Chapters in the description box! The materials you see in the video + a bunch of some extras around early Scriabin's style are available on my Patreon site: www.patreon.com/posts/materials-to-86024125?Link&
Your channel is a one of a kind gem. Thank you so much for going into details on how you proceed instead of just posting the final product. Can't wait to be more fluent in classical improvisation to get to romantic stuff. Not to mention how spot on and marvelous your realizations sound, thank you!
Hey Rubén, thanks so much! Obviously the algo didn't show it to you because it's hidden under the iceberg, but there's an instructive presentation by Derek Remes on late romantic french style: th-cam.com/video/OiPjb3vnxf8/w-d-xo.html
Wow that’s real nice of the YT algorithm to answer my question, if partimento can be applied to late romantic harmony. Great video and love the examples here, now I really wonder if I can apply it to middle-late Scriabin as well as the kind of harmonic structures you would find in the so called French impressionists, jazz/Kapustin, Bartok, etc, or give me another tool to use while improvising at least. I imagine I’ll have to prooactively switch between different approaches because I honestly don’t see how this works against the mystic and octatonic heavy late Scriabin and his tendency for transposition there, same with the weirder Debussy or Ravel.
Hey yo, thanks a lot! Well, in general I'm actually sceptic myself if this is applicable to early Scriabin. The Partimento on the topics featured in that video are pretty basic as well for early Scriabin and I'm not sure if this is fully adequate - I'd say: no. There is too much to cover structurally and even describing early Scriabin in terms of mere "chords" or "voicings" is no longer adequate and becomes more problematic the later you go... this was more like an experiment. I teach Bartok and Debussy usually in theory class and I don't use any thorough bass approach to this. But you're totally right about Scriabin's "tendency for transposition" and he definetely was very conservative about this aspect as it can even be traced in his latest works (let's say the two poèms op. 71) as well as conservative concepts of form. "Switch between different approaches": yeah! What's definetely a thing in approaching any style is finding the "building blocks" and "idiomatic moves"... E.g. Messiaen's style can be approached like this as he very obviously conceptualized his music as he even has some sort of Partimento-like schemata like the "effet de vitrail" and other moves that can be practiced and transposed! Cheers and thanks for commenting
@@en-blanc-et-noirI’m curious how you teach Debussy and Bartok’s music. I’ve heard lots of talk about set theory and while it is fascinating and definitely more effective than trying to use roman numeral analysis, I’m more concerned with using ideas that can be adapted to improvisation. What I come up with at the moment is mostly off of intuition and things I’ve picked up after learning their music for some time, and some form of voice leading that is more dependent on where my hands are positioned than being concerned with the usual no parallel octaves and 5ths rule although I will subconsciously keep that in mind and target what you could call chord tones or non chord tones depending on the context and sound I want. While it is fun I’m not satisfied with the general lack of refinement, I’d love to make things more rhythmically interesting and structurally sound. I didn’t know that about Messiaen’s music, I’ll see if I can get a hold of his preludes including the one from 1964 or the later sketches of birds. From the one sketch I did go through so far I did notice a similar use of transposition to late Scriabin but I wasn’t aware of figured bass or partimenti at the time.
Well, teaching theory and teaching improvisation is different so I'd approach these composers differently in comparison to my class teaching. Set theory: absolutely a good tool to study for a while, I worked with that text book by Strauss which is very good. Although it is a valuable tool to analyse music I doubt that it helps with improvisation - which requires much more pragmatic approaches. A colleague of mine teaches atonal improvsiation in the style of e.g. Berg or Bartok and I find the outcomings very convincing and he is not at all a set-guy. Of course he applies concepts like octatonism but he approaches it in very specific ways: using specific chord/"Klang"-combinations and certain sub-sets instead of the entire collection to make it more "improvisable". Definetely: Check out Messiaen's "mon language musicale", if you're lucky you'll find an english translation online
Thank you for creating and sharing this brilliant, helpful and entertaining video. I hope you’ll consider producing further explorations of ‘romantic partimento’. I’ve tried picking apart certain bits of Chopin, eg his fantasie in f minor, for examples of schemata, and found it fascinating - there are a number of what seem to me as identifiable fonte, monte, ponte and fenaroli sections. I’d be so interested to know whether you think Brahms and Rachmaninoff used similar, recurrent partimento approaches. Thank you again...
