![]() Later on, we'll be figuring out how to compose a harmony for a melody, but right now, the goal is to determine what it actually is right now. Our goal is to figure out what the harmony is. It has harmony, in a sense, but it doesn't have explicit chords (for the most part). But first, we need to establish what we're actually trying to do. But how do you assign chords to melodies? Most of the harmony really has to be horizontal. Keyboard percussion is known for having very little sustain and very harsh attacks, so we don't hear much in the way of simultaneous pitches sounding. His arrangement of Contrapunctus VIII, which is a triple fugue (it has three subjects, of which Example 9.74 is only the first), features the keyboard percussion section in its exposition, and I personally think it sounds really cool. Bach didn't specify the instrumentation of the Art of Fugue, leaving the pieces as more abstract, and when I was in the MIT Wind Ensemble, our assistant director (renowned tubist Ken Amis) arranged the Art of Fugue for the ensemble. The situation is different on the piano, but there, Beethoven in his Moonlight Sonata, of which we analyzed the first movement in Example 9.59, still opted for arpeggios for stylistic reasons, using the dark and resonant low tones of the piano as a harmonic bass line, something the harpsichord is not built to do.īut Contrapunctus VIII is not a harpsichord piece (not that this should stop people from playing it on a harpsichord if they so choose!). ![]() There's a good reason for that, I think: Bach wrote the Well-Tempered Clavier to be played on a harpsichord, and harpsichords have fairly rough and bright attacks when you first play a note, so if you play many notes at once, you don't really get their sounds to combine harmonically very well, unlike with voices or various other instruments. In that prelude, each chord was a five-note arpeggio, and we interpreted each arpeggio as a chord, but technically speaking there were never more than three notes being held at any time (the two lowest notes of each harmony were held, but the upper three were not). The trivial example of horizontal thinking is Bach's Prelude 1 in C major from the Well-Tempered Clavier Book I, which we analyzed in Example 9.58. We need to think not only vertically - many notes at the same time are written vertically on the staff - but also horizontally, as melody. But we've already seen, for example in Section 9.2, that the notes happening at any given time aren't necessarily the harmony: there may be a suspension or passing tone, just as an example, or a pedal tone, or what have you, and it's not so simple to figure out what's in the chord and what isn't. A lot of the time, this makes sense, because some instrument is actually playing many notes at the same time, or an ensemble is collectively playing many notes at the same time. When we talk about chords, we're generally referring to many notes sounding at the same time. Well, hey, that's what we're going to talk about in this section! Section Contents
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