Interesting Miles Okazaki video from his JS Bach series

[thelostboss]

Came across this today after listening to some of Miles Okazaki's "Work" series.

Might be of interest to some. Long but interesting throughout

Cheers and Seasons Greetings to all.

[Christian Miller]

Chord symbols always end up looking so complicated for this type of thing....

[spencer096]

Chord symbols always end up looking so complicated for this type of thing....

Agreed…I don’t know how to explain this but I’ve always digested Bach stuff in my head/practice as identifying inversions rather than thinking of slash chords. But the point of this exercise and charting out is very useful…I remember doing this stuff a ton in college, not Bach but my fav was the middle section of Beethoven’s waldstein w all those secondary dominants.

I’m enjoying this vid a lot.

[Christian Miller]

Agreed…I don’t know how to explain this but I’ve always digested Bach stuff in my head/practice as identifying inversions rather than thinking of slash chords. But the point of this exercise and charting out is very useful…I remember doing this stuff a ton in college, not Bach but my fav was the middle section of Beethoven’s waldstein w all those secondary dominants.

I’m enjoying this vid a lot.

TBF there is also a lot of baggage from nineteenth century ways of teaching these things in mainstream classical music education.

If you are interested in finding out more about how JS Bach himself taught his students, including chorale harmony, and what we know about his approach to music, this interview may be of interest:

EDIT: it's funny how many of these baroque specialists seem to have some sort of formative contact with jazz. Peter Croton too.

[spencer096]

I’ll be stranded w family and no guitar the next two days, I’ll dive in.

[Christian Miller]

I’ll be stranded w family and no guitar the next two days, I’ll dive in.

See you in five years ;-) It's a rabbit hole.....

[ccroft]

This is a timely post. Sat a Peter Bernstein class last week. He talked about his chordal approach to improv. He mentioned looking at diff inversions and looking for voice leading opportunities to find lines. Voice leading? Bach Chorales sprang to mind, having multi-tracked a bunch of them some years ago.

I realize it's an over-simplification. I never got around to the analyzing, or for that matter the understanding part :)

Also, I really like Okazaki.

[Tal_175]

It's interesting how much of it is just back cycling from temporary targets using inversions of your basic I IV (or ii) V or II7 (V/V) V I's. Of course with good voice leading.

[Christian Miller]

It's interesting how much of it is just back cycling from temporary targets using inversions of your basic I IV (or ii) V or II7 (V/V) V I's. Of course with good voice leading.

Yeah in functional terms, a lot of it is standard cadences, P4 sequences, secondary dominants and so on. Which is like saying he uses major and minor scales. It's not untrue?

Viewing Bach and music of his era in general in terms of being chords and Roman numeral functions is a modern imposition. I’m not sure if useless, but it’s less use for understanding the essence of Bach’s music than it might be for more modern music, because Bach's harmony doesn't have so many options as that of later composers. It needs a granular understanding.

Of course, if you go and do a mainstream 'Bach harmony' class at university today you will be using modern theory in this way. Bach himself didn't teach that way, because none of that stuff had been invented yet.

I don’t feel we need to be super purist and antiquarian about this music, but I think we need to understand the ethos of the era, and from what I have learned so far, for Bach and the music of his era, it’s voice leading first. Rather than having chords that are then voice-led, the chords result from the voice leading. And primarily the bass and the counterpoint it makes with the melody especially in a chorale harmonisation.

A lot of this seems to have been based on a repertoire of contrapuntal moves. For example, rather than thinking of a cadence going V-I, you start to view it as a bunch of classic simple counter melodies that work together and can be ornamented in certain ways. No one was better at decorating simple ideas that our JS.

We still do that quite a bit in jazz. Think of guide tones around the cycle for example. But we think of those as coming from chord progressions, rather than being what makes chords.

I think this ‘voice leading first’ concept is hard for us jazz players to get their heads around. (Tbf most modern musicians.) We are so used to conceptualising things as chord progressions and functions. But it’s not the baroque understanding of music…

How does that relate to jazz? Not sure yet. But I think more than it might first appear…

Get back to you in a decade or so lol.

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[ragman1]

Well, Johann never went to Berklee, that's for sure.

[Christian Miller]

Here's a sheet from am 1811 edition of JC Kittel's book on Chorale harmonisation. Kittel was one of JS Bach's last students, and Remes indicates that to his knowledge this practice resembles Bach's own - he had students write multiple basslines for one chorale melody.

The basslines are figured to help with realising this into 4 (or more!) voices.



To ground this in jazz guitar for a minute lol - it strikes me that there's far worse things I could do with my time than write out 8 basslines for a given jazz standard melody. Then reharmonise appropriately.
There's a page like this for All the Things in Dariusz Terefenko's (reasonably priced) jazz theory book.

[Navdeep_Singh]

the simplest voice leading of triads in a ii-V-I-VI I can think of


1.IV major triad (any inversion or root position, doesn’t matter): IV is synonymous with the ii chord.

2.Flatten the P5 of the above IV major chord. (Gives you the rootless V7 guide tones, plus a 9th)

3.Go back to the old P5 in #1. The P5 of the IV chord is actually the root of the I chord. Form a I triad (any inversion or root position).

4. Take the R of the I chord from #3, move it UP a half step. Becomes the M3 of the VI chord. Form a VI triad (any inversion or even root position).

Seamless voice leading, instant ii-V7-I-VI progression, no Berklee College of Music tuition and room and board required, just a shmuck fiddling with his guitar on Christmas day, listening to the Bach Sacred Cantatas.

[Tal_175]

Yeah in functional terms, a lot of it is standard cadences, P4 sequences, secondary dominants and so on. Which is like saying he uses major and minor scales. It's not untrue?

