It's interesting to also observe that in this chorale, Bach breaks the textbook rule "no diminished/augmented melodic intervals", not once, not twice, but three times! Even ignoring this, textbooks will say to properly treat these intervals by following-up with a step in the opposite direction. Bach breaks this rule too (bass, bars 3-4)! Of course, he had good reasons to do these things. For example, a student would easily "fix" the offending bass in bars 3-4 by lifting the penultimate note to a Bb, and rewriting the tenor part accordingly. However, what was more important to Bach here (compared to having an awkward interval to sing), is to maintain melodic independence, achieved by avoiding similar motion. This bass line naturally arises as a consequence. At the end of the day, music making, even chorale harmonisation, is an art, not a science - it is therefore important to not only understand the "rules", but also why these rules exist, so one could go on to break them when the opportunity presents itself! As a side note, the cantata this chorale is from (BWV 78, Jesu, der du meine Seele) is amongst the absolute best Bach has written. Every single movement (this chorale included!) are absolute gems and represent some of the best works of his middle period.
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A pleasure. Much more at www.mmcourses.co.uk including details of our online courses and of our exciting Maestros programme. If you value this channel and would like to help us continue to share and develop the content please consider supporting us as a level 1 Maestro by clicking here ru-vid.com/show-UC8yI8P7Zi3yYTsypera-IQgjoin Alternatively you can express your support for the channel by clicking on the Super Thanks button beneath any of our videos. Thank you.
Thank you. I really enjoy these videos - they take me back to A-level music and degree days (many years ago). I’d love to see one of you expert analyses of #265 (Riemenschneider) Was main Gott will, das. Particularly phrase 4 - diminished 7ths moving effortlessly all over the place.
A pleasure. Much more at www.mmcourses.co.uk including details of our online courses and of our exciting Maestros programme. If you value this channel and would like to help us continue to share and develop the content please consider supporting us as a level 1 Maestro by clicking here ru-vid.com/show-UC8yI8P7Zi3yYTsypera-IQgjoin Alternatively you can express your support for the channel by clicking on the Super Thanks button beneath any of our videos. Thank you.
First time I’ve heard this naming: “two 7 b”. This chord I would have called ii7b5, Am7b5 or A half diminished. Can you tell me more about two 7 b, please? 🙏🏻
That’s very kind. Key issues:- play with the finger legato as connected as possible. listen carefully to the tone and always aim for a beautiful sound balance the texture in favour of the melody at the top shape each phrase eg crescendo/ diminuendo to and from the emotional climaxes
I watched this one year ago and was completely lost. Today I stopped the video and found the chorale in my Bach Chorale book and tried to analyze the harmony. I have to admit that I have trouble notating suspensions, but I'll take that up with my music teacher this week. Quite good timing since I'm trying to do CPE Bachs' cadences, and I have questions about why suspensions work. I have to thank you and Alex for having the nicest and most informative music channel on You Tube. I've been in a depression since I've spent the last 15 years as a climate activist but also fighting the fossil fuel lobby from western Switzerland. I even have the knives in the back to show for my efforts. We've decided that having weekly music lessons is preferable over a hospital stay. I'll ask this week if joining Maestros wouldn't also be a good treatment. Your videos have also shown their worth, my music teacher is mightily impressed with your examples. Merci beaucoup.
My edition of this chorale is in A minor - it’s the chorale 37 (p. 9) of the Bach Riemenshneider “371 Harmonized Chorales and 69 Chorale Melodies with figured bass”. Great video … very informative, as usual !!!
Regarding measure 2. The chord in beat 2 also highlights a very common improvisation technique of filling in the interval of the third with passing notes. Note how this in the soprano and then imitated at 6th in the tenor for the chord on beat 3. To best understand harmony and Bach's choral harmonization is to understand some basic improvisation techniques. Measure 4 also shows a nice voice exchange between tenor and soprano. The tritone leap from beat 4, 3rd measure is quite expressive and can be seen on a slightly larger scale can be viewed as the leap forming a compound interval in the bass - Eflat leap to A forms a tritone and then the movement to G a nice minor 6th which then moved to a very firm consonance the perfect fifth with the D in the bass. To do this on the first beat of measure 4 would have robbed some of the expressivity you find with such chorales in G minor. A far more complex example of Bach's use of 7th chords - arpeggiated - and worth showcasing are parts of the Great Organ Prelude and Fugue in G minor. The Fugue has some passages where the fugal theme is presented over arpeggiated 7th chords in 2 voices. A very smart move by Bach to reduce texture if using arpeggiated seventh chords as there will be an implied 2 part counterpoint with these arpeggiations anyway - creating a far more richer sound just with 2 voices. A simpler example that doesn't employ arpeggiated seventh chords as much but uses the same idea of implied counterpoint within a voice to add richness to a 2 voice texture is the E minor Prelude from WTC I.
