Bach Chorale Analysis

In the summer of 2018 I came across a video of Glenn Gould playing Bach's Keyboard Concerto in D minor BWV 1052; in 2020, I got an offer to study music at Cambridge University. I will discuss the rapid development of my classical music obsession another time, but the point I want to make now is that I established an immense interest in Bach right before I started my music A-Level. Accordingly, my favourite part of that A-Level was the weekly session spent analysing Bach chorale harmonisations.

Below is a spreadsheet I initially made as a revision tool. We were taught to recognise a series of recurring cadential phrases, observing the 'stock' progressions Bach used to harmonise them, such that when we would encounter these melodies in our final exam, we'd be able to quickly replicate Bach's harmonies. The first page of the spreadsheet, 'Fingerprints', consists of the progressions we were taught. Every week we had to go home and harmonise the new melodic phrase we'd learned. I quickly got bored of the stock progressions and began to look through other Bach chorales and see if there were more interesting progressions I could copy, and so I began keeping a bank of them. I called these 'one-offs' and these can be found on the second page of the spreadsheet.

The third page is a list of all the chorales I analysed, with hyperlinks which I believe you can access. I had intended on making a whole website (observe a prototype below) dedicated to publishing my analyses, which I would still like to do at some point (maybe even on this website). Each chorale is accompanied by its Riemannschneider number, BWV number, key, and a short list of highlights.

The final page is a collation of various resources I used and other miscellaneous notes.

Enjoy!