great video! It also brought back some memories, when I was a student and I was asked to write out a basso continuo for a performance of a Bach cantata. For the first time I was continuously finding snippets where the numbers of the bass didn't leave me any choice, there was just one correct way to move four voices through those numbers. I remember how surprised and excited I was when I told my teacher about my "discovery" :D
Thank you once again for your fascinating videos. As you can see from the number of people who have played this one in its first hours online, you are very much appreciated!
Beautifully done episodes with helpful footnotes, "sheet music" examples, and other resources. I admire your intelligence, erudition, scholarship, and musicality. Your explanations are crystal clear and lead onward to the next "discovery." And, I can't wait to hear Profeti della Quinta in Austin!
Fascinating! I had never seen basso continuo notation before and for my first exposure to have this historical context was serendipitous - thank you :)
That was great I didn’t appreciate how intuitive and useful figured bass could be when I was learning it at school. It wasn’t taught like this, though!
Ah, so he's dealing with the compound interval notation kind of like ancient Greek notation, i.e. rather than repeating letters for each octave, the lettering (or here, numbering) just keeps going. Neat!
Qué afortunada coincidencia! debo justo dar un examen de contrapunto y esto me será utilísimo. Gracias!!! ..it´s amazing how Italian and spanish can be so similar!! I don´t even speak Italiano!
Excellent, thanks. You mention keyboard playing only, though early BC seems to be mostly for citharrone-with its re entrant tuning perhaps not quite ideally set up for specific voice leading such as found here?
I had an odd thought inspired by this basso continuo video, Is the continuo in Pachelbel's canon in D meant to be improvised/embellished, and not merely 8 repeated notes? Should that continuo have counterpoint embedded in it?
Your explaination on cadences was fabulous! I have always had a huge emotional reaction to the cadences in early music and now I understand why. Those dissonances get into your soul. One questio however. Why did they end a piece in a minor key with a major chord at the end? I should know the answer but I guess I forgot! I live in Italy and have done the summer early music courses in Urbino. If you ever need a plac3 to crash near Rome, you are always welcome. I live in the country near Scandriglia (Rieti). Keep 'em comin'!
@@EarlyMusicSources don't get me wrong, I'm not criticizing your version. I'm just curios about the fact that by my counterpoint teacher false relations were wrong no matter, while in Cavalieri rendition they seem to be the lesser evil.
Hey Elam, I was wondering how can I learn conterpoint and other barroque/pre-baroque theory. Where should I begin? I can kinda read Italian so maybe I could start with some manuscripts?
Look into the book "Counterpoint in Composition" by Salzer and Schacter. You might also like Counterpoint, by Knud Jeppesen (a renaissance oriented vocal counterpoint book with lots of historical overview). For later baroque counterpoint, Counterpoint by Kent Kennan and 18th Century Counterpoint by Gauldin. For more about realizing an accompaniment from a bass line, you should explore the partimento tradition, and can read a lot about it (including some rules and lots of examples) in Sanguinetti's Art of Partimento.
4:57 I don't understand why the dissonance has to be prepared one note before the 11th interval? Is that an always on rule? If anybody can help I sure would appreciate it.
Other instruments: here's all the notes you play/sing. Keyboard players and bassists: just do your best. Later, after much complaining: OK, we'll throw some numbers in there for you. Even later: fine, here's the other notes, geez.
Why is everything a semi-tone flat, and did you make a video on the answer to this question already? Amazing video as always, I will be bringing it into my History class soon!
What was the composers' reason for not simply writing the score with all notes specified so that more people could practice it with only the score and elementary keyboard understanding? Was there a sort of jazz-type technical freestyling culture at the time? Or was it more of an exclusivity culture allowing only the learned musical scholars to access the correct method to play a piece?
I believe the reason was that it simply wasn't necessary to write everything out, and also the figures specified mainly key moments that were unintuive to the player. It was also said in the video that certain aspects of the realisation were left to the player, because there is not a single right way As for the jazz parallel, it isn't that far from the truth. Many more things weren't written down in the scores and improvisations, embellishments etc were a regular part of the practice. I'm sure I might be corrected on some points of my comment, but I hope I managed to convey the general idea.
Also continuo notation is more modular and thus accessible for more instruments, and it gives musicians a language with which to communicate basic harmonic moves, e.g. a "3443 cadence."
I guess you can work out a lot with only a melody line and the bass, just not necessarily what the composer was thinking. Cavalieri had probably heard one too many variant interpretations of his accompaniments. And hi to Jacob!
