This is the second episode in Alex Jonker and Peter Schubert’s  five-episode mini-series on “idiomatic improvisation” as a pedagogical technique in the music theory and aural skills classroom. In this episode, students improvise a melody over a longer ground bass progression, now in a standard common practice harmonic context including some chromatic harmony.

This episode was produced by Amy Hatch & Katrina Roush along with Team Lead Caitlin Martinkus. Special thanks to peer reviewers Phil Duker and Joseph Straus.

SMT-Pod’s theme music was written by Maria Tartaglia, with closing music by Yike Zhang. For supplementary materials on this episode and more information on our authors and composers, check out our website: https://smt-pod.org/episodes/

Welcome to SMT-Pod, the premier audio publication of the Society for Music Theory. This is the second episode in Alex Jonker and Peter Schubert’s five-episode mini-series on “idiomatic improvisation” as a pedagogical technique in the music theory and aural skills classroom. In this episode, students improvise a melody over a longer ground bass progression, now in a standard common practice harmonic context including some chromatic harmony.

Hi, I'm Alex Jonker. I'm back with my colleague and mentor, Peter Schubert. This is the second episode in our series on idiomatic improvisation. The idiom of the day is Baroque ground bass pieces.

[Intro music – Handel]

So we're going to use a ground bass that actually was used pretty commonly in the 18th century. We're going to use an example by Handel, but it's the same progression that was used by Bach in the first half of the Goldberg Variations. Christoph Neidhöfer and I used ground basses in tonal counterpoint class. Have you ever done that?

Yeah, when I was a graduate student at MSU, I took a keyboarding class with Mike Callahan, who is also a pioneer in using improvisation in both the undergraduate and the graduate curriculum. And one of the things that we did in this keyboard class was improvising over ground basses. Every week we would be given a new ground bass and we were told how many times to repeat it over and over again. And every repetition, we had to make up a new melody over top of it. And this was all played at the keyboard, so it's a little bit different than what we're doing with our students today, but same basic idea. It got progressively more advanced as the semester went on, of course, and Mike ended up teaching us diminution techniques and different ways that we could make it sound like real Baroque music, which was pretty cool.

And as somebody that had never improvised before taking this class and had very little keyboard experience, I can really sympathize with my students that I'm asking them to do these sorts of things now, because I found it absolutely terrifying. And I remember for the first several weeks, I would like painstakingly write out everything that I was going to play on the piano. Like I just composed everything because I was so scared of making a mistake. And by the end of the semester, after like multiple weeks of practice, I could improvise more freely. So I think from like personal experience, I can say that these improv activities work and it's all about like building creativity and fluency, and kind of building confidence as part of it also.

Yeah, improvisation does that. It really helps you say, oh, wow, I did this. I just came up with this. You know what you said that was interesting was about diminutions. So did you start out with sort of note against note kind of things? And when we listen to our students, that we're going to play the clips of now, do they do mostly note against note? I don't remember.

No. Most of them are very florid melodies.

No kidding. Let's hear some.

Yeah. Our improvisers for this activity are Hubert, Grant, and Emily. We'll start off with a clip of Hubert analyzing the Handel ground bass before we get started with improvisations.

My name is Hubert Paré. I'm a voice, a lyric voice major here at McGill. And I just finished my fourth year and final year of my undergraduate degree.

Alex is going to play you a ground bass piece. By I think Handel, right? A ground bass piece is a piece where the bass repeats over and over again, but the right hand changes and it makes sort of variations. So she's going to play you one and just listen to it. Maybe you can remember the bass line. Okay.

Yeah. Here it is.

[Audio clip]

Okay, first of all, do you know what meter that's in?

3/4?

Yeah, good.

Yay!

Okay, good start. Can you sing back the bass line? Do you remember how the bass sounded?

[Hubert sings]

Okay, this is good. Why don't you just sing the downbeats of each of those? So instead of arpeggiating the chords, you can just sing the downbeats.

Yes. [sings] I think.

Okay, let's try one more time. The first little bit was great.

