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A short bass pattern repeated again and again beneath changing upper parts.
Write the ground first and make it memorable and harmonically open — often four to eight bars, frequently a descending tetrachord, shaped so it can turn back on itself. The art then lies above it: vary the upper parts, let melodic phrases overlap the bass’s cadences so the repetitions do not chop the music into blocks, and build intensity across the repetitions. Purcell’s “When I am laid in earth” from Dido and Aeneas is the classic model.
Ground bass is one of 1755 terms in the Gradus musical dictionary: the words, abbreviations and instrument names that appear in printed scores, plus the vocabulary composers use to talk about them.
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