In early music, it was common to use those kind of "alterations"=usual at their time. Even, you can find pitches of A=490Hz or A=418Hz used in the same church for each different season... That would be nice to hear Vivaldi's 4 Seasons a applying that principle! lol
It is basically a consonance/dissonance harmonize- or chord system build over the bass. Nowadays we typically compose modern songs over the upper melody lines and else or the lyrics. It's kinda similar to the chord notations we got over a song sheet. The contrapunct teachings in it is just what was used at the time to avoid voices crossing each over too much and avoid creating "muddy" harmony in the music. It's interesting to note that how as our modern day chord system replaced a lot of the things this kind of notation did, so will the current chord system be replaced by something else in the future. It's so complex it's actually interesting. And meanwhile people are suing each other over melody-lines and copyrights. People also proclaim that the music is a given number and there can only be so and so much in "it all". It's just ironic how they always say high up things like that, but never mention how much of "it all" we have actually managed to figure out about at this given point. Great video! Just imagine how strong the musicians had to be at that time? Imagine singers on those voices and how they would split the various groups up to voice this system out? Marvelous! How good a pitch must these singers have? Just a fascinating system.
I envy these old musicians... They can figure what they will play during playing. Jazz musicians amaze some classical musicians but these people were better than jazz musicians.
I wouldn't say they were better...also jazz has so many periods and sub genres that you'll find that some of them like early bebop has it's own ways of resolving dissonance (like the music discussed here). I'd check out videos associated with Barry Harris to get an idea of what I'm trying to convey.
@@fernwehn5925 I love counterpoint as much as the next guy however, jazz and medieval/renaissance have different aesthetics. Dissonance is treated differently in both genres. The rules of counterpoint for this ancient style work for it's intervallic system. Anyway what I'm trying to say is neither is better than the other. They are essentially two different languages. You have to understand the context from a more complex objective standpoint.
@@spiritualneutralist2597 I am aware that a big part of music is merely a product of a our own human perception and therefore not based on anything "set" in stone. Furthermore I do have quite a bit of respect for jazz musicians, they are one of the saving graces of modern (popular) music which tends to be in all honesty, quite rubbish. Indeed, I consider them superior to many "modern" "classical" composers and their glorified cacophonies. I however do think that Bach, for instance, is orders of magnitude superior to all modern improvisers, classical or not. You could argue that comparing the greatest musical master of all times to mere disciples is unjust, and I would agree. But I would point out that Bach didn't exist in a vacuum and he couldn't have achieved what he did without the building blocks, as it were, given by a 1000 year tradition. Even if jazz has, quite obviously, its own language and its own rules, it still is much less strict and allows for much more dissonance, which is a definate aid to the improviser, even if said freedom of dissonance gives him also a greater palette and thus the possibility to show his command (or lack thereof) of music. As I said, I by no means think jazz musicians are inferior to the average classical musician of today. But I do think they are to 18th century musicians. You also have to consider that in those days the lines betweeen musicians, composers, and improvisers were blurred, the end result of this being a well rounded master. Unlike, say, the modern pianist, who can perform astouning feats of virtuosity, but would struggle to play from the simplest figured bass. Not to mention they were often trained from a very early age, almost every day of their lives, and their livelihood depended on it! The day I see a jazz musician ex-temporise anything close in complexity and strictness to a fugue, I will change my mind.
@@fernwehn5925 I see where you are coming from. I understand since I know how hard writing counterpoint is (I have written a fugue based on bebop harmonic vocabulary not an easy task). So you made a good point. I just feel that there is no point in comparing music that are many centuries apart. I would fully agree if you said something along the lines of music by Palestrina is better than troubadour music.
“Figures from 2 to 9”, of course, but the later use of vertical dashes to mark Tasto solo playing implies actually the “1” figure, otherwise the dash makes no sense.
Well, when listening to his explanation though my headphones, my ears hurt because of the high frequencies in the audio when he makes a "S" of "sh" sound in his voiceover. That's not usual, I don't have that issue on other TH-cam channels I follow, hence the tip. This wasn't meant as an insult.
It's so refreshing to hear proper Italian pronunciation in the musical side of youtube
mamma mia make my pizza
@@michaelperkins8078 ravioli ravioli give me the formuoli
@@erzsblasfantaven3334 presto presto make my pesto
TH-cam, TH-cam, make my italian hand like button
Only took an italian making the video, and TA DAAAAA, magic XD .
