The greatest keyboard exercise ever�.

[uhoh7]

[quote=uhoh7

 

OK Here it is:

I"m sure my description here won"t be perfect, but should be good enough for you to easily get the gist.

 

We will have two basic forms: major and minor. To begin the left hand will simply climb up and down the bass note of the scale. In a minor the 6th and 7th bass notes are sharp going up.

 

Major Scale ©

 

Hi,

 

I don"t know where this is from, but some of the figuring isn"t right. The sharp six in chord two, and the the sharp 5 in chord seven, for example. The only accidental needed is in bar 11. The ordering of some figures is a bit confusing, but I think it"s trying to show something else.

 

Good post though! The way harmony was taught many, many years ago was from a practical perspective, and these kind of things are a reminder of that.

 

Thanks

 

Thanks so much for your reply. I am very far from an expert, but I'm trying hard to learn. The scale is from Fenaroli, one of several RO varients, considered maybe the most "advanced", although the RO is basic knowledge, and it's expected a good player would deviate, knowing the "rules".

 

As you probably know, bass figures can vary, and Bach I think has some strange ones once in awhile--misleading. The sharp 6 in chord two: may refer to Bb, which would be the natural 6 to D, no? But not in the C scale. So that # in this case is telling us to play the "white" B, or the harmonic 6 (in D minor). The 5 in chord 7 has a line through it, which means it's flat/diminished. Charlie Parker would approve

 

The RO chords are just quirky enough to make the right hand "positions" aka inversions very interesting on the 2 chord and some others. To learn them major/minor in 12 keys is not "hard", but....even a good jazz player would need a couple weeks I think to attain some fluency. Then the question arises: what do I do with it? The baroque cadences, and cadence like moves to modulate, which often use suspensions are the way forward, it appears to me. Eventually we'd combine these to link schema like the Romanesca, Prinner, Do-si-Do, Fonte, Ponte, and Monte...and pretty soon we'd have....OMG a Minuet a very widely used basic form that has many more flavors than those we know from the French Court (seriously uncool after 1789) The minuet could be a fundamental outline for larger works, like a study. It escaped the guillotine.

 

Tonite I stumbled on the best tutorial I've yet seen for any player interested in learning how keyboard players improvised in say....1740. This guy has read the new books. Many videos about playing baroque are mired in a bunch of "Schenkerian" language which is using 20th chord theory, what some call a "rusty canon", to parse more subtle and very active tonal movements. "Here we go to the sub-mediant". They did not think that way...so this guy does not use the 20th century lingo, though he does use some of the 21st century lingo like schema/archtype (Gjerdingen "Classic Turn of Phrase") which has been "invented" to describe authentically the processes of music creation up to about 1880, developed in the early Baroque and that evolved to those "lead sheets", Partimenti, where figures are sparse or absent.

 

Bla bla...sorry. But this fellow shows us for real:

 

[video:youtube]

 

What good is this in 2021? For me, the more sparse voices (compared to block chords and chord theory e.g. ii V7 I) distil the various disonances, and the movements in and out of them to a sharp clarity, less muddy to my battered ears. I really was never a big "classical" fan, but I've been seduced by this approach.

 

For color, I'm listening to the autobiography of Casanova, which, believe it or not, is considered one of the best pictures of the crazy world these keyboard giants entertained. Lockdowns and quarantines all the time, he's been having an affair with a young woman who pretends to be a Castrati

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Ah, ok - I very much doubt that it"s original to Fenaroli, as it makes no sense!. The figures always conform to the key, with accidentals appearing when notes are foreign to the key signature- as you would expect. The only legitimate accidental is in bar 11. A slash through a figure means that it is to be raised, not flattened.

 

The difficulty with the example that I quoted, is that the figures don"t reflect what"s happening in the music and vice versa.

 

It"s odd, as the wiki article on the rule of octave gives the same figures, though that example is in G major, so it"s easier to see how that mistake could be made - it"s still redundant though. The mistake with the slash 5 figure is repeated there also. It appears that the example that I quoted is a direct transposition of the wiki one, mistakes and all!

[uhoh7]

Ah, ok - I very much doubt that it"s original to Fenaroli, as it makes no sense!. The figures always conform to the key, with accidentals appearing when notes are foreign to the key signature- as you would expect. The only legitimate accidental is in bar 11. A slash through a figure means that it is to be raised, not flattened.

 

The difficulty with the example that I quoted, is that the figures don"t reflect what"s happening in the music and vice versa.

 

It"s odd, as the wiki article on the rule of octave gives the same figures, though that example is in G major, so it"s easier to see how that mistake could be made - it"s still redundant though. The mistake with the slash 5 figure is repeated there also. It appears that the example that I quoted is a direct transposition of the wiki one, mistakes and all!

 

At least the notation in the bar is clear. Are figures you mention a "mistake"? Whose mistake? Figured bass notation is more standardized today. It's well known that "figures" varied much more in 1700 for two reasons: a single convention was not easily agreed, and copy mistakes were common.

 

Should original figures be "corrected"? My impression is players who are using figured bass live are well aware of the inconsistencies in manuscripts, and can usually tell the difference between a copy mistake and a difference in convention.

 

It's a good question in this case, and I'll try to find out which.

 

Here is one more video from Professor Michael Koch in Essen which shows a path and goal consitent with methods of the Neapolitan Conservatories as we understand them today. Under the guidence of Maestro Durante he starts with simple diminuations of 7-1 partimenti, brings in the RO, modulating schema like the "Fonte", cadences of the time, and concludes by realizing one of Durante's student partimenti using the tools he's demonstated: showing what an expert player in 1750 could do with one of these cryptic partimenti basses.

 

[video:youtube]

 

Koch has a more recent video on Scarlatti, who of course was steeped in all this stuff, his father being a leading maestro in Naples. It is extremely well done, and my conception of Scarlatti is much better informed after watching it.

 

[video:youtube]

 

These are some of the best keyboard videos I have ever seen, honestly.