Baroque improvisation books

[VKat]

Actually one thing I'm noticing is how the Fonte bears a striking resemblance to the melodic outline of an awful lot of bop lines.

i.e. - in the key of C, C# to Bb going into Dm. I think they also use the B to Ab sometimes in C even back then.

That's a great observation - right in the tradition of Charlie Parker who would probably think that Bach played Bop but he only couldn't come up with a proper name for it

In fact, there are two things to mention in this respect:
1. I once had a dialog (unsuccessful) on the All About Jazz forum with a man who tried to prove that Charlie Parker played nothing but Bach! (I didn't object actually, the friction was on another account.)
2. As I remember Charlie Parker resisted to accept the "Bop" label at least publically and insisted that "...it was _just music_".

Another thought that came on my mind after our recent discussion is this: "Why are you (myself) so desperate about authenticity of the Baroque-style improvisation? If you are so sure you cannot correctly realize every detail of the style so that Handel (I avoid Bach for now ) would exclaim: "Bravo, that's a great menuet!" - why to worry at all? Do your best and try your best. Anyway, there would not be too many who will notice mistakes (and to those who do notice them you can always answer: "I'm not so stupid to replicate Baroque masters word for word! I want to be original!" ). However don't pretend you are composing a truely authentic piece - be modest and admit you may make those mistakes."

By the way, there is a good comparison that illustrates my point. Any native English speaker can notice that I'm not: I'm lacking idiomatic colloquial skills, I'm unsure on the use of "the" or "a" for the most part (though I know the rule but it doesn't help!), I often repeat some words (like "however"), making other mistakes, etc. However () most of the native English speakers (I hope!) can understand my comments provided I fill them up (comments, not speakers) with some reasonable meaning.

[VKat]

Actually one thing I'm noticing is how the Fonte bears a striking resemblance to the melodic outline of an awful lot of bop lines.

i.e. - in the key of C, C# to Bb going into Dm. I think they also use the B to Ab sometimes in C even back then.

By the way could you please (not without deviating from the subject of course):
- explain this Bebop idiom to me
- if possible throw in a few more most typical Bebop idioms here (I'm sure there are not too many of them anyway)

What is this C# - down to Bb ? In what context is it and what chord degrees does it represent over the accompanying harmony? You mention going into Dm - from where? I suspect you are talking of the Bb down to A - ^some scale degree into ^5 resolution over Dm. No? Then C# belongs to what harmony preceding Dm? Or is it there to create tension over Dm ? (which would be strange since that's a leading tone over Dm that would normally resolve upwards; however in Jazz 7-1 resolutions must be rare since they are considered "vanilla" unless it's the bass line).

[christianm77]

Gosh that's a whole load of stuff. I'll try and get on it.

Re: minuets - well why learn to write or improvise any historic style?

Why? It develops something, sure. But most of all, you want to.

[Takemitsu]

third of A7 in D min, b^6 in Dmin.

[christianm77]

Yeah I think it's the way that a Fonte is defined by Gjerdingen as having a (in the key of C) a

C# bass rising to D
with the melody going Bb-A-G-F

Followed by

B rising to C
with the melody going A-G-F-E - or -
Ab-G-F-E

Now in the Minuet worksheet with Mozart examples you posted, the C# and the Bb can be in the melody line with the bass going A D (of course) or G D (tasty.)

Well how many bebop 'ii-V-I' lines do that? The answer, quite a lot of them. You can simply decorate that basic chromaticism with scalic movement within the key, and what you get is, well, bebop lines.

Take the 'Donna Lee' line for example - going to D

C# E G A Bb C Bb A G F

So that's the first half of a Fonte. The C here - could that be the use of the classical melodic minor scale to avoid the jump of the aug 2nd - Bb C?

18th century musician would even use the Ab when going to C. This line Ab-G-F-E in C is extremely common in Bebop. As is the Bb-A-G-F line....

(It's often embellished with notes like Bb - would these have been viable scale mutations back in the 18th century, anyone?)

The first example I noticed of this a while back is in bars 9-10 of Bach's Fugue for Solo Violin (often played on Guitar) - not sure the BWV number. This is clearly a Fonte. Although Bach does start on an E minor chord...

The thing that bakes my noodle, is that both these moves are common in bebop and 18th century music, but they are not common in the swing era players I have transcribed. Swing players will AFIAK use the natural 6th when going to both minor and major chords. Isn't that interesting?

I do know that Parker played a lot of classical sax etudes.

Now what I like about this is the idea of decorating basic lines with embellishments rather than thing in terms of scales or arpeggios - you are in fact using scale to embellish the chord tones, but the chord tones are actually a melody - something set that also happens to describe a harmony. This is where I think a quasi partimenti approach could actually be pretty useful for jazz teaching.

One difference is that bop musicians will often play the leap C# to Ab - I don't think this would have been permitted in the Neapolitan style because they didn't like the jump of an augmented second in melodies. Although JS Bach seems to have been cool with it.

[christianm77]

Well here is attempt #2. Again, it's not improvisation, but the ground plan of the piece cam quickly, and then I did a lot of tinkering around with the ornamentation of the modules. In terms of which modules I used, similar to the last, although I add a cadence after the initial Do-Re-Mi

I think to truly improvise a Minuet I need to learn more modules and get better at elaborating the melody as I play. At the moment any minuet I improvised would have this basic ground plan, and not much going on melodically.



Here is the bare bones of the thing sketched out. Hopefully you can see my process, which I found to be pretty easy. I'm not saying this is necessarily a good piece of music, but I found the process of writing it much easier than I have writing comparable pieces using other approaches. It took me a minute or two to sketch out the basic skeleton:



BTW - looking at this piece I do realise it misses at least one of the important characteristics of a Minuet, but actually it's quite hard for me to fulfil that characteristic without more vocabulary from the Gjerdingen book.

[VKat]

I signed off abruptly from this thread in early August because I realized I had (and still have) very superficial understanding of the whole matter.
For the last few months I've done... well, another round of quite superficial study of strict counterpoint, modal polyphony and Partimento school and now I settled on an opinion that I better forget about strict connection of the hard rules with any humble attempts to improvise in the early music styles for now.
Too many variables.
I also realized that Partimenti is the way to go but it can take years before common schemata is internalized.
It only confirms once again that there are no shortcuts.

By the way after going through species counterpoint, tonal harmony and Partimento (as thoroughly as I could) I picked up a few "Guitar Harmony" books and found them to be of a very shallow level. I came to complete understanding that there is no such thing as "Guitar Harmony".
Well, you can still apply Harmony to guitar
And yes! - You have to consider the guitar's limitations when implementing schemata on guitar. Since for Partimento the standard instrument of realization is keyboard more work should be planned when transferring the whole thing to guitar.
In this situation it would be total failure to neglect the authentic guitar (and of course lute) works of that period which is similar in effect to inventing the wheel.

[christianm77]

Weiss Passacaglia?