A pleasure. Much more at www.mmcourses.co.uk including details of our online courses and of our exciting Maestros programme. If you value this channel and would like to help us continue to share and develop the content please consider supporting us as a level 1 Maestro by clicking here ru-vid.com/show-UC8yI8P7Zi3yYTsypera-IQgjoin Alternatively you can express your support for the channel by clicking on the Super Thanks button beneath any of our videos. Thank you.
I'm reading Bach by CF Williams from the Master Musician series. First published 1900, this reprint 1938. A fascinating mind to delve into. Thanks for these gems that help understand why certain notes are chosen over others. I'd love to do the course when finances permit. Little by little...
Second bar second beat, you cannot see it as a iv7 because you will have 5th parallels(soprano tenor). So the only way you can justify it is as a ii6/5
A pleasure. Much more at www.mmcourses.co.uk including details of our online courses and of our exciting Maestros programme. If you value this channel and would like to help us continue to share and develop the content please consider supporting us as a level 1 Maestro by clicking here ru-vid.com/show-UC8yI8P7Zi3yYTsypera-IQgjoin Alternatively you can express your support for the channel by clicking on the Super Thanks button beneath any of our videos. Thank you.
Very interesting thank you ; as usual with knowledge, the more you learn, the more you realize the depth of your ignorance ! Sorry to come to you with a vocabulary question not really musical... but I have to manage music and english at the same time : For the second phrase you say "Running bass"... in jazz, where the tempo can eventually be much faster, they speak about 'Walking bass" !!! what the hell ???😅
That’s absolutely true about knowledge. Running bass is when the bass moves quicker by step. Walking bass is when the bass keeps moving on the beat often outlining notes of the prevailing chord or using inessential notes between them.
I made two comments in one of your videos celebrating 200,000 subscribers. There are whiteboards with music staffs already incorporated. This would mean partial unemployment for Gareth, but would make the notes slightly clearer. If he is too stubborn to change, so be it. Could you also include a camera view of the Maestros' hands to help us with fingering? This would be an invaluable tool. Merci beaucoup to both Alex for working tirelessly behind the scenes and to Gareth.
Is it just me, or would that have sounded perfectly cadenced without the final chord? That last one sounds like an afterthought. Actually, now that I look at it, that penultimate chord in the second phrase is EXACTLY the same chord as the final chord of phrase 1. Which probably is what reinforced that impression - the ear hears the same chord voicing twice and so hears it the same way twice. But instead of staying on that gloomy chord the second time, it moves unexpectedly then to the major.DF#A. Quite possibly this is to show a glimmer of hope. Wonder what the words are.... OK, bit of a confusion in my search, but the last verse, fpr phrase 2, is "Laß mich ja verzagen nicht;" Or, "Let me despair - not". So the despair is the gloomy chord, but its immediately negated "not" with the major chord.
It’s interesting to observe these details and to wonder at what they signify. Of course Bach inherited these melodies and they’re not all great melodies. He makes the best of them.
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Quite often you can geht more insights in why Bach uses dissonances or soecial chords by observing the associated Text. F. i. Sein is often coupled with dissonances.
Nice work!!! Just one question. When I look for the Bach Chorale 29 I find another score, not the one in your video. Is that a different catalogue numbering?
@@MusicMattersGB When I was younger and studied chorales I became fascinated with Bach and his overall approach to compositions and when I’ve even played in a jazz setting I’ve used distinctive Bach phrases to see who’s really listening . I’ve often been asked what was that you played in you solo it sounds familiar to which I replied oh so you was listening to me when I played a little bit of Bach . I chuckle to my self while they are trying to remember what it was that I actually played . Such is the beauty of the KKappelmeister’s music
so in the key of G minor a C minor 7 chord could be reached without the 7 having to be prepared ? And does it have to be resolved downwards by a step? In baroque times that is^ thanks for all the content
Is there a hierarchy in keys of songs? How composers select which key to write in and why some keys are more ''popular''? Some say different keys have different emotions but in 12tet every key must be equal. A video about selecting key of a song/piece would be great.