Viewing Bach and music of his era in general in terms of being chords and Roman numeral functions is a modern imposition. I’m not sure if useless, but it’s less use for understanding the essence of Bach’s music than it might be for more modern music, because Bach's harmony doesn't have so many options as that of later composers. It needs a granular understanding.

It sort of depends on what one is trying to achieve with this sort of analysis. If the goal is to learn how to compose chorales, I agree roman numeral analysis will give a limited insight into how to write each voice. It is helpful in terms of providing an understanding of the harmonic mechanisms that govern the voice-leading choices though for someone who is trained in modern harmony.

In my case, I am not interested in composing chorales or improvising in the Baroque style. My interest in analyzing Bach's music is strictly to gain new insights into modern harmony, if nothing else as a way of undertanding the origin story of vertical harmony. This helps me develop a more generalized notion of harmony that fits how I hear music better than the strictly vertical interpretation. It also gives me new ideas and freedom in chord-melody and comping contexts.

Vertical harmony can be seen as emerging from counterpoint but the opposite is also true. If you learn lots of voicings and devices to increase harmonic rhythm like passing chords, inner lines, approach chords, then counterpoint emerges. Chords become horizontal moving lines. So Bach's music provides a foundation for the emergence of counterpoint from moving chords, even though he didn't think of harmony that way.

[Tal_175]

Here's a sheet from am 1811 edition of JC Kittel's book on Chorale harmonisation. Kittel was one of JS Bach's last students, and Remes indicates that to his knowledge this practice resembles Bach's own - he had students write multiple basslines for one chorale melody.

The basslines are figured to help with realising this into 4 (or more!) voices.

To ground this in jazz guitar for a minute lol - it strikes me that there's far worse things I could do with my time than write out 8 basslines for a given jazz standard melody. Then reharmonise appropriately.
There's a page like this for All the Things in Dariusz Terefenko's (reasonably priced) jazz theory book.

Your good friend* Mark Levine shows a version of this starting on p.318 of his theory book. He writes a bassline for a melody by thinking the bass motion alone (chromatic and P4's) then fills the middle voices to create vertical chords by ear. What emerges out of this is voice-lead 4 part harmony.

*JGO inside joke

[Christian Miller]

Your good friend* Mark Levine shows a version of this starting on p.318 of his theory book. He writes a bassline for a melody by thinking the bass motion alone (chromatic and P4's) then fills the middle voices to create vertical chords by ear. What emerges out of this is voice-lead 4 part harmony.

*JGO inside joke

It’s a standard reharmonisation technique. Doing 8+ of them in a row would force you to come up with some interesting takes so you aren’t just repeating the same thing. As you can see in the chorale basslines I posted. They start obvious and get pretty wild!


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[Christian Miller]

It sort of depends on what one is trying to achieve with this sort of analysis. If the goal is to learn how to compose chorales, I agree roman numeral analysis will give a limited insight into how to write each voice. It is helpful in terms of providing an understanding of the harmonic mechanisms that govern the voice-leading choices though for someone who is trained in modern harmony.

In my case, I am not interested in composing chorales or improvising in the Baroque style. My interest in analyzing Bach's music is strictly to gain new insights into modern harmony, if nothing else as a way of undertanding the origin story of vertical harmony. This helps me develop a more generalized notion of harmony that fits how I hear music better than the strictly vertical interpretation. It also gives me new ideas and freedom in chord-melody and comping contexts.

Vertical harmony can be seen as emerging from counterpoint but the opposite is also true.

It's interesting to look at things from a different perspective. Ultimately, jazz musicians are most often working from a pre-set chord progression. It's hard to see how the old way of doing is relevant right away - but I would say that it does broaden the understanding

If you learn lots of voicings and devices to increase harmonic rhythm like passing chords, inner lines, approach chords, then counterpoint emerges. Chords become horizontal moving lines. So Bach's music provides a foundation for the emergence of counterpoint from moving chords, even though he didn't think of harmony that way.

idk I feel Bach could serve as a good study of how to join II V I's together, but I don't feel that's a unique quality of his music lol.

Just playing through Bach's music certainly offers an education. It has the benefit of being great music, and at this point I can't be bothered to play stuff I don't like the sound of. It's always a technical challenge, so inner stuff from that. developing muscle memory in playing this music is playing multi voice useful in itself. As is hearing contrapuntally in the more polyphonic pieces and so on. All great stuff for developing your solo guitar chops. I think it has done a lot for my playing.

Anyway, I don't think learning more about historical approaches is in tension with playing more modern music at all. There was this lady called Nadia Boulanger you may have heard of, for instance. Working on historical styles has long been considered valuable for developing technique, and if its Bach's voice leading you are interested in, writing stylistic chorale harmonisations of your own has generally been considered part of that training. OTOH Bach is a bad model for that haha, too weird. They don't really teach his style in a ‘Bach’ chorale class but a tidied up version of it.

One advantage is there is very much a right and wrong to it, which is always helpful for a learning activity. (Original music of course doesn’t work like that.)

But I wasn't even really talking about that really.

A practical and tangential point - I don't think the guitar is ultimately well suited to SATB style harmony. You can certainly learn a lot by playing four voice music, but it never seems natural to the instrument, a least not to me. Bach's school was very much four parts + oriented, a lot of the Germans were. But on the guitar this almost always sounds choppy. So I've tended to get more out of the Italian approach which was often - but not always - based around three voices - string trio. One of the troublesome aspects of modern music pedagogy is that it views 3 voice harmony as an imperfect version of 4 voice harmony - somewhat downstream of the German approach. In fact, there's no reason to view it this way if you build up from two voices.