What is Counterpoint?
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- KVRist
- 200 posts since 23 Dec, 2008 from Canterbury, Kent, UK
"Contrapunctistic"? Don't you mean "Contrapuntal"?
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- KVRAF
- 8389 posts since 11 Apr, 2003 from back on the hillside again - but now with a garden!
"Contrapunctistic" is how Smiley and Nicey describe Gentle Giant 
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- KVRAF
- 3346 posts since 19 Mar, 2008 from germany
What is Counterpoint?
The expression "Counterpoint" comes from the classical music:
In every orchestra practise all the musicians don't play
all the time, some have to pause. In the boring time of the
pause they count the points on their score sheets. These are
called the "Counterpoints".
The expression "Counterpoint" comes from the classical music:
In every orchestra practise all the musicians don't play
all the time, some have to pause. In the boring time of the
pause they count the points on their score sheets. These are
called the "Counterpoints".
Last edited by enroe on Thu Jan 22, 2009 10:48 am, edited 1 time in total.
free mp3s + info: andy-enroe.de songs + weird stuff: enroe.de
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- KVRist
- 200 posts since 23 Dec, 2008 from Canterbury, Kent, UK
Well portion me sideways, and call me Herbert!
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- KVRian
- Topic Starter
- 1084 posts since 12 Sep, 2008 from Your basement
Okay, here was the original rant about counterpoint restored to its original self-amused and grandiose state...
When I was an undergrad music student way back in the day, I was excited to learn in depth the "mechanics of music" from those who could teach me how music was put together.
I had all the usual questions that musicians ask, like, "How do you figure out where to go harmonically?" "What makes a musical phrase great? Is it the melody, the harmony or the rhythm?" "How did my favorite composers develop their ideas? Did they start with a melody and apply a harmonization to it, or the other way around?" "Or was it just 'genetic magic' that can be discussed in a classroom but not learned?"
Well you can imagine that I was in for a big shock. You may have had the same big shock as well. The big shock is that theory teachers had a lot to say about Handel, Mozart, and Ravel's musical vocabulary, but it was sort of hard to actually apply it.
If you sat down with a good old fashioned Bach chorale in SATB, you can learn to analyze the triads and "non-harmonic tones," etc. Sometimes Bach uses an "inversion" of a chord. Okay, WHY did he do that?
"Well," explained the learned theory teacher, "Bach had the opportunity to utilize an inversion there."
"What about the bass movement? Why did Bach step into that dissonant harmony and leap out of it?"
"Well, Bach had an opportunity to use an accented 'non chord tone' there. So he did for the purposes of adding interest."
Oh! Opportunity. Okay, so good harmonization is all about correctly selecting the right opportunity? How do you know what those are? "Well, Bach had a great deal of facility." Undoubtedly.
The problem was, after about six semesters of this, I had the distinct feeling that I wasn't really gaining much insight. The classes on form and analysis weren't much help either.
It was as though I was to learn clock making and so we students and teacher gathered together to open up a Swiss clock, yank out a gear, hold it up and say, "62-tooth gear!" Then pull out a spring, hold it up and proudly proclaim, "4 inch spring with a tension of 22 pounds!"
How much insight do we really have about the relationship between the spring and the gear? Do we understand how these to work together to actually function as a clock? Or are we just labeling parts and pieces? Isn't this sort of a useless analysis if we try to apply it to our own clock making?
On the other hand, as junior clock makers we can TALK about springs and gears and rods. We have a common vocabulary, which is good. But we don't yet have any insight.
Quite by accident I came upon a book in the library that hadn't been checked out in a few years. It was a very slender volume called "The Study of Counterpoint." The text was taken from a nearly 300 year old treatise by a name I hadn't heard before.
Fux.
But apparently, according to the introduction, the content of this meager little book was praised by J.S. Bach, thoroughly learned and consumed by Mozart and Haydn, studied by Beethoven, and loved by Brahms. Okay, you've got my attention.
Intrigued I looked for my own copy of the book to see what it was all about. But it wasn't exactly a best seller. So I was 'forced' to tell the library that I lost their copy and paid some ridiculous price for the book (fines included).
