Writing a choral prelude (Jongbloed, Ach Gott erhör mein Seufzen)

A few days ago I described the procedure Marpurg used to compose his choral prelude "Von Gott will ich nicht lassen" (see here). The procedure is simple enough:

  • start with a four part harmonisation of a choral melody
  • strip out the two middle voices
  • write a new middle voice, filling in the missing notes of the harmony.

Analyzing the composing proces of an existing composition is one thing. The next thing is of course to use that analysis to create something new. And that's the topic of this post.

First I need a suitable choral harmonization. I could of course try and write a harmonization myself, but I thought I'd better use something that already exists. Johann Sebastian Bach is well known for his choral harmonizations and I happen to own an edition that contains al harmonizations Bach wrote, so that's a suitable source. I could take any one of these, so to make it a simple choice I just took the first one from the book. Well, the second actually. The first one is written in a major and I waanted something in a minor tonality. So, my source is Bach's harmonization of the choral "Ach Gott, erhör mein Seufzen", that has it's own number in the catalogue of Bach works: BWV 254.

The first line looks like this:

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I first did two things: I stripped out the middle voices and doubled the note values. Musically that does not make any difference, other than the visual appreance it creates. Writing eighth notes against half notes looks more easy going than sixteenth notes against quarter notes.

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And from there it became an exercise in filling in the blanks. The first chord is a d minor chord, and in the first step I stipped out the f and the a. So, I just put them back as part of the middle voice:

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The second chord is again a d minor chord. I let the middle voice just play al the notes of the chord:

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The third chord is an f major chord in it's first inversion.And the middle voice fills in the missing chord notes:

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And so I went on from chord to chord. A little trick Marpurg uses and that I employed as well, is to tie the notes of the middle voice from beat to beat. In that way harmonic tension is created because the middle voice than has a note on the beat that does not belong to the new chord. The challenge in this way of writing is to prevent the result from becoming boring. Creating harmonic tension is one way of making the middle voice more interesting. Another is to create rythmic variety. The variety has to be subtle however, because the middle voice has to sound like it is has it's own sense of direction. I has to sound like it was not written to fill in the harmonic blancs, while in fact, the procedure was to write a middle voice to fill in the harmonic blancs.

I came up with this for the first line of the choral:

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The other lines were written with the same procedure. To finish the piece, I wrote an introduction of four bars. My idea was to use part of that introduction again in the conclusion of the piece, as another way of creating some coherence in the piece. While writing that introduction I rewrote the notes I had already written to accompany the first note of the choral melody. The introduction establishes the main tonality of d minor, so I could let the choral melody enter on a slight dissonant, immediately creating harmonic tension. That's always more interesting a plain consonant chord.

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And here's the sounding result. The recording was done with the Hauptwerk software and the sampleset, made by Sonus Paradisi, of the Janke organ in the Stadtkirche of Bückeburg (https://www.sonusparadisi.cz/en/organs/germany/buckeburg-janke-organ.html).

Score available here: http://partitura.org/index.php/auke-jongbloed-ach-gott-erhor-mein-seufzen



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Gracias por tu voto y por visitar mi blog.

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