[Audio clip]

Did you get it that time?

Not the first note, but I think I know that, I think I understand the chords, but.

Okay. Okay.

I think there's a five of five there. And then going to five and then one. I think that's how it finishes, but then the four, one before that, I'm not sure.

So that's interesting because you could learn about the line and then infer the chords or sort of deduce them, or you could think about the chords. I would suggest that you listen to the bass notes and forget about the chords just temporarily.

Okay. I'll play that much again.

[Audio clip, then Hubert sings]

Yes, that's right.

[Hubert sings]

As you can hear there are lots of challenges with this activity; one of the challenges is the texture of the music. Hubert had a difficult time at first picking out just the bass line and this was something a lot of our students experienced figuring out what the actual bass notes were and being able to sing those back.

One of the other challenges, and this is something all of our students struggled with, was the length of this bass line being eight harmonies long was so taxing on their musical memory none of them were able to do it the first time through, all of them took multiple listenings to figure out all eight harmonies and how that bass line really sounded. One thing that we talked about with Hubert during his recording was the fact that he started humming along with the bass line as he was listening, and this was something that helped him pick out those bass notes more easily and also commit it to memory because he could feel in his body what that bass line sounded like.

And I think this is something that I encourage my students to do-it's a bit more difficult in a large classroom setting with everybody's humming to themselves, but I often use the direction 'hum quietly to yourself' so that they're not too overpowering; nobody's like full out singing or anything. But humming along helped them commit it to memory and figure out how bass lines go if they're struggling to hear it. For our students that were struggling to remember the whole eight measures, especially when they improvised their own melody over it-it was so difficult for a lot of them to remember eight measures of music that they made up on the spot.

Right, oh boy.

So for some of them we asked them to just improvise over the first four measures instead, seemed a little bit more of a manageable chunk for them. So here is Grant improvising over just the first four measures.

I'm Grant Kane, I am a cello performance major in second year.

Okay, here we go: one, two, three

[Grant sings]

Okay, one more time: two, three,

[Grant sings]

oh, too bad that was gonna be Good, yeah, can you do that one again,

[Grant sings]

Yeah, that's nice. Can you sing the scale degrees? Do you know what scale degrees you're singing?

[Grant sings]

Yeah, that's good, that's very good. So usually um we do this exercise in an upper level musicianship class and by then the students know something about tonicization and so it's actually possible to ask them to tonicize another degree at the end of the first four bars, so this is what actually happens in the Handel and in the Bach is, we tonicize the dominant in the next clip, you hear our student improviser Emily did it almost instantaneously.

My name is Emily Popolo. I am a rising U2 at McGill, but I'm from the United States, so this will be my third year, and then I have one more year after that. Um, I'm a mezzo-soprano, but uh, but um, I'm in BMus history,

So a lot of the time, in with this progression, the third harmony is a tonicization of the dominant. Yeah? So our baseline goes one-seven-six-five, five being the dominant and in order to get the tonicization of the dominant over scale degree six in the bass, you often see sharp four and then they kind of go in contrary motion to the dominant. Do you think you could try to make up a little melody just for the first four harmonies that ends with the tonicization of the dominant? Yeah?

Very good all you need is to introduce that note that note when I get to the third thing so conduct me in

[Emilie sings]

Beautiful yeah nailed it

That was great, okay let's hear Hubert’s improvisation this is over the same ground bass, think I'm playing the bass? I'm gonna play down here right there okay one two three

[Hubert sings]

Keep going, keep going. Two, three.

[Hubert sings]

Again. That one was awesome, can you remember it?

No.

That was so interesting to hear you go through it and like the first time, like two of the chords you're like okay yeah, and then after that you're like oh no and then like every time you got more and more it got better and better.

It was really good, yeah, but you can't remember it.

OK try again

And that's called true improvisation,

Oh no! It's not you can do better than that

Try again

Do better than that, do solfege and improvise. You're asking a lot of me,

I hope so, okay. That last one was completely awesome, and I hope you can remember it, there's your tonic, ready one two three

[Hubert sings]

That was very nice, and now we have some more entertainment for you.

