Figured bass is a concept that is central to how we talk about musical “entities” in academic music theory. In some ways, talking in terms of “figured bass” can seem quite old fashioned. But what I try to do in this video is, first, connect the original motivations behind figured-bass notation to more recent methods of notating musical works, such as a) the use of lead sheets in jazz (fake books); and b) the use of lyric-sheets-with-chords, as found all over the internet. We often think of a score that writes out all of the individual notes as somehow “better” or “more official” or even “more classical.” But as you will see, it isn’t. Figured-bass notation was used in the early baroque to promote improvisation and creativity just as lead sheets do today in jazz. And, just as with lyrics-plus-chords, the use of figures was, even earlier (later renaissance), a shorthand used by keyboardists and lutenists to simplify what was going on in a complex score into a simple, easy-to-read shorthand providing the structure of the piece and its chords, but nothing more.
Figured bass is dead. Long live figured bass.
As the video continues, we take an in-depth look at one of the earliest published works written just in figured bass: Giulio Caccini’s “Amarilli mia Bella” (1601), breathtakingly performed by Philippe Jaroussky and Björn Colell (https://youtu.be/roJSYFu3pYk).
If you can survive this video, you can survive figured bass.
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