Letters

Extract

Laura Campbell's article (Vol. 5, No. 3, November 1988) seems a little ambivalent. On the one hand she proposes a ‘method’ for harmonising chorales in the style of J. S. Bach; on the other she seems to suggest that this is not in any case an appropriate task for the student.

By implication this raises once again the whole question of the value of ‘imitative’ work as an agent of musical education. Does it teach anything other than knowledge of the particular style involved and if not, does it matter? To take a style even more remote from everyday musical experience, that of Palestrina, I am sure that those of us who devoted a good deal of time to it as students did gain much useful practice in the writing of smooth vocal lines applicable in fields as distant from the idiom of Palestrina as the arrangement of modern light music. In the same way the budding composer can learn from Bach-style chorale harmonisation something of the way in which harmonic considerations interact with the writing of interesting vocal lines, and the compromises that have to be made in the process of fusing the two together. It is true that the principal benefit of this activity is knowledge of Bach's methods in chorale harmonisation, but the same is true of what is now known as ‘pastiche’ work in any idiom; the idea that one can learn a sort of all-purpose abstract harmonic language which can be applied mutatis mutandis to all tonal music from the Baroque to the late Romantic era has now fallen into disrepute. It is worth noting that Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Bruckner all considered it worth their while to work at Fux's Gradus ad Parnassum, a sort of archetypal ‘pastiche’ method. Figured bass, incidentally, is not primarily a method of teaching, but a shorthand performing notation.