Species Counterpoint

[jancivil]

a 'tied note over a chord' is seen as a 'non-harmonic tone' when this is true. to say that figured bass is problematic because it deals with such phemonena clunkily or confusingly does not appear to be a true statement.

baroque continuo practice is all about maintaining coherence of part writing in functional harmony. figured bass is the correct map for this ('historical') exercise.

[llatham]

But damn, that experience trying to accompany some Bach from figured bass has scarred me. With his tendency to tie notes over between chords, you get the most gawdawful mess in your figurations. You have what is (to me) a one-note change to a simple harmony, and that turns into complete algebra soup in the bass. Not (again, to me) the way things ought to be.

Victor.

Victor,

If you know your *full* inversion symbols and what they mean, it can be a little easier. In other words, you start to see patterns like nothing to 4/2 or 6/4/2 as a root position chord with a bass line that moves down by step - or from the point of view that it's "upside down" in that we know the bass, and not the upper notes, nothing to 6/4/2 over a stepwise descending bass means the upper notes can stay.

Rather than the more convoluted Bach, you could try to realize some simpler textures - an aria with keyboard accompaniment for example.

Like anything, you just have to practice it enough to learn it - of course, unless you're into historic performance practice, it's not all that useful for most of us

Steve

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[llatham]

i came up with this book - and wanted to know what you experts think of it ( if familiar with ) - the first view pages available seem to be very conclusive and thoughtfull.

At that price, it will be a while before I look at it. Like the price for Kindle but we have a Nook.

[warrior545]

+1 for Salzer and Schacter's Counterpoint in Composition.
this book is amazing, everything is inside there.