You're welcome! Yeah I guess I'm gonna show some more of this. I'm always thinking of making a Brahms video, to me he's one of the most interesting composers but he's not as easy to grasp as some of the other "classics" (e.g. Chopin or Rach)... There's probably reasons why Nahre Sol didn't make a "how to sound like Brahms" vid up to this day...
Thank you for the incredible fountain of knowledge that is your channel. Can you do a video on Chopin's E minor Prelude from a partimento perspective? My harmony teacher said, and I'm paraphrasing "that is all chromatic motion, and there is nothing to explain". :)
Hey man, thanks SO much! About that Shopan prelude: excellent idea and I already got some more Chopin examples in the shelf I could present in that same video. I never took a closer look at the e minor piece in recent years but from how I remember it I bet that it's a chromatisized version of a common diatonic sequencial scaffolding - I assume a Fauxbourdon with suspensions. At the moment I have no time to work on a tutorial video but I guess I could start working on it in late July or early August. So stay tuned!
Sahin, are you still interested in that E minor Prelude? I just scrolled a bit through yt and realized that there are already a bunch of analysis videos on this piece, some of them shady, some of them not bad at all (Frederick Viner)...
@@en-blanc-et-noir tried to watch Frederick Viner's video. It has too much story-telling for my taste. I couldn't concentrate and watch it to the end, but I'll try again later. I have seen a few analyses of the piece but they pretty much amount to "it's all chromatic descent". So I am still interested in your take :) But I would understand if you just suggest a few videos by other people and don't spend time on this one.
Well, I do have a soft spot for russian romanticism and the silver age period in general, but I got a significant preference for the Moscow scene instead of the Petersburgian… so if I had to choose between Lyadow and Arensky I‘d go for the latter😅
May I ask a few questions? Were many composers outside of Italy, and occasionally France, trained in _partimenti_ ? When I looked up some exercises done by Schubert, Beethoven (based on Albrechtsberger's and Seyfried's own respective treatises), and Tchaikovsky (according to his own harmonic treatise), I don't find any evidence of them learning _partimenti_ , just thoroughbass and counterpoint exercises. Further, doesn't learning Roman Numeral Analysis make it harder for people composing in the style of 18th and 19th century classical music?
Hey Louis, thanks for watching! :D Of course you can - I just dunno if I could answer them properly. 1) Composers outside of Italy: depends on specific local traditions in Europe, Munich would be an example for a maintaining Partimento tradition up to the late romantics and there's more! 2) Schubert /Beethoven: Vienna was a place were Italian traditions have been maintained e.g. by Czerny, Salieri and especially E.A. Förster. As far as I know Beethoven even subscribed to a Fenaroli-edition but I cannot tell if he really possessed it in the end let alone using it for teaching purposes There's a few articles by Felix Diergarten on Viennese Partimento tradition, reach out for him on Academia.edu! Tschaikowsky - and let's say most Russian composers / educators of the conservatories - have a strong connections to the German systematical tradition of the Leipzig conservatory... those methods lead directly back to Marx / Richter which can be named as downright Partimento opponents. Roman Numerals: I'd say some in the community are actually overdoing it a little with anti-RN-policy which is just driving people nuts :DDD There's of course as well the opposite (outside the bubble)... Basically: the one thing (RN) was primarily a tool invented to analyze music, the other - Partimento - is primarily a tool to learn composition (different things!). Unfolding this problem here in a descent manner would crash this comment section and I could agonize about this for ever...:D And the least that I want is an RN-war in the comment section, in my opinion there's actually nothing to fight about: just pic the things from each that you find useful. Cheers! :D
@@1685Violin In Germany there was a desire for systematization already in the early 18th century, you can find traces of that in designated partimento-rooted sources like Händel's Partimenti and Heinichens "Generalbass in der Composition" . In the 19th century however this became something like an "ideology" as natural sciences + their methodology and Hegel's idea of historical progress became somewhat of an overall paradigm that influenced german theory heavily. Richter and Marx in that context formed a tradition on their own: E.F. Richter tried to replace thorough bass methods by a strict systematical apporach based on RN - charts of chords and chord combinations, modulations etc. Broken down: this systematical approach teaches PRINCIPLES instead of EXAMPLES (what is salient in Partimento) rejecting the itialian approaches as "primitive" and "unprogressive". A.B. Marx was sailing in a similar stream: he's the inventor of modern "Formenlehre" which as well tried to apply "scienctific" methods to the field of composition, that he however - and inconsistently - considerd as actually not teachable as in his own thinking originality is a thing that cannot be trained but just can be studied in model "masterworks". Both were influential teachers at the Leipzig Conservatory which became a most influencial institution and model for many other institutions that copied their concept of structure, teaching methods and literally books - for example the conservatories in St. Petersburg and Moscow. There is a huge and brilliant article on this whole field by L. Holtmeier titled "Feindliche Übernahme" ("hostile takeover") that IMO everybody interested in Partimento and thoery in general should know, it's a pity that there is no english translation...
