Encodings and analysis of musical 'schemas' (work in progress).

There has been a resurgence of attention lately to the position of practice in relation to the teaching of music theory, both in the sense of 'practical' keyboard skills and the 'practice' of the composers we study. Much of this has centred on reviving the sets of 'schemas' that Eighteenth-Century musicians learned as stock-in-trade prototypes for improvisation and composition (the distinction between the two being much more slight for musicians of the time than we sometime suppose today).

This repository consists of resources for encoding, analysing, teaching, and learning these schema. Specifically:

1. Introductions to the 'The Rule of the Octave' by building up the Rule incrementally from a succession of parallel 63s, and by taking a closer look at the component parts in turn.
2. Open and short (piano) score files with other, sequential methods for harmonising the scale also starting from parallel 63s.
3. Representations of canonical schemas both with and without realisations of the figured bass.
4. Templates for pieces based on combinations of schemas.

These files are freely available to view and play online, and / or to download in a choice of formats for printing or editing.

See versions of this material in

• fourscoreandmore.org
• musescore.com
• Open Music Theory (online textbook)

A similarly schema-based approach is to be seen in some other contexts such as Caplin's account of how form-functional units relate to harmonic reductions. Again, this repository encodes that information. Notable here is the emergence in recent years of human harmonic analysis corpora encoded in computational formats (e.g., see 'When in Rome'. These harmonic analyses provide a testing ground for this idea as the code explains and demonstrates. I.e., this section explores similar ideas but from a more analytical perspective.

This section explores the use of recogised clausulae (common to all of the above) in the context of chorale settings which provide a useful case of real repertoire, but of a relatively simply type in which it is relatively easy to identify:

• 'the' melody and bass lines as extricable part of the texture
• corresponding clausulae, given that the rhythms typically very simple.