fill any container you wish. 

By the time I analyzed this piece, I could already play it from memory and had performed in public twice—that's why I was so drawn to working with it in the first place. A musical analysis should begin with hearing the piece, preferably at an internal level. Even if it's just a single chord, you want to hear these different musical structures within you before you set out to label them with a symbol. 

Figure 1. In the case of the prelude, notice how each bar spells out a simple triad or seventh chord. When you look at the score, a perpetual arpeggiation of chord progression is the characteristic that defines this movement. Compositionally, Bach then creates huge contrasts by breaking this flow as we'll see in a bit. 

Figure 2. All I did was arrange the different notes into a single triad, performing a harmonic reduction as we saw in our last post. When re-arranging a composition for analysis you want to be very careful as to not upset the original work's construction. Always keep the voices as they appear in the original. Meaning, if Db is the highest note in the original piece, then make it so that the Db is sung in the highest voice in your reduction. That's just the general rule, but you can break that in 1 or 2 places if you know what you're listening for.

Figure 3. After creating a single condensed reduction from all of the notes in the score I wanted to see how the voices moved horizontally. So I "exploded" or re-arranged that reduction for 4 separate voices.

Noteworthy

Figure 4. In the piece, the moving lines that guide the ear are the outer voices. The first contrast is the Db in the soprano that starts a descending line to the G in bar 9, where the bass then takes over the descent to Bb major, the dominant of the piece.

Harmonic Rhythm

Figure 5. Throughout the beginning, the harmonic rhythm, felt by how often the harmonic impacts are heard, is one chord per bar. This changes at measure 31, the arrival on F minor, where one harmony is felt for two bars. Bach achieves this by breaking free of the arpeggiation briefly, by invoking the melodic parameter and allowing it to take over for a second before resuming back to the forces from the beginning. If our ears don't arrive at the F minor chord then the resolution to the home key of Eb several bars later will not make sense and the need to go on to G minor will have lost its effect.

The way back

Figure 6. After arriving on G minor, Bach moves to more and more remote harmonies and keys through improvisatory interruptions of the arpeggiation which is growing less and less stable. Eventually we find ourselves in Eb minor and hear an even more remote note: Fb. In fact, these two harmonies are already bringing us on our way back home to Eb major (i-bII-V-I cadence).

How to hear music

A world in one.

As I listen to the 4 voices stripped of rhythm and melody I still find it so hard to understand how it's possible that harmony alone could be so moving. The "Bach Fond" track expresses 300 year old notes and tone relations in a new way that still manages to move us deeply.

When listening, to the reduction or to the actual performance of the prelude, pay attention to the phrasing. When you're in the middle of the piece, ask yourself, "Can the piece end here?" If no, then why not? Search for a deeper answer than the music is not in the same key as the beginning. How did you get there? What will you need to resolve to get back home? How does Bach propose to make the journey? Does it work? 

Try skipping over 1 or 2 chords. Does the piece still work as a whole? Why not?

You'll see that all of the answers have to do with experiencing unity of a composition. With a composer like J. S. Bach, every development is organically and economically cohesive with all others. The harmony alone, stripped from the other parameters have everything already contained within itself. 

Musical unity as a goal. 

The purpose of this kind of analysis is to aid in the search for how the musical structures impact us, and then to go for it. If you determine that a chord must arrive with a certain impact so that the ear can connect where it came to where it is going, then go for it with your entire being, go for each musical resolution and impact. That is how you make music alive.

Exercise

Choose any repertoire piece that you're working on and study how the 4 voices move with relation to each other. 

Find the primary moving line based on what is guiding the ear from one musical impact and resolution to the next. 

This post is part of 14 Days of Harmony, a free course for musicians who want to deepen their understanding of harmony, and learn how to develop their connection with sound as a result. You can view the entire course here.

Next day: Analysis and Hearing

Previous day: Harmonic Reduction