Does the book by Arensky sort of "prove" that Rachmaninoff and other late Russian romantics were at least trained in the general partimento system? Is there more evidence that the Moscow conservatory used this system, e.g.? I feel like Tchaikovsky's harmony book was mostly roman numerals, was it not? I can't exactly remember. Also, I'd love to see a similar video about a Rachmaninoff style improv, other than the meme in this one ;)
Good question... First of all I'd say there is no "general Partimento system" at all, such a thing did never exist. Already in the Naples era Partimento was a pretty different thing depending on the teacher: e.g. Sala or Durante, that's very different approaches although both of that counts as "Partimento". There is a lot of evidence supporting the assumption that figured bass was at the center of Russian harmony training in the 19th century: the book by Tschaikowsky is based on figured bass BUT as well heavily relies on roman numerals. So I wanna give you the following disclaimer: From my own research I can tell you, the invention of the 19th century academia textbook marks the end of the Partimento era - and Tschaikowsky's book is actually pretty much a condensed rip off of the german methods taught in the Leipzig Conservatory. His teacher Zaremba was a student of Adolf Bernhard Marx, and that pretty much sums it up: Marx was an outright opponnent of the old italian methods and accused them of being primitive, unsystematic and outdated. There is as well a Harmony book by Rimsky Korsakow that became an influential Russian textbook: as well a rip off of German 19th century methods from the Leipzig, especially the one by Ernst Friedrich Richter which as well is absolutely an anti-Partimento approach, he basically is the inventor of the modern roman numerals system, of chord charts, of the approach of measuring chords by their intervallic content (instead of their syntactical/practical use, as in Partimento) and all the stuff that leads away from pracitcal use in general. Now you might legitimately ask: "HOW did they learn it then, when their books are shit?" Obviously some of the Russian teachers, such as Arensky or the legendary Taneyew must have been exquisite, inventive and creative pedagoges of their splendid craft and most of their knowledge has been conveyed in face-to-face-teaching and not in books - thus just like in the Partimento era. I'm planning to do a video on some earliest Scriabin pieces that show a lot of schematic traces that he probably borrowed from Taneyews teaching, it's on my bucket list and it'll be among one of the upcoming en blanc et noir videos. Until then you can read Gjerdingen's interesting article on the Russians and their "Gebrauchsformulas"... drop me a line per mail and I'll send it over. Cheers dude! :D
@@en-blanc-et-noir wow, thanks for the in-depth reply! Yeah, I mostly meant a general figured based harmony teaching system by partimento, at least "here's a bass line, let's think how the 'voices' above could sound". It's interesting some of the Germans were SO hostile to this way of teaching, was it just because it was old? That's also very interesting about Tchaikovsky. I'm a total amateur, only minored in music in undergraduate, but I remember buying his harmony book and being very disappointed with it. If only videos like yours were a thing 10 years ago, maybe I would have stuck with it more!
The mentioned Arensky ("1000 exercises"), Czerny "Generalbassstudien", E.A. Förster "Practische Beispiele", Kalkbrenner "Harmonielehre"... But these are of course no textbooks in the modern sense and require actually a certain expierience with sources. If you are a student that is used to conservatory training in musictheory class you'll be pretty disappointed. But curiousity is the first step into this stuff...
@@en-blanc-et-noir Thanks for the quick response. Could one maybe get a beginners guide on how to realize the arensky exercises , maybe in exchange for a patreon subscription? Or should they be realized like typical partimenti? But the diminutions easily found on the internet seem very baroque to me . should one instead just look for diminutions/figurations in romantic style and early impressionistic music and collect them or realize them according to your romantic videos ?
