There’s Even More to Playing the Piano

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Chapter 13 - Figured Bass

Chords were used in Renaissance times, particularly in madrigals and in lute music but, rather than thinking of chords as I, IV and V etc., Renaissance composers considered chords to be a result of the contrapuntal part-writing. Baroque music is often contrapuntal (see Book 1, Chapter 28), but the innovation that heralded the baroque era was the idea of chords. Figured bass is a system of notating chords that retains the contrapuntalists’ interest in intervals. It is a halfway house between contrapuntal thinking and harmonic thinking. Working out what notes...

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