Reddit mentions of 371 Harmonized Chorales and 69 Chorale Melodies with Figured Bass

Basso Continuo (Figured Bass)-You do not need to learn how to read it fluently or anything, but it is the building block of the composers of that time. This is especially prevalent in the Baroque period. Study it, play it, listen for it. This helps to truly understand and write good cadences and tropes of that time.

Bach - Bach is king when it comes to tonal harmony and modulation.
Study his Harmonized Chorales and learn how he constructs his harmonic phrasing and cadences.

Counterpoint - I used this book by Kent Kennan. Learn the basics of good voice leading. This is a huge subject and requires study and practice, but it is crucial to replicating the music. This will help you develop the tools needed to construct the forms and sounds of that time.

This is a good starting place. Keep in mind people spend entire lifetimes learning this stuff. God speed.

One thing you could do is get a chorale book - they are mostly note-against-note four part settings of melodies. Coupled with generally simple progressions, and that the fact that there are very few non-chord tones like passing tones and the like, it makes for a very good starting point for basic harmonic analysis.

Many countries have their own chorale books with texts in the native language, sometimes published by the church, on IMSLP the only one I found relatively quickly was an old English one: http://imslp.org/wiki/The_Chorale_Book_for_England_%28Various%29

When you want something slightly more advanced you can start looking at chorale settings outside of chorale books, for example this collection with Bach chorales (I use it for sight reading and figured bass reading, plus it's good to have such a large collection to beat people over the head with when you run into voice leading misconceptions): http://www.amazon.com/Harmonized-Chorales-Chorale-Melodies-Figured/dp/0793525748

Not all chorale books have that great harmonisations (being from Sweden I have a Swedish one which truth be told contains some pretty crappy ones), but the one up on IMSLP looked to be pretty decent.

musictheory.net has some lessons on chord progressions and such which might be of help.


edit: here are a whole bunch of Bach chorales on IMSLP: http://imslp.org/wiki/Chorale_Harmonisations,_BWV_1-438_%28Bach,_Johann_Sebastian%29 , once again though they might be a bit hard to start out with.

I have this book which is great. It's all 371 Bach chorales (4-voiced harmonizations of typical contemporary religious melodies, along with some new melodies) in a solid volume, at a pretty good price often.

My suggestions are going to be very simple. I highly recommend you don't try to skip anything thinking it's too easy for where you are. This is how you end up with lots of gaps. I speak from deeply personal experience and some of the best improvements in my playing have come from realizing that unless it's easy enough that I can sightread it perfectly and effortlessly the first time, it's worth working. Every small thing even in children's beginner books helps build that scaffolding that remove ability gaps and helps you be a better and more consistent player.

>1) get some classic stuff that we learn at the begining and

Not entirely clear about what you want in terms of if you just want the basics or you specifically mean you want some classical style stuff. Either way, here are some recommendations.

Alfred All-In-One - This is just a generally good book to work through with a lot of fairly basic stuff mostly sticking to a very small harmonic palette used in a ton of music. You can carry on to level 2 and 3 when you're done.

Masterwork Classics - If you're looking for actual simple literature, this is a great place to start. Very easy pieces and a great progressive series of books.

Burgmuller Op. 100 - Probably a it more challenging, but great progressive stuff as well and very classical.

Czerny Op. 139 - More progressive goodness.

Czerny Op. 821 - Not progressive, but lots of very short, bite-sized exercises that isolate specific things that show up in classical music, but in a fun musical way rather than just dull exercises.

>2) get better at sight-reading. I have lots of gaps in my piano skills.

Progressive Sightreading - These are ridiculously easy, but this is really where you should start. They are easy enough to let you be successful quickly and focus on keeping your eyes on the page because they are all within a 5 finger pattern reach covering all keys.

Paul Harris books - These are progressive sets of books that slowly introduce specific concepts. My favorite part about them is the articulations and stylistic directions that go beyond just having you hit the right notes, but have you actually thinking about how you want a piece to sound.

Mikrokosmos - These start a bit easy, but get hard very quickly. They also tend to not stick to predictable western harmony, which helps with getting your reading out of its comfort zone. Additionally, there tends to be a good deal more left hand motion and even melodies which really helps your left hand not just be the accompaniment hand.

Bach Chorales - I'm honestly not a huge fan, but some people swear by these. I would actually instead recommend finding a hymnal instead. These chorales are not only more difficult than most hymns, but will be extremely frustrating if you don't have a comfortable 10th.

In general, you should be learning lots of small pieces constantly. A huge part of sightreading is actually being technically capable. If you can't execute it technically, you can't read it. So find lots of pieces in a variety of styles that you can learn in no more than a week, or better, several of in a week. Lots of short focused pieces will chip away at very small weakness in your playing very quickly and efficiently. This will make your reading much better. Better technique and reading will lead to you being able to learn increasingly difficult music much faster. You'll likely find that something that once might've taken you a month to learn could be learned in a week. Something that could be learned in a week might be learned in a day or even sightread.

