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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2008
Music examinations frequently require students to harmonise chorale melodies ‘in the style of J. S. Bach’, but the manner in which the skill is taught generally emphasises the adding of chords below the melody note by note ‘arithmetically’, and may thus fail to develop inner hearing and a sense of overall harmonic direction. Using the system of ‘harmonic sketching’ which she developed originally as an approach to keyboard harmony and described in detail in her book Sketching at the Keyboard, Laura Campbell extended the technique to the harmonisation of chorale melodies, in the process comparing her students' choices of outline harmony with those employed by Bach in four settings of the same chorale. In this article she describes the experiment and comments upon its results, showing how the ‘sketching’ method, which reveals the fundamental ‘harmonic landscape’ of a melody, is an especially valuable tool in the acquisition of written harmony skills.
1 Campbell, L. (1982) Sketching at the Keyboard. London: Stainer & Bell, p. 42.Google Scholar
2 It will be seen, in Fig. 2, that the first-year students produced the smallest number of divergencies from Bach.
3 See the landscaping of a section of a Mozart slow movement in Sketching, p. 65.
4 Sketching, pp. 202–4 (on the inversion of a three-note motif).
5 Introducing Sketching at the Keyboard, ch. 6, on modal landscaping, I asked a group of first-year students what they knew about chord III. One replied ‘We were told to do our damndest to avoid it!’.
6 See Sketching, pp. 160–1.
7 Tovey is said to have commented on the inadequate length of the usual harmony exercise for this purpose.
8 See Sketching, chs. 5 and 6 (on alternation of major and minor chords as opposed to the segregation of them into groups, which leads from modal into diatonic harmonisation).
9 When students play me their landscaping of this chorale I ask them, at the end of phrase three, if they hear the E chord as major or minor. In the first phrase I normally take it for granted, in view of bar 1, that they hear it as major.
The G chord as a minim at the beginning of bar 3 would not preclude hearing the ensuing E chord as major (modal VII–V, with musica ficta raised 3rd), though false relations might be hard to avoid in the detailing.
10 See Sketching, p. 75 (alternative chords of opposite character).
11 See Sketching, p. 112 (on implied chords).