The more I researched the more I discovered that this little volume from Fux's, "Gradus ad Parnassum" was a sort of de facto resource for teaching music step-by-step to eager young musicians in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was a distillation of the voiceleading style of Palestrina, but more a distillation of the guidelines of good voiceleading for any style or era. It was a book about the 'essence' of writing voices, without a lot of emphasis on style or trend or genre-based details. Sort of a set of 'pure' elements where in painting you might find a book on how to draw lines, circles, shapes and curves.
So I set to work on my own journey through the book. I spent every night drinking pots of coffee, smoking packs of cigarettes and doing "species counterpoint" directly from the book. (I don't smoke anymore, but I still love counterpoint.)
In that same period of time, I learned that there was another hugely influential theoretician of the 18th century. A French cat by the name of Rameau. Rameau was a brilliant man who took a completely revolutionary view of harmony. His idea was so revolutionary and brilliant that every student of music and even every musical amateur speaks this language today.
Rameau said, look, if you take all the consonances that you can possibly stuff above a bass note you get three different note names in total. You can, therefore, think of any three consonances and derive a "root" note from it. Maybe the root note is not the bass note at the time. Maybe the root note is in the alto or tenor or even in the soprano.
So then if that's true, you can look at a piece of music and ask, "What are the root notes of each harmony?" Then you can start to see that a cadence can be formed by a root progression from the second note in the scale (or the fourth) to the fifth note in the scale, and finally to everyone's satisfaction, to the first degree of the scale. Voila!
But what about the notes built on the seventh degree of the scale? That's dissonant. "Oh yes, that's an exception. It's a 'diminished chord'. It WOULD be consonant but the tonality forces the fifth above the root to be diminished rather than perfect."
Okay so now you've got consonant units called triads and one dissonant triad. But what about all those other notes in there?
"Oh, those are non-harmonic tones." You have to use special rules of voice leading to handle them because they are dissonant.
Gotcha.
So now we have taken a very complex set of principles that involve the interaction between notes (both vertically and horizontally) and their relative activation and deactivation as tendency tones which point the music to various tonal regions and subregions and provide a sort of musical "logic" and have reduced it to consonant units with associated "non-harmonic tones," and then some general voiceleading rules.
So when a musician is presented with a melody, the first thing to do is to figure out all the root movements that are implied by the melody and then apply the correct triads, with little non-harmonic tones sprinkled in, all while deftly handling dissonance and avoiding parallel perfect consonances.
If you've been through the western musical mill, this should sound familiar. The thing is, is that this approach works. But looking at root progressions is kind of limiting, to say the least. It presents a kind of rigid logic in music that requires a phrase to be bent in various shapes by heavy tools. Want to modulate to a new tonal area? No problem! Just take an opportunity to throw in a secondary dominant and...just a second here.....kind of.....*OOF!*...bend it around......and....*ugh!*.......*AH!* There you go! Now we are in a new temporary key!
Elegant, no?
So now let's apply this approach to writing our own music. Hmm... kind of exhausting isn't it? All that bending with pliers, vices and hammers! A real workout... And it SOUNDS kind of rigid too, like listening to someone lift heavy weights in a gymnasium.
But applying counterpoint analysis yields different information about a phrase. Suddenly there is a different type of logic at work which is more like working with soft, pliable clay rather than bending steel rods. Why did Mozart's bass move up chromatically in bar 19? Because by doing so, he has allowed the melody to want to resolve downward a whole step when the bass moves a half-step upward again. There is a sequential relationship between the parts, and there is a fluid, dynamic "activation" and "deactivation" of the tendency properties of each note that drives the phrase forward to its conclusion.
So in counterpoint, we have something to say about CONTEXT. While Rameau shoots the bird, nails it to a plank and labels its parts, counterpoint reveals the dynamic relationship between the bird, the wings, the air, and the direction. It teaches flight.