Arensky is definetely meant to be realized in 4-voice block chords. This type of "figurative" or decorated realizations like one knows e.g. from Durante died out in the 19th century. All this due to the fact that the idea of generic figurative structures that defined the baroque era and still partly the classical just vanished for asthetical reasons (individuality, originality). If you wanna see something similar to the Durante approach but applied to 19th century music: watch my current video on the Chopin waltz, there I show motives on 7-1's, 5-1's and cadences that can be learned like Durantes "motivi" and that is more or less a common practice strategy in jazz music: internalizing licks on certain progression-modules (e.g. 2-5-1) by transposition.
Chapters in the description box! The materials you see in the video + a bunch of some extras around early Scriabin's style are available on my Patreon site: www.patreon.com/posts/materials-to-86024125?Link&
This is just so-o-o cool. Your explanations of the process make me want to pick up my pencil and start applying/adapting this to/in my own language.
Your channel is a one of a kind gem. Thank you so much for going into details on how you proceed instead of just posting the final product. Can't wait to be more fluent in classical improvisation to get to romantic stuff. Not to mention how spot on and marvelous your realizations sound, thank you!
7:02 hauntingly beautiful
i actually started weeping. it sort of reminded me of the end of chopin’s op. 17 no. 4
@9:53 "Is' doch Geil!" :D Ich glaube so sehr zugestimmt habe ich einem Satz in einem TH-cam Video noch nie! Einfach Geiles Video, danke!
:DDD Vielen Dank, Luis!
Awesome!!!
Thoroughly enjoyable-even for a layman like me. I adore Scriabin and appreciate the education.👍
Many thanks!
This is truly wonderful, thanks so much
THX Fergus!
Your channel is amazing. I'm very happy that I have found such a treasure !
:)
This is so cool! Thank you for sharing!
Thanks for watching! :D
Another brilliant video🤯...loved the jest content🤣
Amazing video, like your other videos. I love them! thank you for the high quality informative content
Thanks so much, Ehsan!
Super nice musikbeispiele, gerne mehr! :D
ha! Cool, dass du vorbei schaust und schön, dass es dir gefällt :)
5:58 the right hand score on bar 3 should be EFD right?
nice proposition !
This is by far the best video (if not the only one) I have found linking the partimento to the late 19th and early 20th century period. Thanks!
Hey Rubén, thanks so much! Obviously the algo didn't show it to you because it's hidden under the iceberg, but there's an instructive presentation by Derek Remes on late romantic french style:
th-cam.com/video/OiPjb3vnxf8/w-d-xo.html
Great content, thanks!!
Thank you very much!
Sublime video! The compositional explanation and your piano playing are both top notch!
Thanks a lot! :D
Love your music
Do you give also private lessons?
Thank you Jürgen...
yes I do, if you're interested you can drop me a line per mail. Yo'll find the address on the channel-page!
absolutely loving your channel
haha, thank you… love that comment😂
Wow that’s real nice of the YT algorithm to answer my question, if partimento can be applied to late romantic harmony. Great video and love the examples here, now I really wonder if I can apply it to middle-late Scriabin as well as the kind of harmonic structures you would find in the so called French impressionists, jazz/Kapustin, Bartok, etc, or give me another tool to use while improvising at least. I imagine I’ll have to prooactively switch between different approaches because I honestly don’t see how this works against the mystic and octatonic heavy late Scriabin and his tendency for transposition there, same with the weirder Debussy or Ravel.
Hey yo, thanks a lot! Well, in general I'm actually sceptic myself if this is applicable to early Scriabin. The Partimento on the topics featured in that video are pretty basic as well for early Scriabin and I'm not sure if this is fully adequate - I'd say: no. There is too much to cover structurally and even describing early Scriabin in terms of mere "chords" or "voicings" is no longer adequate and becomes more problematic the later you go... this was more like an experiment. I teach Bartok and Debussy usually in theory class and I don't use any thorough bass approach to this. But you're totally right about Scriabin's "tendency for transposition" and he definetely was very conservative about this aspect as it can even be traced in his latest works (let's say the two poèms op. 71) as well as conservative concepts of form.
