[Smt-talk] Written record of Boulanger pedagogy?

[skostka at aol.com]

I found the Paul Vidal basses in PDF form at:


http://www.dinsic.com/en/content/download/2749/87875/file/VBB1A-tripaMostra.pdf



But let me know: who is the Vidal mentioned here? Is there a    publication of his basses? I never heard of these exercises around    here. They cannot be worse than some I have had to do during my    studies, but I know nothing of them. And as one of my former    students is planning a study of this extremely odd French tradition,    I'd very much like to know.
Stefan Kostka
University of Texas at Austin





-----Original Message-----
From: Nicolas Meeùs <nicolas.meeus at paris-sorbonne.fr>
To: JONATHAN W BERNARD <jbernard at u.washington.edu>
Cc: SMT Talk <smt-talk at societymusictheory.org>
Sent: Fri, Dec 17, 2010 6:28 pm
Subject: Re: [Smt-talk] Written record of Boulanger pedagogy?


              It strikes me that Jonathan's description of the purpose (or the    lack of purpose) of Vidal's exercises exactly matches what I'd say    (here, not in France) of the traditional exercises of the Paris    Conservatoire and of the French way of teaching harmony in general.    Harmony properly speaking in not taken in account, in so far as    there is no attempt made to distinguish good progressions from poor    or bad ones. The only concern is to have a correct voice leading,    especially in avoiding parallel perfect consonances.
    
    French "harmony", since Catel's treatise of 1801, probably, is    nothing more than a kind of naïve tonal counterpoint, without any    real concern for harmonic progressions or (which boils down to the    same) for tonality. And, as Jonathan seems to suggest, the figures    become mere labels for the chords, to be translated at first sight    into chords totally decontextualized. "Making sense" is utterly    foreign to this teaching.
    
    I am afraid to have to say that this, even today, remains the way    harmony is taught not only in the French conservatoires (after all,    conservatoires are the places where tradition is conserved), but    also in universities, and even, horresco referens, in the    Sorbonne.
    
    This all would tend to indicate that Boulanger's harmonic pedagogy,    if it was based on these Vidal basses, may not have been very    different from the French traditional one (i.e. that of the    Conservatoire National Supérieur de Paris), with its odd figures    includig +6, +4, etc., or barred 5, etc.
    
    But let me know: who is the Vidal mentioned here? Is there a    publication of his basses? I never heard of these exercises around    here. They cannot be worse than some I have had to do during my    studies, but I know nothing of them. And as one of my former    students is planning a study of this extremely odd French tradition,    I'd very much like to know.
    
    Nicolas Meeùs
    Université Paris-Sorbonne
    
    
    
    Le 17/12/2010 04:39, JONATHAN W BERNARD a écrit :    
      
Hello, Dmitri, and everyone,

[...]
One caution I'd like to offer here concerns the Vidal basses.  Having spent untold hours of my freshman year in college plugging through page after page of these figured-bass exercises, under the tutelage myself of a Boulanger disciple, I have the distinct impression that Vidal designed these quite deliberately not to follow any known rules of harmonic progression.  The whole point seemed to be to make progression unpredictable, forcing the student to learn to read the figures mechanically and accurately, to get them right at first sight without any contextual clues (such as what would "make sense" harmonically in a given situation).  They are entirely artificial exercises: no upper parts are provided, as would of course be present for real continuo playing.  Other veterans/victims of the Vidal regimen may disagree with this assessment; I'd love to hear from them either way.


Jonathan Bernard
University of Washington
    
  
 
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