ground bass

ground bass, in music, a short, recurring melodic pattern in the bass part of a composition that serves as the principal structural element. Prototypical instances are found in 13th-century French vocal motets as well as in 15th-century European dances, where a recurrent melody served as a cantus firmus, or fixed theme. With the rise of idiomatic instrumental music in the 16th century, the practice of improvising or composing new melodies above a repeated bass pattern became widely popular, especially in music for the lute and guitar (especially in Italy, England, and Spain) and harpsichord (especially in England); this practice, known in Spanish music as diferencias and elsewhere in Europe as divisions, is an early manifestation of the technique of theme and variations.

Some familiar ground bass patterns, or grounds, came to be identified by name. One favourite dance, the bergamasca, used a simple ground built on the scale degrees I-IV-V-I in two bars (as, for example, in Ottorino Respighi’s Ancient Dances and Airs, Suite 2 (1923). Other well-known grounds, such as the passamezzo antico, romanesca, folia, ruggiero, and passamezzo moderno, took their names from dances that were popular throughout Europe. All such grounds used unchanging harmonic patterns (each note of the ground serving as the basis for a different chord) that in turn served as an essential framework for improvisation. The familiar folk song “Greensleeves” has often been arranged with either the passamezzo antico or the closely related romanesca as a harmonic bass.

In the Baroque era the melodic basso ostinato became incorporated into more rigorously structured forms of continuous variation, such as the chaconne and passacaglia. Some examples are Claudio Monteverdi, Zefiro torna (1614); Henry Purcell, “When I Am Laid in Earth” from Dido and Aeneas (first performed 1689); Johann Sebastian Bach, Cantata No. 78 (“Jesu, der du meine Seele”), Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor for organ (1708–17) and “Chaconne” from Partita in D Minor for solo violin (1720); Ludwig van Beethoven, 32 Variations in C Minor (first performed 1806); Johannes Brahms, Variations on a Theme by Haydn (1873); and Alban Berg, Altenberg Lieder, Opus 4, No. 5 (1912). Bach’s famous Aria with 30 Variations (1742), called Goldberg Variations, is based on a 32-bar harmonic bass pattern that is slightly varied at each repetition but conserves its essential outline throughout the work.

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Compositions called carillon used a melodic ostinato, not necessarily in the bass, to suggest a repeating peal of bells; for example, the carillon in Georges Bizet’s l’Arlésienne (1872) has a three-note ostinato. In the 20th century, ostinato patterns became widely used in jazz (notably in forms such as 12-bar blues and boogie-woogie).