"Switch between different approaches": yeah!
What's definetely a thing in approaching any style is finding the "building blocks" and "idiomatic moves"... E.g. Messiaen's style can be approached like this as he very obviously conceptualized his music as he even has some sort of Partimento-like schemata like the "effet de vitrail" and other moves that can be practiced and transposed!
Cheers and thanks for commenting
@@en-blanc-et-noirI’m curious how you teach Debussy and Bartok’s music. I’ve heard lots of talk about set theory and while it is fascinating and definitely more effective than trying to use roman numeral analysis, I’m more concerned with using ideas that can be adapted to improvisation. What I come up with at the moment is mostly off of intuition and things I’ve picked up after learning their music for some time, and some form of voice leading that is more dependent on where my hands are positioned than being concerned with the usual no parallel octaves and 5ths rule although I will subconsciously keep that in mind and target what you could call chord tones or non chord tones depending on the context and sound I want. While it is fun I’m not satisfied with the general lack of refinement, I’d love to make things more rhythmically interesting and structurally sound.
I didn’t know that about Messiaen’s music, I’ll see if I can get a hold of his preludes including the one from 1964 or the later sketches of birds. From the one sketch I did go through so far I did notice a similar use of transposition to late Scriabin but I wasn’t aware of figured bass or partimenti at the time.
Well, teaching theory and teaching improvisation is different so I'd approach these composers differently in comparison to my class teaching.
Set theory: absolutely a good tool to study for a while, I worked with that text book by Strauss which is very good. Although it is a valuable tool to analyse music I doubt that it helps with improvisation - which requires much more pragmatic approaches. A colleague of mine teaches atonal improvsiation in the style of e.g. Berg or Bartok and I find the outcomings very convincing and he is not at all a set-guy. Of course he applies concepts like octatonism but he approaches it in very specific ways: using specific chord/"Klang"-combinations and certain sub-sets instead of the entire collection to make it more "improvisable".
Definetely: Check out Messiaen's "mon language musicale", if you're lucky you'll find an english translation online
Thank you for creating and sharing this brilliant, helpful and entertaining video. I hope you’ll consider producing further explorations of ‘romantic partimento’. I’ve tried picking apart certain bits of Chopin, eg his fantasie in f minor, for examples of schemata, and found it fascinating - there are a number of what seem to me as identifiable fonte, monte, ponte and fenaroli sections. I’d be so interested to know whether you think Brahms and Rachmaninoff used similar, recurrent partimento approaches. Thank you again...
You're welcome! Yeah I guess I'm gonna show some more of this. I'm always thinking of making a Brahms video, to me he's one of the most interesting composers but he's not as easy to grasp as some of the other "classics" (e.g. Chopin or Rach)... There's probably reasons why Nahre Sol didn't make a "how to sound like Brahms" vid up to this day...
Echt cool mann!
Thank you for the incredible fountain of knowledge that is your channel. Can you do a video on Chopin's E minor Prelude from a partimento perspective? My harmony teacher said, and I'm paraphrasing "that is all chromatic motion, and there is nothing to explain". :)
Hey man, thanks SO much! About that Shopan prelude: excellent idea and I already got some more Chopin examples in the shelf I could present in that same video. I never took a closer look at the e minor piece in recent years but from how I remember it I bet that it's a chromatisized version of a common diatonic sequencial scaffolding - I assume a Fauxbourdon with suspensions. At the moment I have no time to work on a tutorial video but I guess I could start working on it in late July or early August. So stay tuned!
Sahin, are you still interested in that E minor Prelude? I just scrolled a bit through yt and realized that there are already a bunch of analysis videos on this piece, some of them shady, some of them not bad at all (Frederick Viner)...
@@en-blanc-et-noir tried to watch Frederick Viner's video. It has too much story-telling for my taste. I couldn't concentrate and watch it to the end, but I'll try again later. I have seen a few analyses of the piece but they pretty much amount to "it's all chromatic descent". So I am still interested in your take :) But I would understand if you just suggest a few videos by other people and don't spend time on this one.
🔥🔥🔥
Marvelous
What do you think about Anatoly Liadov?
