46: Uses of first-inversion triads with the Laudamus Te from the B minor Mass

 

This is the opening phrase of the “Laudamus te” (“We praise you”) from the Gloria of the B minor Mass. It’s the third movement of the Gloria, written for solo violin “obligato” (which means you absolutely must use a solo violin and not replace it, e.g., if your violinist is sick, or you can’t hire one, or their violin is at the luthier, or some other bad thing happened) with a similarly-ranged instrument, a soprano, and continuo:
  

I found a MuseScore file online, and I’ve kept just the melody and the continuo parts because I want to show you something: Can you see how many times the “6” figured bass indication appears?

In the Baroque era, there were many uses of the 6 chord—not to be confused with vi, or with a chord with an added sixth (the former being the relative minor, and the latter being a triad which has added a sixth above its root, in effect turning itself into an inverted seventh chord), and looking at so many “6”s in a row made me think it would be the perfect score to illustrate some of these uses.

1.       We’ve already seen a few articles ago that we can use a 6 chord to make a cadence weaker, for example, turning a PAC into an inverted IAC

2.       You can see this especially clearly in bars 2 and 3—the 6 can be used to reduce or eliminate the size and frequency of leaps in the bassline

3.       You can use a 6 chord (preceded by a root position chord, followed by a second inversion chord, perhaps) as part of a bassline that draws out an arpeggio, i.e., breaks a chord into its constituent parts, rather than sounding them at the same time

4.       You can “move” to or from a 6 chord, from a chord in some other inversion, especially if it’s a dominant chord and you want to delay the settling effect of the resolution to the tonic—buying time, basically

5.       You can use a 6 chord to make a bassline more interesting than if, e.g., with all root-position chords, you’re jumping around by fifths and fourths all the time

6.       You can use a 6 chord for pretty much any reason you would a root-position chord, as long as you know and want the chord to sound weaker than the root-position alternative

7.       You can use 6 chords to create parallel motion by sixths, thirds, or fourths, with another voice

In general, then, you can be as liberal as you like with 6 chords—and, as you can see from the score, Bach did not use them sparingly whatsoever—but be careful with one thing: it is possible that, moving in or out of a 6 chord, to or from a root position chord, you could create a tritone in the bassline. (I’ll leave it to you as an exercise to figure out what would have to be true in order for this to occur.) This is absolutely verboten, but there are easy fixes:

1.       Invert the other chord as well

2.       Don’t invert the chord you want to be a 6 chord

3.       Pick another inversion (6/4 if legal, perhaps? We’ll talk about how to determine that, next)

4.       Pick another chord, of which the note is a member, make sure using it is legal (we’ll talk about how to do this very soon), and if so, use it, and then at the next opportunity, insert a 6

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