This is like Renaissance sudoku :D
Quite a fun exercise.
holy this channel is a gold mine.
It is.
I almost broke my mouse clicking on this title :)
That was illuminating and enjoyable. I always wondered how it was supposed to provide enough information to figure out what to play.
I absolutely love this channel. Thank you for bringing light for somewhere there once was dark.
I have a guilty pleasure of finding basso figures and making my own realization so this was a treat to come across.
My goodness! If word gets out, what will the neighbours say?? :D
My deep gratitude and compliments for this concise as effective insight of notions I conceived mysterious and unattainable!
great video! It also brought back some memories, when I was a student and I was asked to write out a basso continuo for a performance of a Bach cantata. For the first time I was continuously finding snippets where the numbers of the bass didn't leave me any choice, there was just one correct way to move four voices through those numbers. I remember how surprised and excited I was when I told my teacher about my "discovery" :D
I missed this voice so much. Glad to see you're back.
This is such a great channel! Thanks for your effort for all the videos!
Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us on TH-cam!
Thank you once again for your fascinating videos. As you can see from the number of people who have played this one in its first hours online, you are very much appreciated!
Beautifully done episodes with helpful footnotes, "sheet music" examples, and other resources. I admire your intelligence, erudition, scholarship, and musicality. Your explanations are crystal clear and lead onward to the next "discovery." And, I can't wait to hear Profeti della Quinta in Austin!
Thank you for this beautiful lesson, let alone your _PERFECT_ pronunciation of Italian!
Fascinating! I had never seen basso continuo notation before and for my first exposure to have this historical context was serendipitous - thank you :)
That was great I didn’t appreciate how intuitive and useful figured bass could be when I was learning it at school. It wasn’t taught like this, though!
I'm about to play continuo on my first Rappresentatione. Very grateful for this video!
Thank you so much! Really helpful, informative, and very well performed.
I always find counterpoint fascinating. Thanks as always for sharing with us!
Ah, so he's dealing with the compound interval notation kind of like ancient Greek notation, i.e. rather than repeating letters for each octave, the lettering (or here, numbering) just keeps going. Neat!
It's just wonderful. We learn and enjoy so much from you
Totally wonderful and extremely informative! Thanks for you hard work!
Excellent video in all respects!
Gotta love the glowing pineapple, Guidonian hand mug, and the collection of wine bottles - great environment!!
AND the blue pig with sunglasses! 😎
What an excellent discussion of continuo realisation. Also, I must offer a shout out to the wonderful Jacob Lawrence!
Amazing! This is awesome study material.
thank you for sharing these insights so generously
Brilliant. Thank you very much, Elam! Awaiting with abated breath the video on Preparamento alla cadenza. :D
I would love to hear your analysis of Gesualdo (!)
Excellent video! Thanks !
Very informative and interesting!! Loved the examples
Wonderful channel you have!
increíble contenido!! definitivamente me he suscrito.
this is incredibly good I can believe
Che fortunata coincidenza! Devo giusto dare un esame di contrappunto e questo mi sarà utilissimo, grazie!!!
Qué afortunada coincidencia! debo justo dar un examen de contrapunto y esto me será utilísimo. Gracias!!!
..it´s amazing how Italian and spanish can be so similar!! I don´t even speak Italiano!
Brilliant episode !
Excellent, thanks. You mention keyboard playing only, though early BC seems to be mostly for citharrone-with its re entrant tuning perhaps not quite ideally set up for specific voice leading such as found here?
Excellent !
Merci beaucoup.
I had an odd thought inspired by this basso continuo video,
Is the continuo in Pachelbel's canon in D meant to be improvised/embellished, and not merely 8 repeated notes?
Should that continuo have counterpoint embedded in it?
Came for the lesson. Didn't understand it. Stayed for the beautiful music and singing.
NEVER CLICKED SOO FAST! Shalom from a gentile in Amsterdam :3 Love your videos!
Your chanel is fantastic. ! Thank you.!
Your explaination on cadences was fabulous! I have always had a huge emotional reaction to the cadences in early music and now I understand why. Those dissonances get into your soul. One questio however. Why did they end a piece in a minor key with a major chord at the end? I should know the answer but I guess I forgot! I live in Italy and have done the summer early music courses in Urbino. If you ever need a plac3 to crash near Rome, you are always welcome. I live in the country near Scandriglia (Rieti). Keep 'em comin'!
what does the - s - signify?