Well, I do have a soft spot for russian romanticism and the silver age period in general, but I got a significant preference for the Moscow scene instead of the Petersburgian… so if I had to choose between Lyadow and Arensky I‘d go for the latter😅
May I ask a few questions? Were many composers outside of Italy, and occasionally France, trained in _partimenti_ ? When I looked up some exercises done by Schubert, Beethoven (based on Albrechtsberger's and Seyfried's own respective treatises), and Tchaikovsky (according to his own harmonic treatise), I don't find any evidence of them learning _partimenti_ , just thoroughbass and counterpoint exercises.
Further, doesn't learning Roman Numeral Analysis make it harder for people composing in the style of 18th and 19th century classical music?
Hey Louis, thanks for watching! :D Of course you can - I just dunno if I could answer them properly. 1) Composers outside of Italy: depends on specific local traditions in Europe, Munich would be an example for a maintaining Partimento tradition up to the late romantics and there's more! 2) Schubert /Beethoven: Vienna was a place were Italian traditions have been maintained e.g. by Czerny, Salieri and especially E.A. Förster. As far as I know Beethoven even subscribed to a Fenaroli-edition but I cannot tell if he really possessed it in the end let alone using it for teaching purposes There's a few articles by Felix Diergarten on Viennese Partimento tradition, reach out for him on Academia.edu! Tschaikowsky - and let's say most Russian composers / educators of the conservatories - have a strong connections to the German systematical tradition of the Leipzig conservatory... those methods lead directly back to Marx / Richter which can be named as downright Partimento opponents.
Roman Numerals: I'd say some in the community are actually overdoing it a little with anti-RN-policy which is just driving people nuts :DDD There's of course as well the opposite (outside the bubble)... Basically: the one thing (RN) was primarily a tool invented to analyze music, the other - Partimento - is primarily a tool to learn composition (different things!). Unfolding this problem here in a descent manner would crash this comment section and I could agonize about this for ever...:D And the least that I want is an RN-war in the comment section, in my opinion there's actually nothing to fight about: just pic the things from each that you find useful. Cheers! :D
@@en-blanc-et-noir What was the German systematical tradition and who were Marx and Richter?
@@1685Violin In Germany there was a desire for systematization already in the early 18th century, you can find traces of that in designated partimento-rooted sources like Händel's Partimenti and Heinichens "Generalbass in der Composition" . In the 19th century however this became something like an "ideology" as natural sciences + their methodology and Hegel's idea of historical progress became somewhat of an overall paradigm that influenced german theory heavily. Richter and Marx in that context formed a tradition on their own: E.F. Richter tried to replace thorough bass methods by a strict systematical apporach based on RN - charts of chords and chord combinations, modulations etc. Broken down: this systematical approach teaches PRINCIPLES instead of EXAMPLES (what is salient in Partimento) rejecting the itialian approaches as "primitive" and "unprogressive". A.B. Marx was sailing in a similar stream: he's the inventor of modern "Formenlehre" which as well tried to apply "scienctific" methods to the field of composition, that he however - and inconsistently - considerd as actually not teachable as in his own thinking originality is a thing that cannot be trained but just can be studied in model "masterworks". Both were influential teachers at the Leipzig Conservatory which became a most influencial institution and model for many other institutions that copied their concept of structure, teaching methods and literally books - for example the conservatories in St. Petersburg and Moscow.
There is a huge and brilliant article on this whole field by L. Holtmeier titled "Feindliche Übernahme" ("hostile takeover") that IMO everybody interested in Partimento and thoery in general should know, it's a pity that there is no english translation...
Amazing!!!!
Quality content
:D
Bravissimo. Thanks
thank you very much!
Can you put the materials for this video on the patreon? Please 🙏
will do in July!
Hey Erick, materials are online on my Patreon now. You find the link in the description box!
@@en-blanc-et-noir woooho!! Thanks a lot! I'll check them in the afternoon, you're the best❤️!
Does the book by Arensky sort of "prove" that Rachmaninoff and other late Russian romantics were at least trained in the general partimento system? Is there more evidence that the Moscow conservatory used this system, e.g.? I feel like Tchaikovsky's harmony book was mostly roman numerals, was it not? I can't exactly remember.
