35: Figured Bass

 There’s a system of notating harmonies that’s rather unique to the Baroque era, but which is so frequently used there, and so important to it, that no discussion of theory would ever be complete if we did not cover it. This is the notation of figured bass: “figured,” in the sense of using figures (numbers) to notate the bass. Figured bass was, in a sense, its own notation completely separate from the five lines and four spaces of the staff, which was nearly exclusively the purview of cellists, bassists, harpsichords, and organists. 

Figured bass, fair warning, can be intimidating at first. But, just as with anything else we’ve covered so far, the more you practice reading it, the better you’ll get. 

In this system, we use numbers to indicate intervals above the bass. We stack them, and this is how we build chords. If you can’t stack them, nowadays, it’s perfectly fine to use slashes and write the numbers horizontally. 

Let’s start with the easiest figured bass notation you’ll see— for triads:

  • 5/3 (or just 5 in shorthand) means we have a triad in root position: the bass, and then a third above it, and a fifth above *the bass*— not above the thing that was a third above the bass

  • 6/3 (or just 6 in shorthand) means we have a triad in first inversion: the bass, a fourth above it, and a sixth above it

  • 6/4 (which is always written like this) means we have a triad in second inversion: some note, a fourth above it, and a sixth above it

  • # means we have a Picardy third— a minor chord, whose third should be raised to turn it major 

Sevenths get a little bit more complex, but that’s to be expected since sevenths really do have one more note (and thus one more inversion) than triads:

  • 7/5/3 (almost universally just “7”) means we have a seventh chord in root position

  • 7/6/5 (typically shorthanded to just 6/5) means we have a seventh chord in first inversion

  • 7/4/3 (shorthanded as 4/3) means we have a seventh chord in second inversion 

  • 7/4/2 (shorthanded as 4/2) means we have a seventh chord in third inversion


There are some special symbols that sometimes mean a chord is a dominant seventh or a diminished seventh or a half-diminished seventh, but they’re too inconsistent to be noteworthy enough to mention here. 

Consider this example:

Imagine you’re a harpsichordist in the second half of the 1600s. All you’ll see are a G, a B, a D, and an F, plus 7, 6/5, 4/3, and 4/2. (The other notes on the page, though they exist to you now, would have been imaginary, implied ghosts on the page in Bach’s time.) How you voice the chords is up to you-- you determine which notes go in which voices, with what spacing, and so on. You may or may not come up with in your own mind exactly what’s printed here. If you do, great; if not, wonderful. 


The skill of figured bass is reading “a G, a B, a D, and an F, plus 7, 6/5, 4/3, and 4/2” and realizing-- in real time, just as quickly as you’re processing the letters into words and the words into my complete thoughts on the page-- that this combination of notes and figured bass indications means you should play (in figured bass lingo, we say “realize”) a root position, first inversion, second inversion, and third inversion G7 chord in the four bars. 


Let’s walk through this:

  • You see a G, and an indication 7-- that means G is the bass of some chord, which is indicated by 7 (recall that that’s the root position seventh chord), so you play a G7 in root position

  • You next see a B, and an indication 6/5-- that means B is the bass of some chord, which is indicated by 6/5 (recall that that’s the first-inversion seventh), so you play G7 in first inversion

  • You next see a D, and an indication 4/3-- that means D is the bass of some chord, which is indicated by 4/3 (recall that that’s the second-inversion seventh), so you play G7 in second inversion

  • You next see an F, and an indication 4/2-- that means F is the bass of some chord, which is indicated by 4/2 (recall that that’s the third-inversion seventh), so you play G7 in third inversion


Learning to read figured bass is like learning to read, period-- the first thing you’ll learn is these patterns, analogous to “sight words” when you learn phonics. Especially if you play (or in my case, write) keyboard music often, you’ll get up to speed very quickly as your brain and/or your hands start learning how to voice certain patterns, and so you’ll get a sense of what feels good for certain indications. There’ll be a time where “the cat sat on the mat” will feel hard, and there’ll come a time when you’re in love with Shakespeare, to continue the analogy of learning to read text. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

58: Swell pedals and swell shades

There’s one pedal that we haven’t discussed on the organ because it isn’t one of the “note” pedals—in fact, it’s the only one that doesn’t have a pitch. Instead, the missing pedal is the swell pedal. Look at the body of the organ (the assembly of where all the pipes are, as opposed to the “console”, where the organist sits and plays the instrument—these may or may not be physically close to each other), and you’ll probably see what kind of look like plantation shutters. (If you know where my parish is, then this feature of the organ is very clearly visible on ours. Your local organ might not be so obvious.) These shutters, called “swell shutters/shades,” show or hide the pipes of the organ. Organs have instantaneous dynamic control—the amount of pressure you put on a key dictates how much air flows through the pipes, just like a piano allows you to adjust dynamics on the fly by changing the amount of pressure with which the hammer hits the string(s) given the pressure on the key. Thes...
Read more

54: Trills in the Baroque vs. Classical Periods

Image
Baroque music is known for its incredibly technical and ornamented style. The most common and fundamental of those ornaments is our focus today: the trill. Most simply, a trill is a very fast, repeated alternation of two notes. In the vast majority of cases, those notes are adjacent, but that is not a requirement. Given how fast and common they are, regardless of what you play—whether it’s a string, wind, or keyboard instrument, or your voice—they have a reputation for being quite tiring to play. The period matters when considering a trill. Classical and later composers treat trills, in a sense, in the opposite manner than Baroque composers do. Let me show you two examples: First, the Baroque way of thinking. This is a PAC:   and especially in the Baroque era, when the plucked harpsichord dominated over the hammered piano, it was hard to sustain sounds for long since the sound of the plucking decays quickly. The trill was developed in response, out of a need both to ornam...
Read more