At the end of a chapter of his Fundamentals of Musical Composition entitled ‘Advice for Self Criticism’, Arnold Schoenberg admonishes the beginning composer to: ‘watch the harmony; watch the root progressions; watch the bass line’. It is no surprise that he would direct the composer to harmony and root motion, the bread and butter of compositional training. But striking is his highlighting of the bass part, in effect saying nothing about the upper voice, to which listeners normally direct their hearing. Indeed, most composition treatises – from Riepel and Koch in the eighteenth century, through Marx, Lobe and Riemann in the nineteenth – employ musical examples that mostly show the soprano melody alone, thus supposing that readers will intuit the bass line on their own. Yet Schoenberg wants to focus on the lowest voice of the musical texture; and in so doing, he taps into another important source of compositional pedagogy, one reflected, for example, by the numerous partimenti treatises produced throughout those same two centuries, works that provide stock bass lines for learning improvisation and composition.

Now what does Schoenberg actually want the composer to watch for in the bass line? Earlier in the chapter, he briefly explains: