Creative Practising Using Keyboard Harmony

Keyboard harmony has its origins in the Baroque period in what was called a figured or thoroughbass. This was largely a form of accompaniment in which a keyboard player has a written baseline with figures that indicate what chords to play on top of the bass. Bach considered keyboard harmony the foundation of all music and it was considered an essential part of music education.

This tradition continued into the 18th century with a practice called partimento, which originated in Naples, Italy. Partimento was developed to train orphan children in music with practical exercises at the keyboard forming its foundation. It then spread to France in the 19th century and became an important part of the curriculum for keyboard players accompanying singers at the Paris Conservatory. Accompanists were expected to be able to play from figured base, transpose and play from full scores.

As we moved forward in time, music theory became more of an academic subject, distancing itself from practical applications at the keyboard. This is unfortunate because there’s much to be gained from learning harmony directly at the keyboard. Our hands learn the shapes of chords, and our ears hear immediately how things sound. However, this aspect hasn’t been adequately integrated into music education.

In the first part of a two-part online workshop series on Saturday 6th April, Ken Johansen gave a practical demonstration of how to develop keyboard harmony skills. Ken shared various exercises and techniques which can be used to learn, practise and memorise piano music more effectively.

Identifying patterns

Identifying common harmonic patterns makes scores easier to read and music feel more familiar in a similar manner to how knowing vocabulary makes a language intelligible. Starting with cadences, Ken showed us several patterns or harmonic formulas including Fauxbourdon, Rule of the Octave, Romanesca and the Circle of Fifths which can all be learned, practised and transposed.

Fauxbourdon comes from ancient counterpoint and simply means parallel sixths and can be used as an excellent exercise to learn keys or work on pedalling and voicing:

Here is an example of it’s use in the 3rd movement of Mozart’s Sonata in G, K283:

This is an example of the Romanesca pattern – can you guess which ubiquitous Baroque work it features in?

Simplifying the score

One of the challenges pianists face when learning new pieces is that there is so much information on the page to process. This can be daunting and makes it easy to lose the bigger picture. Ken showed us how he creates reduction which can be an incredibly useful tool for addressing these challenges. These start by simplifying a score and slowly adding detail, thereby learning “from the ground up” rather than top down.

In this example featuring Schubert’s Impromptu in A-flat, D935 No. 2, the reduction process starts by creating blocking the chords to learn the basic harmonic shape:

The next step is to play an outer voice outline which gives an opportunity to observe many of the melodic features of the phrase:

Once you’ve done this, you can then add the middle voices to the outer voices and will likely find that you have a much more thorough understanding of the music!

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If you are interested in find out out more about to develop keyboard harmony skills, but missed the first part of Ken’s workshop series, you can still purchase a ticket to get access to the recording and exercises and join us live for the second session on Saturday 27th April! Click here to find out more and to sign-up!