Also, I'd love to see a similar video about a Rachmaninoff style improv, other than the meme in this one ;)
Good question... First of all I'd say there is no "general Partimento system" at all, such a thing did never exist. Already in the Naples era Partimento was a pretty different thing depending on the teacher: e.g. Sala or Durante, that's very different approaches although both of that counts as "Partimento". There is a lot of evidence supporting the assumption that figured bass was at the center of Russian harmony training in the 19th century: the book by Tschaikowsky is based on figured bass BUT as well heavily relies on roman numerals. So I wanna give you the following disclaimer: From my own research I can tell you, the invention of the 19th century academia textbook marks the end of the Partimento era - and Tschaikowsky's book is actually pretty much a condensed rip off of the german methods taught in the Leipzig Conservatory. His teacher Zaremba was a student of Adolf Bernhard Marx, and that pretty much sums it up: Marx was an outright opponnent of the old italian methods and accused them of being primitive, unsystematic and outdated. There is as well a Harmony book by Rimsky Korsakow that became an influential Russian textbook: as well a rip off of German 19th century methods from the Leipzig, especially the one by Ernst Friedrich Richter which as well is absolutely an anti-Partimento approach, he basically is the inventor of the modern roman numerals system, of chord charts, of the approach of measuring chords by their intervallic content (instead of their syntactical/practical use, as in Partimento) and all the stuff that leads away from pracitcal use in general. Now you might legitimately ask: "HOW did they learn it then, when their books are shit?" Obviously some of the Russian teachers, such as Arensky or the legendary Taneyew must have been exquisite, inventive and creative pedagoges of their splendid craft and most of their knowledge has been conveyed in face-to-face-teaching and not in books - thus just like in the Partimento era. I'm planning to do a video on some earliest Scriabin pieces that show a lot of schematic traces that he probably borrowed from Taneyews teaching, it's on my bucket list and it'll be among one of the upcoming en blanc et noir videos.
Until then you can read Gjerdingen's interesting article on the Russians and their "Gebrauchsformulas"... drop me a line per mail and I'll send it over.
Cheers dude! :D
@@en-blanc-et-noir wow, thanks for the in-depth reply! Yeah, I mostly meant a general figured based harmony teaching system by partimento, at least "here's a bass line, let's think how the 'voices' above could sound". It's interesting some of the Germans were SO hostile to this way of teaching, was it just because it was old?
That's also very interesting about Tchaikovsky. I'm a total amateur, only minored in music in undergraduate, but I remember buying his harmony book and being very disappointed with it. If only videos like yours were a thing 10 years ago, maybe I would have stuck with it more!
You mentioned resource that teach up to date 19th century harmony , which specifically can you recommend ? Thx in advance
The mentioned Arensky ("1000 exercises"), Czerny "Generalbassstudien", E.A. Förster "Practische Beispiele", Kalkbrenner "Harmonielehre"... But these are of course no textbooks in the modern sense and require actually a certain expierience with sources. If you are a student that is used to conservatory training in musictheory class you'll be pretty disappointed. But curiousity is the first step into this stuff...
@@en-blanc-et-noir Thanks for the quick response. Could one maybe get a beginners guide on how to realize the arensky exercises , maybe in exchange for a patreon subscription? Or should they be realized like typical partimenti? But the diminutions easily found on the internet seem very baroque to me . should one instead just look for diminutions/figurations in romantic style and early impressionistic music and collect them or realize them according to your romantic videos ?
Arensky is definetely meant to be realized in 4-voice block chords. This type of "figurative" or decorated realizations like one knows e.g. from Durante died out in the 19th century. All this due to the fact that the idea of generic figurative structures that defined the baroque era and still partly the classical just vanished for asthetical reasons (individuality, originality).
If you wanna see something similar to the Durante approach but applied to 19th century music: watch my current video on the Chopin waltz, there I show motives on 7-1's, 5-1's and cadences that can be learned like Durantes "motivi" and that is more or less a common practice strategy in jazz music: internalizing licks on certain progression-modules (e.g. 2-5-1) by transposition.
Tausend Dank
❤❤❤
Hi, Name of the painting please. I love that type of art
Me too! You should visit Bruxelles then... Painting is by Ramón Casas, named "A decadent girl" from 1899
Moin Leudde!
8:00 exercise worthy of BH
could not stop laughing at 9:00
lol I was trying my very best... think it's about time to do a Brahms vidz