study-music

Bach chorales

Bach’s chorale harmonizations are a reference for everyone studying classical harmony in relation to voice-leading. Harmonizing a chorale melody is a part of UK college final exams.

• Chris Gill. Harmonising Bach Chorales - A short book describing all aspects of pretty regular bach language (at least those 320 chorales written within minor/major modes) - voice-leading, cadences, modulations, chromaticism.

• David Huron. Voice Leading: The Science behind a Musical Art - An accessible scientific explanation for the traditional rules of voice leading, including an account of why listeners find some musical textures more pleasing than others. Introduces the concept of auditory scene and its parsing, explains how ear anatomy leads to masking, cites many other psychoacoustic researches as well as statistical analysis of music corpora.

• ChoraleGUIDE - A concise explanation of the topic

• 20 chorales analyzed in “When in Rome” corpus

• Christopher Czarnecki. J.S. Bach 413 Chorales: Analyzed

Introduction on types of chords in a figured-bass chord types and treatment (pre-Rameau era thinking): https://t.me/keetezh/482

• 370 chorales transposable to C major (press “Typeset” button)

There are many ways to paint chorale scores to reveal their harmony:

• colortriads (broken, an open issue)

• colored noted by Tomonari Motegi

• https://authentic-chorales.com/

• Coconet - the ML model that harmonizes melodies in a style of Bach chorales

• Martin Rohrmeier, Ian Cross. Statistical Properties of Tonal Harmony in Bach’s Chorales

• https://partwriter.com/

• https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.20.26.3/mto.20.26.3.remes.html

• Lori Burns. Bach’s Modal Chorales