Jean-Philippe Rameau · section 105 of 109

CHAPTER XVIII. Rules necessary for good accompaniment

1°. Before placing your hands on the keyboard, examine the key and mode of the piece, its meter and its tempo. See whether the mode, meter or clef changes during the piece. Attend to the figures carried by the notes, and to any ♯ or ♭ signs associated with them. Consider the bass progression so as to make up for missing figures. In a word, put all our preceding rules into practice.

2°. Your accompaniment must suit the character of the voices and of the airs, entering into the spirit of the words—or, if there are no words, the expression of the air alone. Its strength must also be proportioned to that of the voices or instruments, so that you neither overwhelm them with excessive sound nor, by the opposite fault, fail to support them sufficiently. According to the circumstances, you may double in the left hand the chords played by the right, excepting dissonances from this rule; or you may remove octaves, or even certain dissonances, from the chords.

3°. When the sound of a harpsichord or theorbo dies away, you may repeat the same chord. Preferably do so on the first beat of the measure rather than on another beat, and with the final syllable of a word. Repeating a chord in the middle of a word, or even in the middle of a phrase, may often prevent its meaning from being understood. This is unnecessary on the organ, since its sounds are “contained” [printed wording; the supplement corrects this to “continuous”].

4°. Keep your chords in the middle of the keyboard as far as the bass permits. When you must shift their position, try to do so on the same chord, or at least after a consonant chord, never after a dissonant one. You cannot always control this, since unexpected changes in the bass may make it rise or fall by two octaves at the composer's whim. To shift chords in this way, if you see or feel that a key in the chord you are holding can also serve the chord to which you must move, place the lowest finger on that key when moving upward, or the highest finger when moving downward. The hand should not lift: the change of position should result from the movement of a single finger taking another's place. This lets you keep your eyes on the book. Remember also the manner in which we have said chords should be arpeggiated.

As for accompanying without figures, although all our rules concern this subject, those of composition must also be added. Even with all this, success will be difficult unless the ear, taste and fingers anticipate conscious knowledge. Nothing therefore equals training the ear in good and true harmony through frequent practice of the preceding principles.