Beautifully made video and great explanation. Love it!
After over 13 minutes of explanation and analysis: "The music... is also nice." :-)
isn't the harmonization in 8:26 yielding "false relazioni"?
indeed
@@EarlyMusicSources don't get me wrong, I'm not criticizing your version. I'm just curios about the fact that by my counterpoint teacher false relations were wrong no matter, while in Cavalieri rendition they seem to be the lesser evil.
Uffa!!! Perché non ci sono i sottotitoli in questo video?
!Muchas gracias!
again a very nice video! Thanks
Elam, your videos are amazing, but they would be even better (IMO) if you played the excerpts again from start to finish after analyzing them.
genius!!! thank you very much!!!!!!!!!!
Is there any potential to include imitation in the realizations?
Thanks, always!
Now I'd like to know which composer is the first who never used basso continuo in any of his compositions thus finally closing the era.
It would be around 1800 if that helps narrow the search.
@@kathyjohnson2043 The Baroque, and therefore the basso continuo era, is said to have died with J.S. Bach in 1750.
Hey Elam, I was wondering how can I learn conterpoint and other barroque/pre-baroque theory. Where should I begin? I can kinda read Italian so maybe I could start with some manuscripts?
Look into the book "Counterpoint in Composition" by Salzer and Schacter. You might also like Counterpoint, by Knud Jeppesen (a renaissance oriented vocal counterpoint book with lots of historical overview). For later baroque counterpoint, Counterpoint by Kent Kennan and 18th Century Counterpoint by Gauldin. For more about realizing an accompaniment from a bass line, you should explore the partimento tradition, and can read a lot about it (including some rules and lots of examples) in Sanguinetti's Art of Partimento.
4:57 I don't understand why the dissonance has to be prepared one note before the 11th interval? Is that an always on rule? If anybody can help I sure would appreciate it.
Yes, dissonances always have to be prepared. You check this episode: th-cam.com/video/oIMNTMreIig/w-d-xo.html
I still struggle with counterpoint tbh😂, but excellent video as always!
Pictured in the thumbnail: the first bassist, mad that everybody is getting more credit than him.
Other instruments: here's all the notes you play/sing.
Keyboard players and bassists: just do your best.
Later, after much complaining: OK, we'll throw some numbers in there for you.
Even later: fine, here's the other notes, geez.
Why is everything a semi-tone flat, and did you make a video on the answer to this question already? Amazing video as always, I will be bringing it into my History class soon!
It’s standard HIP practice to tune instruments to A=415 if you’re playing Baroque music.
@@agogobell28 Ohhhhh I had no clue! I'm fairly new to it all, thanks
What was the composers' reason for not simply writing the score with all notes specified so that more people could practice it with only the score and elementary keyboard understanding? Was there a sort of jazz-type technical freestyling culture at the time? Or was it more of an exclusivity culture allowing only the learned musical scholars to access the correct method to play a piece?
I believe the reason was that it simply wasn't necessary to write everything out, and also the figures specified mainly key moments that were unintuive to the player. It was also said in the video that certain aspects of the realisation were left to the player, because there is not a single right way As for the jazz parallel, it isn't that far from the truth. Many more things weren't written down in the scores and improvisations, embellishments etc were a regular part of the practice. I'm sure I might be corrected on some points of my comment, but I hope I managed to convey the general idea.
When you're trying to save paper, you come up with notation methods that allow you to use as little paper as necessary.
Also continuo notation is more modular and thus accessible for more instruments, and it gives musicians a language with which to communicate basic harmonic moves, e.g. a "3443 cadence."
I guess you can work out a lot with only a melody line and the bass, just not necessarily what the composer was thinking. Cavalieri had probably heard one too many variant interpretations of his accompaniments.
And hi to Jacob!
In early music, it was common to use those kind of "alterations"=usual at their time. Even, you can find pitches of A=490Hz or A=418Hz used in the same church for each different season... That would be nice to hear Vivaldi's 4 Seasons a applying that principle! lol
It is basically a consonance/dissonance harmonize- or chord system build over the bass. Nowadays we typically compose modern songs over the upper melody lines and else or the lyrics. It's kinda similar to the chord notations we got over a song sheet. The contrapunct teachings in it is just what was used at the time to avoid voices crossing each over too much and avoid creating "muddy" harmony in the music. It's interesting to note that how as our modern day chord system replaced a lot of the things this kind of notation did, so will the current chord system be replaced by something else in the future. It's so complex it's actually interesting. And meanwhile people are suing each other over melody-lines and copyrights. People also proclaim that the music is a given number and there can only be so and so much in "it all". It's just ironic how they always say high up things like that, but never mention how much of "it all" we have actually managed to figure out about at this given point. Great video! Just imagine how strong the musicians had to be at that time? Imagine singers on those voices and how they would split the various groups up to voice this system out? Marvelous! How good a pitch must these singers have? Just a fascinating system.
Bravo!
How old is the piece and who wrote it?
🙏
I envy these old musicians... They can figure what they will play during playing. Jazz musicians amaze some classical musicians but these people were better than jazz musicians.
I wouldn't say they were better...also jazz has so many periods and sub genres that you'll find that some of them like early bebop has it's own ways of resolving dissonance (like the music discussed here). I'd check out videos associated with Barry Harris to get an idea of what I'm trying to convey.
@@spiritualneutralist2597 They were better. I don't see jazz musicians ex temporising complex and beautiful counterpoint.
@@fernwehn5925 I love counterpoint as much as the next guy however, jazz and medieval/renaissance have different aesthetics. Dissonance is treated differently in both genres. The rules of counterpoint for this ancient style work for it's intervallic system. Anyway what I'm trying to say is neither is better than the other. They are essentially two different languages. You have to understand the context from a more complex objective standpoint.
@@spiritualneutralist2597 I am aware that a big part of music is merely a product of a our own human perception and therefore not based on anything "set" in stone. Furthermore I do have quite a bit of respect for jazz musicians, they are one of the saving graces of modern (popular) music which tends to be in all honesty, quite rubbish. Indeed, I consider them superior to many "modern" "classical" composers and their glorified cacophonies. I however do think that Bach, for instance, is orders of magnitude superior to all modern improvisers, classical or not. You could argue that comparing the greatest musical master of all times to mere disciples is unjust, and I would agree. But I would point out that Bach didn't exist in a vacuum and he couldn't have achieved what he did without the building blocks, as it were, given by a 1000 year tradition. Even if jazz has, quite obviously, its own language and its own rules, it still is much less strict and allows for much more dissonance, which is a definate aid to the improviser, even if said freedom of dissonance gives him also a greater palette and thus the possibility to show his command (or lack thereof) of music.
As I said, I by no means think jazz musicians are inferior to the average classical musician of today. But I do think they are to 18th century musicians. You also have to consider that in those days the lines betweeen musicians, composers, and improvisers were blurred, the end result of this being a well rounded master. Unlike, say, the modern pianist, who can perform astouning feats of virtuosity, but would struggle to play from the simplest figured bass. Not to mention they were often trained from a very early age, almost every day of their lives, and their livelihood depended on it!
The day I see a jazz musician ex-temporise anything close in complexity and strictness to a fugue, I will change my mind.
@@fernwehn5925 I see where you are coming from. I understand since I know how hard writing counterpoint is (I have written a fugue based on bebop harmonic vocabulary not an easy task). So you made a good point. I just feel that there is no point in comparing music that are many centuries apart. I would fully agree if you said something along the lines of music by Palestrina is better than troubadour music.
💝💝💝 TY
Professor Farnsworth says so! 👉
Good job!
Do you have some bottles of Scotch whisky behind you? Do you have an Laphroaig there?
Yes, naturally
דיייי כמה עוד נשמע על קאווליירי כמההההה
סתם
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👍👍👍
“Figures from 2 to 9”, of course, but the later use of vertical dashes to mark Tasto solo playing implies actually the “1” figure, otherwise the dash makes no sense.
Who is da monster who gave thumb down? I have a little mouse that actually can beat that jealous sick!
Maybe some random music academy pupil who must practice basso continuo and also pass on the exam XD.
Anch'io voglio la tazza con la mano guidoniana!!! 😯😍
www.teechip.com/guidonianhand
Thanks as always
We need subtitules in spanish
Contrapoints❤️
I have a headache after watching this.
The piece doesn't "teach" you counterpoint, does it? You need to already know counterpoint to play it.
Tip: try de-essing your voiceover. Your S is quite sibilant.
Chill lol
What should it be, rhotic?
It sounds fine to me.
Well, when listening to his explanation though my headphones, my ears hurt because of the high frequencies in the audio when he makes a "S" of "sh" sound in his voiceover. That's not usual, I don't have that issue on other TH-cam channels I follow, hence the tip. This wasn't meant as an insult.
Bravo!