(Ger.: ‘thoroughbass’ or
Continuo). The term itself was taken by Niedt (Musicalische Handleitung, i, Hamburg, 1700) to reflect the fact that the continuo bass line contains all or nearly all the other parts generaliter or insgemein (‘in common’). Earlier, in 1611, C. Vincentius had called a bass part he added to Schadaeus’s Promptuarium musicum the basin vulgo generalem dictam. But generalis is not German and cannot be a translation of ‘continuo’; rather it was one of the optional names for figured or unfigured bass parts, like basso principale (Orfeo Vecchi, Missarum liber secundus, 1598 and In septem Regii Prophetae psalmos, 1601), basso generale (Fattorini, 1600; Billi, 1601), sectione gravium partium ad organistarum usum (Zucchini, 1602), basso continuo (Viadana, 1602) and basso continuato (Girolamo Calestani, 1603). That Viadana’s so-called continuo bass part was, unlike the others, independent of the vocal bass may or may not be significant in this respect. Praetorius (Syntagma musicum, iii, Wolfenbüttel, 2/1619) headed his chapter on this subject ‘De basso generali seu continuo’, and he may have meant to give the two as optional alternative names; later German theorists such as Johann Staden (Kurz und einfältig Bericht, Nuremberg, 1626), Heinrich Albert (prefaces to Arien, i–ii, Königsberg, 1638–40) and Wolfgang Ebner (1653) either followed Praetorius in using both terms or kept only bassis generalis, in which they were followed by all later writers. The term Generalbass became a kind of synecdoche for the science of harmony in general; to learn Generalbass (or, as in France after Rameau, the basse fondamentale) meant to learn the science of tonal harmony, made more direct and clear by figured harmony than by the old German keyboard tablatures. Many writers from 1650 to 1850 scarcely mentioned the art of figured bass accompaniment in their treatises on Generalbass.
A further instructive use was as the basis for keyboard improvisation, either in the form of Partimento (as in Mattheson's Exemplarische Organisten-Probe, Hamburg, 1719) or as a harmonic framework on which to build a free improvisation (as in Niedt's Musicalische Handleitung, ii, Hamburg, 1706 and C.P.E. Bach's Versuch, ii, Berlin, 1762). Conversely, a composition could be reduced to its underlying harmonic structure in the form of a Fundamental bass, as demonstrated by Rameau (1722 onwards) and J.A.P. Schulz (1773). Instructive and analytical uses of Generalbass continued throughout the 19th century, as reflected by the large number of Generalbass and thoroughbass tutors published in Germany and England. Many composers also continued to use it as a form of shorthand notation in the process of composition. It gained new impetus in the theory of analysis through the influence that C.P.E. Bach's discussion of improvisation and the Generalbassregeln attributed to J.S. Bach had on the development of Heinrich Schenker's system. More recently it has lent itself again to instructive use in educational computer programs. For further analytical uses of figures see Notation, §III, 4(viii).
See also Thoroughbass.
J.S. Bach: Vorschriften und Grundsätze zum vierstimmigen Spielen des General-Bass oder Accompagnement (Leipzig, 1738); ed. and trans. P.L. Poulin (Oxford, 1994)
P. Benary: Die deutsche Kompositionslehre des 18. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1961)
W. Heimann: Der Generalbass-Satz und seine Rolle in Bachs Choral-Satz (Munich, 1973)
D.W. Beach: ‘The Origins of Harmonic Analysis’, JMT, xviii (1974), 274–306
W. Schenkmann: ‘Mattheson's “Forty-eight” and their Commentaries’, MR, xlii (1981), 9–21
A. Mann: ‘Bach and Handel as Teachers of Thoroughbass’, Bach, Handel, Scarlatti, ed. P. Williams (Cambridge, 1985), 245–57
R.W. Wason: Viennese Harmonic Theory from Albrechtsberger to Schenker and Schoenberg (Ann Arbor, 1985/R)
I. Bent and W. Drabkin: Analysis (London, 1987)
T. Christensen: ‘The Règle de l'octave in Thorough-Bass Theory and Practice’, AcM, lxiv (1992), 91–117
J. Lester: Compositional Theory in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1992)
S.M. Schwanauer: ‘A Learning Machine for Tonal Composition’, Machine Models of Music, ed. S.M. Schwanauer and D.A. Levitt (Cambridge, MA, 1993), 511–32
PETER WILLIAMS/DAVID LEDBETTER