How Does Bach's Music Relate To Today

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Bach’s work for the melody was different from the beginning of the Classical period compared to the other composers. Instead of keeping all of the melody, bass, and harmony line, he wanted to keep a good bass line in order to write effective music. Bach had a good compositional skill in creating a bass line. The melody construction was carefully thought out and dense. He restricted the leading tones and the second-inversion chords. Bach’s melisma characteristics were different from what Handel wrote. A melisma is a group of notes that is sung to one syllable of text. Handel wrote it in a sequence making the melodic line more predictable and made it sound more pleasant for the listeners. However, Bach wrote the melisma in an unpredictable …show more content…

The Harpsichord and the Organ could not smoothly modulate to the two dynamic contrast, soft or loud. Stringed instruments like violin had a strings made out of the catgut, which created a raspy sound and Oboe had more harsh sound. Many Baroque composers like Bach focused their composition on “expression marks.” Expression mark is a phrase that is written on the musical score that tells the performers to have more expression. However, the performer’s capacity of expression, Bach did not want them to rely on them too much especially during the time where Leipzig was not in a good condition. Although, Bach believed that if the performer was capable of adding the expression on its own, he did not get too picky about …show more content…

This is similar technique as polyphony. The difference here is that heterophony’s second voice melody is coming from the first voice. Similarly, the melody is ornamental part where the melodies sometimes plays in a unison, parallel octave, or against each other. To embellish the melodic line, the chorale melody was added. However, the expansion is completely different than the original. On the other side, Bach was able to exempt parallel octaves. To make Bach’s music more interesting, he hid the parallel octaves. For instance, if the alto voice sang one single note above the soprano and came back down immediately back to alto, the audience will hear the singing voice just as one single voice was singing. Bach was very expert at this technique so the audiences could not hear any mistakes in the

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