The Most Common 6/3-Chords in Baroque Harmony / Counterpoint / Partimento

Video by Michael Koch. Sheets, Partimenti and Working Materials on my Patreon-Page: https://tinyurl.com/mphmztrj “Not Furno” is a series of posts and videos aimed particularly at beginners in partimento and baroque improv, offering an alternative—or at least a high quality supplement—to Furno’s exercises, which, although often recommended, are in reality not especially thorough. One aspect that Furno neglects quite severely is the topic of sixth chords—a subject that is in fact very important and, in my opinion, represents a key aspect of Baroque compositional technique that should be addressed at an early stage. Why? Sixth chords, as “mobile sonorities,” are fundamentally involved in the flow that is constitutive of Baroque music. With sixth chords, the student encounters for the first time a type of “dynamic sonority.” By this I mean chords (or rather: figured-bass numbers) that do not stand on their own, but must necessarily be understood within dynamic voice-leading contexts. For this reason, the term “chord” should really be placed in quotation marks, since the traditional concept of a chord implies something inherently static. The 6/3-chord, however, typically appears in dynamic compositional contexts characterized by a horizontal drive that unfolds across multiple chords.