With a thorough grounding in counterpoint, one can listen to Bill Evans differently as well. Jazz is taught as a series of chords and scales. But the really good players defy this simplistic reduction. It seems magical and unfathomable, until some counterpoint analysis reveals the melodic engines that propel a great tune forward.
In fact, it seems that the phrase logic that missing from Rameau is still being applied in music in spite of chord-based music education rather than because of it. Rameau, in his simplification of the mechanics of music to dwell on root progressions only succeeds in widening the gap between the musical "haves" and the "have nots" due to the difficulty one is presented in applying the principles to actual composition.
So unless one has "got it" you probably won't "get it."
And now, it seems that because of Rameau, history has been rewritten as well. We now are taught that counterpoint is a technique that Bach used to compose fugues but that Mozart "didn't use counterpoint" to compose that beautiful homophonic aria with one soprano singing the melody while the strings sustained their support below.
One employs counterpoint and the other doesn't right?
Nope.
They both employ counterpoint. In fact both examples employ exactly the SAME amount of counterpoint.
Today the term counterpoint is used synonymously with "many independent voices, especially imitative fugue and canon." We talk in these forums of "contrapuntal textures" (which is a bit like saying 'mauve database') and we discuss things like "a harmonic structure that provides the basis of counterpoint" but in the original sense of the word, counterpoint is really the study of relationships between notes in context.
When looking up the entry for counterpoint in that definitive source of all human knowledge, Wikipedia, I was pleasantly surprised by the definition at the beginning of the article, and the approach that the information was provided throughtout. It begins:
In music, counterpoint is the relationship between two or more voices that are independent in contour and rhythm, and interdependent in harmony.
Not bad... I take issue with the emphasis on "independent in contour and rhythm" but the rest seems to capture what is really going on. To help me make my point, all you have to do is to look in the old Gradus ad Parnassum. Joe Fux really makes it easy for us to learn the stuff, and we don't get into "florid" counterpoint until we have mastered writing sustained whole notes under the relatively active cantus firmus. Not exactly fugue, eh? (Not even really independent at all!)
I am grateful for the time and effort I have put into the study of music because now I feel as though I can write the stuff without having to think too much about the theoretical pieces and parts. Last night I was using some dissonant harmonic "cells" and by transposing them around, was able to come up with something that was a suitable A section for my previously orphaned B section.
But underneath even this "cellular" approach was still some essence of counterpoint. I realized that if I altered the cells chromatically the second time through, I could tie back in to the tonality in the B section. There wasn't anything forced going on, it was a kind of inner realization. If I had only Rameau to guide me, I would have to bring the crowbar out, or perhaps improvise and wait for a happy accident.
If you are a musical "have" rather than a "have not" and you can put phrases together that work out elegantly, then I am genuinely happy for you. Perhaps you are relying on your knowledge of chord progressions but maybe you are mainly guided by your innate sense of musicality to propel the song forward.
But if your inner sense of musical structure needs some help and you are unsure "where to go," then it's possible to study the bird in its flight and learn to fly.
Shit, that was pretty corny right there. My apologies for that last part.
When I was an undergrad music student way back in the day, I was excited to learn in depth the "mechanics of music" from those who could teach me how music was put together.
I had all the usual questions that musicians ask, like, "How do you figure out where to go harmonically?" "What makes a musical phrase great? Is it the melody, the harmony or the rhythm?" "How did my favorite composers develop their ideas? Did they start with a melody and apply a harmonization to it, or the other way around?" "Or was it just 'genetic magic' that can be discussed in a classroom but not learned?"
Well you can imagine that I was in for a big shock. You may have had the same big shock as well. The big shock is that theory teachers had a lot to say about Handel, Mozart, and Ravel's musical vocabulary, but it was sort of hard to actually apply it.
If you sat down with a good old fashioned Bach chorale in SATB, you can learn to analyze the triads and "non-harmonic tones," etc. Sometimes Bach uses an "inversion" of a chord. Okay, WHY did he do that?
"Well," explained the learned theory teacher, "Bach had the opportunity to utilize an inversion there."
"What about the bass movement? Why did Bach step into that dissonant harmony and leap out of it?"
"Well, Bach had an opportunity to use an accented 'non chord tone' there. So he did for the purposes of adding interest."
Oh! Opportunity. Okay, so good harmonization is all about correctly selecting the right opportunity? How do you know what those are? "Well, Bach had a great deal of facility." Undoubtedly.
The problem was, after about six semesters of this, I had the distinct feeling that I wasn't really gaining much insight. The classes on form and analysis weren't much help either.
It was as though I was to learn clock making and so we students and teacher gathered together to open up a Swiss clock, yank out a gear, hold it up and say, "62-tooth gear!" Then pull out a spring, hold it up and proudly proclaim, "4 inch spring with a tension of 22 pounds!"
How much insight do we really have about the relationship between the spring and the gear? Do we understand how these to work together to actually function as a clock? Or are we just labeling parts and pieces? Isn't this sort of a useless analysis if we try to apply it to our own clock making?
On the other hand, as junior clock makers we can TALK about springs and gears and rods. We have a common vocabulary, which is good. But we don't yet have any insight.
Quite by accident I came upon a book in the library that hadn't been checked out in a few years. It was a very slender volume called "The Study of Counterpoint." The text was taken from a nearly 300 year old treatise by a name I hadn't heard before.
Fux.
But apparently, according to the introduction, the content of this meager little book was praised by J.S. Bach, thoroughly learned and consumed by Mozart and Haydn, studied by Beethoven, and loved by Brahms. Okay, you've got my attention.
Intrigued I looked for my own copy of the book to see what it was all about. But it wasn't exactly a best seller. So I was 'forced' to tell the library that I lost their copy and paid some ridiculous price for the book (fines included).
The more I researched the more I discovered that this little volume from Fux's, "Gradus ad Parnassum" was a sort of de facto resource for teaching music step-by-step to eager young musicians in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was a distillation of the voiceleading style of Palestrina, but more a distillation of the guidelines of good voiceleading for any style or era. It was a book about the 'essence' of writing voices, without a lot of emphasis on style or trend or genre-based details. Sort of a set of 'pure' elements where in painting you might find a book on how to draw lines, circles, shapes and curves.
So I set to work on my own journey through the book. I spent every night drinking pots of coffee, smoking packs of cigarettes and doing "species counterpoint" directly from the book. (I don't smoke anymore, but I still love counterpoint.)
In that same period of time, I learned that there was another hugely influential theoretician of the 18th century. A French cat by the name of Rameau. Rameau was a brilliant man who took a completely revolutionary view of harmony. His idea was so revolutionary and brilliant that every student of music and even every musical amateur speaks this language today.
Rameau said, look, if you take all the consonances that you can possibly stuff above a bass note you get three different note names in total. You can, therefore, think of any three consonances and derive a "root" note from it. Maybe the root note is not the bass note at the time. Maybe the root note is in the alto or tenor or even in the soprano.
So then if that's true, you can look at a piece of music and ask, "What are the root notes of each harmony?" Then you can start to see that a cadence can be formed by a root progression from the second note in the scale (or the fourth) to the fifth note in the scale, and finally to everyone's satisfaction, to the first degree of the scale. Voila!
But what about the notes built on the seventh degree of the scale? That's dissonant. "Oh yes, that's an exception. It's a 'diminished chord'. It WOULD be consonant but the tonality forces the fifth above the root to be diminished rather than perfect."
Okay so now you've got consonant units called triads and one dissonant triad. But what about all those other notes in there?
"Oh, those are non-harmonic tones." You have to use special rules of voice leading to handle them because they are dissonant.
Gotcha.
So now we have taken a very complex set of principles that involve the interaction between notes (both vertically and horizontally) and their relative activation and deactivation as tendency tones which point the music to various tonal regions and subregions and provide a sort of musical "logic" and have reduced it to consonant units with associated "non-harmonic tones," and then some general voiceleading rules.
So when a musician is presented with a melody, the first thing to do is to figure out all the root movements that are implied by the melody and then apply the correct triads, with little non-harmonic tones sprinkled in, all while deftly handling dissonance and avoiding parallel perfect consonances.
