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.
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.
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.
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.
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