We want to analyze that?

Yes, we want to know if you know what you sang. Could you name the scale degrees of what you sang? You can do it very slowly, do you know what degree did you start on?

One

Correct, right so you just sing the tune and name the scale degrees.

[Hubert sings]

I think I changed something up in the second half,

I thought it was in the first half, you know I'm not sure I can remember it either.

Yeah it's too fancy.

Oh yeah here do it again, do it again, see if we can put it back together, ready go,

[Hubert sings]

Okay let's do it one more time, ready and sing the scale degrees at the same time, ready go,

[Hubert sings]

Lovely, I'm curious if you can figure out which of those are chord tones and which are non-chord tones like are you singing anything that's not a chord tone at any point

Yes there is… [sings]

What interval is that?

Third minor

Yeah correct

I mean I don't have a chord so

But it's consonant yeah yeah you know that

It sounds itchy

Okay, it sounds itchy. I don't know.

Itchy?

Okay so that gets us to the e in the in the bass and then what happens? What's that?

[Hubert sings]

Is that what you sang? Do it again.

[Hubert sings]

What interval is that?

Major third

Good. What was this?

Minor six.

Hold on, what's that?

Whoa!

What's that?

I love seconds. Yeah.

Okay. So this is a case where you got into your pattern and you sort of say, oh, I don't care about the bass. I'll just do my patterning.

No, I just love seconds.

Okay, maybe you love seconds.

I do actually really love it when there's a lot of tension in the harmony. I'm like, otherwise it's kind of boring. So it was an artistic decision.

Okay, well, it was a very nice artistic decision. Okay.

As you heard, Hubert’s improvisation included a pattern that resulted in a second above the bass which, of course, is not idiomatic to the baroque style. Peter led Hubert to realizing he was singing a second, which led to a conversation about tension in music, however we didn’t correct him or ask him to change the melody to be more idiomatic.

This was Hubert’s first time improvising in this style. As with all our students improvising in a given style for the first time, we were more concerned with having him experiment and try things out. As students gain more experience with the idiom, or for students who catch on more quickly, we insist on sticking more closely to the style.

In this example, we use Handel's HWV 442 for our model, but there are other possibilities, of course. Pachelbel's Canon is one that your students are likely familiar with also. Dido's Lament is another ground bass you could use. There's other possibilities from Handel, including the Passacaglia HWV 432, which you heard at the beginning of this episode. So other possibilities to use as models here.

How come we didn't do minor keys? Those are the most fun.

I know.

So you should definitely do one in a minor key. Dido's Lament is in a minor key. But that has a chromatic bass. But that would be pretty challenging. That would be good. You know what's interesting about the ground bass thing is that the second chord, and, and the third chord are not in root position. So this is already a big departure from the doo-wop song. And the fifth chord is also not in root position and so forth. And so it is important for the student to see this if they know harmony. Then they know to put above the C, maybe they should put an A or whatever. And so it's a way of bringing theory and musicianship together. I think that all of these improvisation exercises are the perfect marriage of theory and aural skills for that reason.

Yeah. We do our activities, almost all of our activities in this series are done completely aurally. But this one, you could very easily give them the ground bass written out with some figures underneath it, turn it into a partimento exercise so that they know what these chords are and really bring together that theory and oral skills.

Yeah. There's one other episode coming up where they see a melody and have to do something with it. And that's the Faubourdon exercise.

That's our next episode.

Oh, how convenient.

Tune in for our next one. And you can hear about how we improvise Faubourdon harmonizations.

[Outro music – Dido’s Lament]

[Outro Theme by Yike Zhang.]

Visit our website, smt-pod.org, for supplemental materials related to this episode and to learn how to submit an episode proposal. You can join in the conversation by tweeting us your questions and comments to @SMT_Pod. SMT-Pod’s theme music was written by Maria Tartaglia, with closing music by Yike Zhang. Thanks for listening!