Introductionmusic theoryto for Part-Writing musicians and normal people by toby w. rush as we look ahead, we’re confronted with an ugly truth: there is a lot of music in the history of the world that is worth studying... much more than we can hope to cover in the span of a few semesters. since we can’t cover it all, we have to choose a specific musical language to study in depth. let’s start by narrowing things down to the common practice period. 1700 1500 1600 1900 1800 2000 early 20th renaissance baroque classical romantic century contemporary the common practice period is the music of the baroque, it’s especially worth classical and romantic eras in europe and america. studying because the name comes from the fact that most composers used most of the pieces a common musical language during this time. commonly performed in concert are from this period... but there is a ton of common practice period music... ...and the language more than we can hope to cover. is there a forms the basis for we can sink our representative style the most popular academic teeth into? musical styles today. leipzig, germany st. thomas church four-voice chorale writing is a good style to study for several reasons: chorales have a fast a large percentage of the cantatas of j.s. bach harmonic rhythm, allowing common practice period music provide us with a tremendous for a larger number of can be easily reduced to amount of consistently-written chords per exercise. four-voice counterpoint. four-voice chorales. one of the changes to the catholic church more than two hundred years later, j.s. bach proposed by martin luther was appointed musical was to allow members of director at the st. thomas the congregation to church in leipzig, germany participate in the singing and, in the spirit of luther, of the liturgy. wrote five years’ worth of liturgical music. of course, luther was branded a heretic for each of these works, his proposals, and began called cantatas, were built his own church in which around a hymn melody to implement his ideas. harmonized in four parts l j. uther for congregational singing. s. bach by analyzing bach’s cantatas, we can construct a set of “rules” for writing in four-voice common practice period musical style, allowing us to study it in depth. licensed under a creative commons BY-NC-ND license - visit tobyrush.com for more.