As I struggle my way through the Bach Chaconne on guitar, I’m having to work around the fact that I am great at music theory but terrible at note reading. So before I could play the piece, I had to completely understand it and be able to feel it by ear. The only way I could make the score useful to me was to go through the entire thing and write in jazz-style chord symbols. I know that this approach is “wrong,” because Bach didn’t think about chords as independently existing entities in this way, but it has still helped me get the piece under my fingers. Another “incorrect” but practically useful way for me to think about the piece is as a collection of scales and modes.
The scales approach can not explain everything that happens in the Chaconne. There are a few places (marked pink in the video) where the harmony emerges out of chromatic voice-leading that can’t be meaningfully described in terms of scales. Still, those moments are infrequent, and otherwise the scales approach has been very helpful.
Continue reading “What if the Bach Chaconne was modal jazz?”