Some certainly feel that certain keys carry certain emotions. Of course, as you suggest, in a system of equal temperament the intervals are all equal. There’s not really a hierarchy of keys but the relationship between one key and another is the important ingredient eg does a song modulate to a closely related key or does it modulate to a more distant/ unexpected key?
Having used major and minor 7th chords in jazz, blues and folk, I would never have "felt" the 7th chords in this piece. It all sounds so seriously "minor" chord in its totality. (But I'm not a technical musician).
It is, dare I say it, slightly clumsy that he jumps the bass line by a diminished 5th between bars 3 and 4, then continues outside the interval, but then, slightly wayward augmented / diminished intervals are an occupational hazard for the Bach bass. A rising subdominant to leading tone augmented 4th going on to the tonic is pretty much stylistic for Bach.
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Why did Bach keep the first two tones a tonic, instead of going the V-way? Think it also has to do with the fact that it is a prayer. "Insisting" on the I-chord in the beginning adds a character of urgency and imploration wich hardly could have been achieved with a profane V-I-V.
I was wondering Gareth the interval from first inversion chord and the dominant inversion f sharp is a diminished Fourth. Is it allowed and if yes why? Bach use these intervals frequently. Thank you
it's just different SOUNDS. If you had to listen to songs with same movement or chord progression..it's going to get boring after a while. Becuase KEYS are just PITCH Imagine writing hundredth songs sounding the same.lol You can alter ANY CHORD degree into any chord as you wish.. if you knew DIFFERENT SCALES. Im on the GUITAR... example after the C min7 chord Im going to play Ab min Db dim F7 G min Then C dim F#7 A min D7 into G min... if you borrow from G melodic min it's A dor b2 ( possible A min chord) I could had also play A7 D7 into G min. It's just sounds... But if you're familar with tritone SUBS Most people knows it from counting or Vamping over the V chord. F7 , B dim as the n6 chord of Bb MAJOR. it's a reverse process.. I play from C dim (dor b5/ Bb harmonic MAJOR or dor #4/G harmonic min) C dim to F# 7. I could had play F#7 into B Maj or B maj7 ( N6 chord of Bb as B maj or B min) try playing B dim F#7 D7 into G min or Db dim Ab7 F7 into Bb MAJOR They're just GUIDES. There's different scales. You can mix/blend them different ways. Example...If you use the FULL dim H/W you can stack MAJOR. min7 . DOMINANT, or dim chords every b3 interval VAMPING over the 2, 4, b6, 7 chord degree F#....C......Eb.......A..yes??? NOTICE the A min , dominant or Dim ???
Apparently also known as BWV 78 or possibly Chorale 369 or 37, though all those I found on RU-vid had a slightly different score than what you show here. Is this common? Or did Bach simply harmonize the same chorale in a number of different ways?
The latter-he has at least three different harmonizations of Hassler's passion chorale (Herzlich tut mich verlangen, or O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden) that I can think of from different works, for example.
I'd like to offer a diffent approach to the viib chord on the first beat of bar 4. My approach to that chord would be reading it as rootless V7 in second inversion, so bar 4 is a V7 - I - V progression. Just as you said, V - I - V would be kind of boring, so using V7 in second inversion as substitution for the simple V chord adds a nice variation to it.
Of course there’s a very close relationship between VII and V7 but a rootless V7 is in fact a VII. VIIb is much more commonly used in Bach than many realise but of course it’s not that far away from V7
It would not be good to jump to a second inversion (V7) from an inversion of another chord (IVb); but since there is no D (root) here, it wouldn1 really be a second inversion of V, but VIIb
A pleasure. Much more at www.mmcourses.co.uk including details of our online courses and of our exciting Maestros programme. If you value this channel and would like to help us continue to share and develop the content please consider supporting us as a level 1 Maestro by clicking here ru-vid.com/show-UC8yI8P7Zi3yYTsypera-IQgjoin Alternatively you can express your support for the channel by clicking on the Super Thanks button beneath any of our videos. Thank you.
A pleasure. Much more at www.mmcourses.co.uk including details of our online courses and of our exciting Maestros programme. If you value this channel and would like to help us continue to share and develop the content please consider supporting us as a level 1 Maestro by clicking here ru-vid.com/show-UC8yI8P7Zi3yYTsypera-IQgjoin Alternatively you can express your support for the channel by clicking on the Super Thanks button beneath any of our videos. Thank you.
