Bach chorales are very suitable to develop a sense for harmony. Chorales are relatively short and the are strophic, therefore they can be used and presented line by line to practise systematically diverse aspects of harmony. You should just "have" them. I use the serie of 371 Choräle. To befound at IMSLP: 371 Choräle. I use use also the paper edition of Breitkopf & Härtel Wiesbaden.
They can be used for a diversity of goals:
- learning to listen to outer voices, and play these or notate them as a dictation exercise
- learning to listen to cadential patterns, because each line has some kind of closure
- naming chord sequences (degrees, chord symbols, cadence types)
- recognizing ornamental aspects in harmony
- play (along) outer voices on a keyboard instrument (also perfectly doable for non-keyboars players and you experience how outer voices behave and control the overall harmonic setting
- ...
The chorales I share here come from the Mattheus Passion, Johannes Passion and the Weihnachtsoratorium. You can play them line by line (real performance) with an audioclip for each line. Play along with voices is very beneficial, do it with a digital piano tuned down a half step. All audiofragments use A = 415Hz.
The Bach chorales that are handed down to us are very varied. Ulrich Kaiser (Der Vierstimmige Satz) gives a useful typology:
- mostly homorhythmic setting (note to note) with minimal movement in eighth notes
- "walking bass" in eighth note movement in combination with mostly a quarter note movement in other voices
- eighth note movement divided between A, T and B, with sixteenth notes sparingly used
- chorales in which contrapuntal segments are inserted.
I will add tags to the chorales, so that you will be able to select them by type.
(Technical info: The chorales were imported from the Corpus of Music21 into Finale, with a Finale script converted to a four part SATB setting on two staves, the layout was adapted to be able to make a suitable image of each line. Audio was recorded with Audacity from Spotify, in Audacity markers were added in order to be able to generate and export audioclips. And lastly the necessary files were put in web pages, 1 web page for 1 chorale with audioclips as embedded audio).