If you've been through the western musical mill, this should sound familiar. The thing is, is that this approach works. But looking at root progressions is kind of limiting, to say the least. It presents a kind of rigid logic in music that requires a phrase to be bent in various shapes by heavy tools. Want to modulate to a new tonal area? No problem! Just take an opportunity to throw in a secondary dominant and...just a second here.....kind of.....*OOF!*...bend it around......and....*ugh!*.......*AH!* There you go! Now we are in a new temporary key!
Elegant, no?
So now let's apply this approach to writing our own music. Hmm... kind of exhausting isn't it? All that bending with pliers, vices and hammers! A real workout... And it SOUNDS kind of rigid too, like listening to someone lift heavy weights in a gymnasium.
But applying counterpoint analysis yields different information about a phrase. Suddenly there is a different type of logic at work which is more like working with soft, pliable clay rather than bending steel rods. Why did Mozart's bass move up chromatically in bar 19? Because by doing so, he has allowed the melody to want to resolve downward a whole step when the bass moves a half-step upward again. There is a sequential relationship between the parts, and there is a fluid, dynamic "activation" and "deactivation" of the tendency properties of each note that drives the phrase forward to its conclusion.
So in counterpoint, we have something to say about CONTEXT. While Rameau shoots the bird, nails it to a plank and labels its parts, counterpoint reveals the dynamic relationship between the bird, the wings, the air, and the direction. It teaches flight.
With a thorough grounding in counterpoint, one can listen to Bill Evans differently as well. Jazz is taught as a series of chords and scales. But the really good players defy this simplistic reduction. It seems magical and unfathomable, until some counterpoint analysis reveals the melodic engines that propel a great tune forward.
In fact, it seems that the phrase logic that missing from Rameau is still being applied in music in spite of chord-based music education rather than because of it. Rameau, in his simplification of the mechanics of music to dwell on root progressions only succeeds in widening the gap between the musical "haves" and the "have nots" due to the difficulty one is presented in applying the principles to actual composition.
So unless one has "got it" you probably won't "get it."
And now, it seems that because of Rameau, history has been rewritten as well. We now are taught that counterpoint is a technique that Bach used to compose fugues but that Mozart "didn't use counterpoint" to compose that beautiful homophonic aria with one soprano singing the melody while the strings sustained their support below.
One employs counterpoint and the other doesn't right?
Nope.
They both employ counterpoint. In fact both examples employ exactly the SAME amount of counterpoint.
Today the term counterpoint is used synonymously with "many independent voices, especially imitative fugue and canon." We talk in these forums of "contrapuntal textures" (which is a bit like saying 'mauve database') and we discuss things like "a harmonic structure that provides the basis of counterpoint" but in the original sense of the word, counterpoint is really the study of relationships between notes in context.
When looking up the entry for counterpoint in that definitive source of all human knowledge, Wikipedia, I was pleasantly surprised by the definition at the beginning of the article, and the approach that the information was provided throughtout. It begins:
In music, counterpoint is the relationship between two or more voices that are independent in contour and rhythm, and interdependent in harmony.
Not bad... I take issue with the emphasis on "independent in contour and rhythm" but the rest seems to capture what is really going on. To help me make my point, all you have to do is to look in the old Gradus ad Parnassum. Joe Fux really makes it easy for us to learn the stuff, and we don't get into "florid" counterpoint until we have mastered writing sustained whole notes under the relatively active cantus firmus. Not exactly fugue, eh? (Not even really independent at all!)
I am grateful for the time and effort I have put into the study of music because now I feel as though I can write the stuff without having to think too much about the theoretical pieces and parts. Last night I was using some dissonant harmonic "cells" and by transposing them around, was able to come up with something that was a suitable A section for my previously orphaned B section.
But underneath even this "cellular" approach was still some essence of counterpoint. I realized that if I altered the cells chromatically the second time through, I could tie back in to the tonality in the B section. There wasn't anything forced going on, it was a kind of inner realization. If I had only Rameau to guide me, I would have to bring the crowbar out, or perhaps improvise and wait for a happy accident.
