Day Eight: The Bach Chorale Exercise
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.
Studying the chorales of Bach will develop your harmonic creativity.
A chorale is a musical form that dates back to the mid 1500s. In its basic principle, a chorale is a harmonization of a hymn-tune. The harmonization itself can be done in a number of different ways. The chorale as a musical form continued well into the 20th and 21st centuries, and is going strong today, composers still use them. They are timeless. Chorales appear in symphonies and contemporary albums, and in both vocal and instrumental music.
The Bach Chorale
The chorales of Johann Sebastian Bach are short pieces originally meant to be sung, and written out for four voices. The chorales are pieces where the hymn-tune is sung in the highest voice, the soprano. The harmonization is articulated by the three lower voices, each of which forms horizontal voices that are built in function of the main melody.
On the whole, the Bach chorales are typically in bar form (AA'B) where the first big phrase is repeated, and then the second phrase expands harmonically, and concludes the piece. The structure of the hymn-tune or the chorale melody gives structure to the chorale itself, so there are plenty of chorales by Bach that don't follow the AAB schema, but it's pretty common. Harmonically, in each chorale Bach remains in one key, and progresses to a single point that is the "furthest away" from the central key before concluding and bringing us back home. There exist longer and more complex chorales, which I'll link to at the end, but the general principle of a chorale as a harmonization of a melody always holds true.
In the middle of his life, in the 1720s, Bach worked at a Lutheran church in Leipzig, and part of his duty was to produce music for the Sunday service. Every week, Bach wrote and produced a new cantata—a large musical form consisting of music for instrumentalists, choirs, and soloists, that typically articulated sacred texts. The chorale is just one movement in the cantata. As part of the greater whole, chorales were not too musically "complicated" because they were meant to be sight-read by the congregation as well as performed by the musicians. To write the chorale, Bach would take a melody from the old Lutheran hymn books and harmonize them.
The reason that we study his efforts over 300 years later is because they still remain one of the best collections of real and masterful music that we can study as students of harmony. Bach's craftsmanship makes it easy for us to use his Chorales for our purposes without sacrificing any of the musical directness.
Often in theory we grow familiar with chord progressions that remain in isolation. (How many variations of I-ii-vi-V-I in the different keys have we studied in harmony?) The chorales of Bach make it possible for us to breathe so much life into the diatonic chord progressions between the cadences.
When heard slowly and without the text, the chorale harmonies are beautiful. The beauty of the chorale comes from their “perfect” construction, respecting the limitations of the human voice, allowing each note its own room to resonate while being part of a cohesive whole. Each one offers us a complete masterclass on cadences, chord progressions, and melodic harmonization.
The "source code" of Western musical harmony.
Analysis: What do I look for in a Bach chorale?
First of all, you can find the chorales in this book on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3fznfxi
You can just head to IMSLP.
Or you can download the free Bach chorale worksheet and work alongside this article now.
When I open any one of them up, there are generally two phases that I work in, and this is a broad simplification. I walk you through my full thought process later in this article. Basically it's a theory phase where I work with paper, pencil, and my voice, and then a practice phrase where I try to integrate everything and play it on the piano.
But take this split lightly. The trick and secret is to understand that these two phases are really one.
The goal of the theory phase is a harmonic analysis. Since most Bach chorales are tonal, I use Roman numerals to label each chord in the chorale as I hear it. Throughout, I'm guided by the melodic phrase and the cadences. If there's a chord that I don't know how to label, I skip it and find the stable harmony and then work backward. The main point to take away here is compositionally, the progression of harmony is always guided by the melody. The purpose of labeling it is to show how I hear it.
The goal of the practice phase is to find the point of maximum expansion for the whole piece. In better words, the climax. Where does Bach finally make the turn to come home? To answer this I have to be open enough to turn off the logic that I used in the harmonic analysis and just go based on what I feel and hear on intuition. No one can tell you what you hear, but chances are that we can live at the high point in exactly the same place because of the reality that music is structured sound relations. Practice it this way and you'll hear music differently.
Seek Timeless Truths
Like all intellectual endeavors, music theory can be fashionable. Everybody today is interested in negative harmony and figured bass. In the 1900s people were interested in dodecaphony. My recommendation: don't seek what's hot or what you think you should know based on others. Instead, seek timeless truths.
The dimensions that the intervals open to us are timeless. Knowledge of the overtones is timeless. We've seen that even the structure of musical cadences is timeless from the historical view, suggesting a look at something deeper about human consciousness.
"Things that we understand create Silence. The things we don't understand create Emotion."1
Our goal is to set up foundations. Setting yourself up this way will allow you to view the more complicated musical structures as variations of those fundamental musical truths that are so apparent in the music of the masters.
In undergrad I studied theory and harmony with Reza Vali and took his graduate level course called Repertoire and Analysis for composers and conductors. In the course, he taught me this technique for learning the chorales that I'm sharing with you. He said the chorales of Bach are like looking at the "source code" of Western harmony.
I should preface by saying that I don't recommend listening to recordings of the chorales that you haven't made yourself. The recordings that are available don't capture the sound that we are looking for, and very often go for the "sound" of the Baroque church and that is not why we study them. This technique allows you to take the music out of the context that they were originally conceived and repurpose them for our contemporary ears/understanding.
The Technique for Practicing Bach Chorales
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