Figured Soprano
Open the PDF file (music notation) and then click on the black bar: “Exercises FigSop 2Hands”
What follows is not a composition, nor is it intended for piano practice. It is a composition exercise given here as an illustration of what might happen if we thought about harmonization from the top down. This is not connected to the current fascination with Collier’s “negative harmony.” We actually do this to some extent when we reharmonize a melody, that is when we try putting a different chord to a particular melodic tone than the one normally expected. And that means that the tone may no longer serve the same ‘function’ of the chord. Instead of the tone occupying, for example, the third degree of a chord (the mediant), it could sound as the fifth, the seventh, the flatted seventh, or the augmented eleventh, of a different chord. This exercise is simply an extended and somewhat more rigorous exploration of that mode of thinking.
This kind of “top>down” thinking about harmony can be very useful, and I see many improvising musicians do this without actually giving it much thought. Jazz players are doing some version of this when they make harmonic substitutions.
I call this particular way of thinking about harmony “figured soprano” only because this approach is the ‘other way around’ from the traditional practice of figured bass. Figured bass uses numbers above the bass notes to indicate the intervals to be played above the given bass note … a kind of “lead-sheet” notation used widely in the Baroque era to help continuo players improvise. Instead of writing out the chord voicings and textures, those choices were left up to the improvisational skills of the keyboard players (or other instruments). When jazz players ‘reharmonize’ a known melody, they are essentially doing just this, that is, they may inwardly hear a note as carrying a different function from that which was originally intended, and then they reconceive the harmony “down” from there. While bass motion is typically the most important factor in generating a sense of harmonic motion, I often feel that it is a change in the function of the melody note that engenders a great deal of the emotional sense. Even a deceptive cadence to the sub-mediant (e.g., IV—V—vi), which owes its harmonic function to the unexpected bass note, seems to derive its feeling from the new character that enters into (or emanates from) the melody note.
The following exercise is an example of what I think of as “rainy-day composing”—sitting down to write music without a specific artistic agenda, and to slowly work out an idea just to see what happens. It could also be done right at your instrument, but you would need a lot of facility with chords to do this without the support of notation.
The annotated score below is the same as the PDF which is linked at the top of this page. So you can open the PDF and follow the score in one window while playing the sound file. The score has boxed comments to let you know about the process taking place in each new experiment. It gets really interesting at m.28 but remember that many more studies can be generated using this simple idea of figured soprano.
Click on each page to see the next page.
There is a scrolling version of the score with audio on Youtube. The link is: https://youtu.be/AGFAKwxGzqk
The first 8 bars of Moussorgsky’s “Pictures” are notated above, with a number indicating the position of the soprano pitch within the prevailing chord. This approach is the ‘other way around’ from figured bass, which uses numbers to indicate the intervals to be played above the given bass note … a kind of lead-sheet notation used widely in the Baroque. Instead of writing out the chord voicings, those choices were left up to the improvisational skills of the keyboard players (or other instruments). When jazz players ‘reharmonize’ a known melody, they are essentially doing just this, that is, giving a different function to the melody note and harmonizing “down” from there. While bass motion is certainly the most important factor in mobilizing a sense of harmonic motion, I often feel that it is the function of the melody note that can give a great deal of the emotional sense. Even a deceptive cadence (e.g., IV, V vi) which owes its harmonic function to the unexpected bass note, seems to derive its feeling from the new character that enters into (or emanates from) the melody note.
Below is another example where the numbers above the melody indicate the harmony which is placed underneath. Apart from use in some analysis, this is a way of thinking that can yield some very creative decisions. And, for practice purposes, the melody need not be limited to the 1, 3 and 5 of a diatonic triad. It could also be a minor-9th, an augmented-11th, or anything else including part of a harmonic cluster.
You could try writing in the soprano positions on your own. The soprano positions for the first seven beats would be: 3,1,3,5,1,5). The soprano positions in the main exercise at the top of the page offer some rather new impressions: new ways to hear ‘old’ triads as something quite new. Try this with simple diatonic melodies, chorales, and so on. Much of it will sound strange but once in a while you will find something new, and that is often what composers and improvisers are hungry to find. Many of the pages on this website are intended for this purpose: finding something new.