Try to remember when learning new, simple pieces, to try to keep your eyes on the page. Not matter how slow or out of tempo you need to go, really learn to trust your ability to feel the distances and shapes of chords you need to play. You might need to look early on for stuff that is more difficult for you, but try to get to a point where you don't need to look. When you can trust yourself in that regard, your reading ability will increase a ton.

If you want to study Bach and functional harmony, this should suit your needs. Starting with the chorales would be advisable, as they are much easier to study and will teach you everything you need to know about four-part writing. Once you have, though The Well-Tempered Clavier has been a major inspiration to many composers of keyboard music and will serve you just as well. Beethoven could apparently play all 48 from memory and drew on his knowledge of them in the creation of some of his later and greater works.

The Art of Fugue and the Goldberg Variations would also be great additions to your library someday, but for now the chorales and WTC should be fine.

As Friedso has already mentioned, Bach's music can be obtained freely (and legally) on IMSLP, also known as the Petrucci Music Library. There you will find multiple editions of the Art of Fugue, WTC, Goldberg Variations and more in PDF.

Hope this helps!

Look at some of the Chorales in riemenschneider, have a look at what Bach does.

Do you have a good edition you can point me to for this? Would this Reimenschneider edition be ok?

My approach is classically oriented and requires an ability to read music at a level found say at the beginning of intermediate piano lesson books-just to give an example of what I'm thinking of here.

J. S. Bach four part Chorales-tough to follow up on this. But understanding the rules becomes a task of inscrutable difficulty so these two books might help-could need require some additional tutoring on the side.

Robert Ottman's Elementary Harmony -Theory and Practice approachable but lacks some thoroughness. Available at the online booksellers too.

Harmony and Voice Leading (2nd Edition) /Aldwell and Schachter -very thorough, steep learning curve.

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WTC is awesome - maybe don't go THROUGH it per se, since the level of difficulty vary a lot. The Inventions and Sinfonias are a bit more consistent, and I think they're at a great level to practice bringing each line out, which is really the point.

As for getting comfortable with counterpoint in general, The Riemenschneider is essential. There are 69 chorales at the end for which only the figured bass is provided and you have to improvise the other three parts. It can be tough at first, but your musicianship will skyrocket if you can get the hang of it.

I've been slacking on this skill, but I can tell you what my ideal method would be for this skill. Note that aural skills were the bane of my existence as an undergraduate, and my current struggles have probably kept me from full funding at the graduate level, which is why I've been woodshedding (I'll show them! I'll show them all!)

• Buy "A New Approach to Sight Singing, 4th Ed." (because the newest editions are too expensive) http://www.amazon.com/New-Approach-Sight-Singing-Fourth/dp/B000L3K71I. Why? Because the interval of a 4th (do --> fa, re --> so, mi --> la, so --> do, la --> re, ti --> mi) feels different in each of those contexts, relative to whatever is your tonic note. For that matter, so do all other intervals. At any rate, sing through Part I of each chapter, and then Part II of each chapter, etc. Expect this to take a long time. Expect to be frustrated when the keys go outside of a comfortable range (e.g. a major 2nd which is easy in G major is incredibly difficult in the key of B, a major 3rd above)
  
  
• Buy "371 Harmonized Chorales and 69 Chorale Melodies with Figured Bass" by J.S. Bach (http://www.amazon.com/Harmonized-Chorales-Chorale-Melodies-Figured/dp/0793525748), and play three voices while singing the other. This will also take forever. Use sol-fege
  
  
• Buy MacGAMUT (http://www.macgamut.com/) MacGAMUT looks really, really outdated. But it isn't--if you use Windows you'll need to get a Virtual MIDI Synth and some SoundFonts, because the way it sound out-of-the-box will probably hurt more than help. But where MacGAMUT succeeds is in it's refusal to coddle you as a musician. Either you know it or you don't. Expect to spend dozens of hours using the program. The most vital exercises are going to Melodic Dictation and Harmonic Dictation. They are both difficult and will require you to use staff paper. But they work.
  
  
• If you are fortunate enough to be studying music at the Undergraduate level or beyond, look for "error detection" methods in your music library. If you are not fortunate enough to be studying music but you have money, you can buy something like "Error Detection: Exercises for the Instrumental Conductor" for around $200. (http://www.jwpepper.com/10087652.item#.Vy0lh76b2CM)
  
  
• Realize that ear training is different for everybody. Some people just have great aural skills, and they will treat you like dirt because they'll wonder "why can't you hear that?" Others believe that aural skills are like athletic abilities and thus cannot be trained to a consistent standard. I disagree. I do think that ear training requires devotion and it is time-consuming, and the payout is not the same now when everything is on youtube than it was in the 17th-19th centuries when you had to be able to relay information accurately to other musicians. Consider that most of the educated populace had better skills with the visual arts before the age of photography and you have a striking parallel to music before the age of recordings.