Keyboard Harmony

I've recently decided to start working on keyboard harmony. I have worked through the entirety of Walter Piston's 'Harmony' and I've recently started playing piano. Can anyone suggest any books that will take me through figured bass, improvised harmony et cetera?

Thanks :w00t:

The best way to learn improvised harmony is to improvise. Learn some scale or other, say G# minor. Find some basic rudiments book or other and learn its constituent chords. Maybe learn the IV V I cadence in it. Maybe learn the circle of fifths progression. But then toss away your books (at least for a while) and try playing chords with notes not in the scale. If it comes out sounding "wrong" it really doesn't matter. Then learn some other major and minor scales. It doesn't matter what order you learn them in. Learn other chords like sevenths chords and ninths chords. augmenteds. all the basics.. practice them in all positions in all keys (but not necessarily in order, that would be boring. mix them up...IMPROVISE and play with them like cool pieces of gadgetry...use their inversions a lot, etc.).

In terms of books, I've read Walter Piston. It's alright I suppose...I found it rather dry though. In terms of figured bass (which I'm not very good at), I found this one book called "Fugal Improvisation through Figured Bass" which is called the "Langloz Manuscript." It has a bunch of partly written fugues and figured bass symbols in it for you to fill in baroque figuration. I've never done much with it but it is out there if it interests you.

Thanks very much for your advice.

:)

Here is an online historical source, a figured bass book by Georg Muffat, who was a French-influenced German. It is difficult to follow, but I always try to use the original baroque sources.

Regulae Concentuum Partiturae Authore Georgio Muffat

Baroque composers would have been able to realize figured bass on the spot and improvise using the same rules. Being able to spontaneously voice-lead chords led the way to improvising in counterpoint.... I wish I could do that, but I've never really tried. Soon I'll have to start learning how to play continuo, since I play the harpsichord; I've studied voice leading on paper, but I still can't think fast enough to voice lead with my hands.

Also, here is a great article explaining a potential method used to improvise fugues. If I ever learn to improvise fugues, I'll die happy.

Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music | Vol. 12 No. 1 | Michael R. Dodds Columbus's Egg: Andreas Werckmeister's Teachings on Contrapuntal Improvisation in Harmonologia musica (1702)

But I don't know about non-baroque stuff.

Baroque is where I'm starting, first I'm learning to voice lead between all of the chords in all of the common keys (using just closed voicings) and then I'm going to start working on figured bass, and then expanding my harmonic palette later.

thanks for the links, :blink: