101 Chorales Harmonized By J S Bach Belwin

Using the Bach Chorales for Voice Leading Study

The 101 Chorales Harmonized By J S Bach Belwin edition is one of those books that shows up in every second-year music theory classroom. It's not special because of the Bach harmonizations themselves, which are well known, but because of what Belwin compiled and how they're laid out. You get a collection of forty-five core chorales with the full figured bass realization visible, plus melody fragments for students to harmonize themselves. The formatting is straightforward: soprano, alto, tenor, bass on a single page per chorale with harmonic analysis underneath. That's it. Nothing fancy. I ran into a real issue with this book when I was grading a section of students working through it. Several of them were treating the chorales like sight-reading material instead of analysis targets. They'd play through each one quickly and mark down whether it sounded right, skipping the actual voice-leading inspection. The ones they misjudged the most were the chromatic ones, specifically BWV 375 and BWV 639. Those contain deceptive resolutions and borrowed chords that sound plausible at first listen but violate strict part-writing if you're working in the common-practice style the book expects. My workaround was making them trace each individual line in pencil across two measures at a time before they could move to the next chorale. Took ten minutes per chorale instead of thirty seconds, but the difference in their understanding was night and day.

101 Chorales Harmonized By J S Bach Belwin

Here's the thing most people miss about these chorales. The standard textbook approach treats them as perfect models to imitate. They're not. Bach makes decisions based on text accentuation, liturgical function, and musical economy that have nothing to do with clean four-part exercise aesthetics. Look at BWV 257, "Wachet auf." The alto has a passing tone that creates a suspended fourth against the tenor on beat two of measure three. In a strict harmony class you'd call that an error. In the chorale it's a deliberate voice-leading color that resolves properly. Beginners who internalize only the "rules" without understanding the context end up writing chorales that are technically correct but musically lifeless because they've been trained to avoid anything that looks even slightly like a mistake. Another counter-intuitive point: the Belwin edition's analysis markings aren't always consistent across all forty-five analyzed chorales. Some use Roman numerals with accidentals outside the key signature, others use chord symbols or abbreviation marks. It depends on which editor handled which page. If you're using this for an exam or a class that expects a specific analysis format, you need to check which convention your instructor uses before you start marking everything up. I've seen students lose points for writing a V7/IV when their professor wanted German sixth notation, and the opposite direction too. The book won't save you from that mismatch. The download situation is tricky. The Bach original harmonizations are public domain. You can find complete PDFs of the five-part Kantaten editions and the Neudecker edition on IMSLP without any issues. But the specific Belwin Mills compilation with their editorial apparatus, their ordering, and their analysis markings is likely still under copyright in some jurisdictions. The original Belwin Mills publication dates vary by reprint, and some reprints are from the mid-twentieth century which may have had renewals filed. I'd check the specific edition's copyright page before sharing a scanned copy anywhere. The safest route is buying a used copy, which runs around eight to fifteen dollars depending on condition, or accessing it through your school library's reserves if your institution has one.

For actual study, the most effective approach isn't to analyze all forty-five chorales linearly from one to forty-five. Start with the diatonic ones first, the straightforward four-chord progressions that establish the baseline voice-leading patterns. BWV 246, 255, and 274 are good starting points. Then move into the ones with secondary dominants, which appear around numbers twenty through thirty in the standard ordering. The chromatic modulations come later, and those are where the real learning happens. If you try to tackle the whole collection straight through in order, you'll spend most of your time on material you've already absorbed by chorale twelve and then hit a wall when you reach the difficult ones without enough foundational practice behind you. The biggest limitation of this book as a standalone resource is that it assumes you already know basic four-part writing rules. If you're picking it up without having completed a full year of music theory, you'll struggle. The analysis footnotes assume familiarity with terms like "deceptive progression," "neighbor chord," and "pedal point" without explaining them. There's no introductory chapter on how to read figured bass either, even though several of the less common harmonizations use abbreviations you'd need to decode. Pair it with a proper theory textbook if you're working through it independently, or just use it as a supplement to a classroom course rather than a primary learning tool. What this book does well is give you a manageable number of chorales to work through thoroughly. One hundred and one sounds like a lot, but the Belwin edition actually contains forty-five fully realized chorales and fifty-six melody fragments for student harmonization. That's a workable scope. You can complete serious analysis and rewriting exercises on the forty-five in a semester. The melody fragments are useful for homework assignments but less valuable for self-study since you don't get the full solution set printed in the same volume. You'd need to cross-reference with a separate answer key or solution manual, which Belwin also published separately and is harder to find now.

If you're looking for a free alternative that covers similar ground, the Neue Bach-Ausgabe chorales are available through the Bach Digital project. They're the original sources with more editorial rigor and no copyright issues, but the interface is academic and not student-friendly. For a balance between accessibility and legality, scanning the public-domain five-part versions and comparing them to the four-part harmonizations in this book is a legitimate study method that doesn't infringe on Belwin's editorial contributions.