If you are a musical "have" rather than a "have not" and you can put phrases together that work out elegantly, then I am genuinely happy for you. Perhaps you are relying on your knowledge of chord progressions but maybe you are mainly guided by your innate sense of musicality to propel the song forward.
But if your inner sense of musical structure needs some help and you are unsure "where to go," then it's possible to study the bird in its flight and learn to fly.
Shit, that was pretty corny right there. My apologies for that last part.
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- KVRist
- 200 posts since 23 Dec, 2008 from Canterbury, Kent, UK
Ogg, my respect for you has increased ten-fold!!
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- KVRAF
- 11162 posts since 16 Mar, 2003 from Porto - Portugal
Ho Ogg:
You captured the very essence of this, IMO
I congratulate you for the elegantly written and well thought insight, and I basically subscribe everything.
Oh, and regarding "contrapunctistic" vs "contrapuntal". You are probably right. I'm not a native english speaking guy, and sometimes my hand escapes towards my latin origins
You captured the very essence of this, IMO
I congratulate you for the elegantly written and well thought insight, and I basically subscribe everything.Oh, and regarding "contrapunctistic" vs "contrapuntal". You are probably right. I'm not a native english speaking guy, and sometimes my hand escapes towards my latin origins
Fernando (FMR)
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- KVRAF
- 8389 posts since 11 Apr, 2003 from back on the hillside again - but now with a garden!
...must resist temptation to hit 'reply with quote' to Ogg's post and write 'me too'...
Great post
DSP
Great post
DSP
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- KVRian
- 1116 posts since 18 Jan, 2004 from Los Angeles, California, USA
Great post Ogg, but I would supplement it slightly.
The original wording comes from "punctus contra punctum", translated either literally as "point against point", taken more liberally as "voice against voice" or "note against note". The key word here is "against". Thus the emphasis on independence.
I agree with you that counterpoint can from the backbone of an effective analysis of pieces by many composers, not just the ones known for effectively employing it. However, not all composers were in fact actively thinking about the independence of the voices and it is fair to say that there are many compositions where one voice is a "slave" to another, rather than independant from it.
If we go back to the earliest recorded music written down in Europe by the church, we find that harmonization was static. The preferred intervals between voices changed over time, as did the preferred rhythm or "tactus".
It seems important to differentiate between whether a composer was more concerned about completing a chord, completing a texture or maintaining the strength of several independent lines, and thus the differentiation between contrapuntal and homophonic writing is helpful, rather than hurtful.
Did the great masters you mentioned know counterpoint? You bet. Was it always their primary consideration? No. Just take a look at the chordal emphasis of so many G.F. Handel compositions and it easy to see that he wasn't particularly concerned about any form of independence but rather in creating strong chords.
At it's most basic, the dichotomy seems to be between "horizontal composition" and "vertical compostion".
With all that said, I think that counterpoint should be considered an essential part of the music theory curriculum, just like the study of harmony and form and analysis.
Here are some useful resources for anyone seeking to study the topic independantly:
Here is the WikiPedia article Ogg mentioned earlier:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpoint
The counterpoint analysis and practice program "Counterpointer" by Ars Nova, for Mac and PC. Last time I checked, it was the only widely available program of its kind.
http://www.ars-nova.com/cp/
An updated text on counterpoint, based upon the principles of Fux but different from Fux's own text.
http://www.truespec.com/counterpoint-by-fux-p-266.html
The original wording comes from "punctus contra punctum", translated either literally as "point against point", taken more liberally as "voice against voice" or "note against note". The key word here is "against". Thus the emphasis on independence.
I agree with you that counterpoint can from the backbone of an effective analysis of pieces by many composers, not just the ones known for effectively employing it. However, not all composers were in fact actively thinking about the independence of the voices and it is fair to say that there are many compositions where one voice is a "slave" to another, rather than independant from it.
If we go back to the earliest recorded music written down in Europe by the church, we find that harmonization was static. The preferred intervals between voices changed over time, as did the preferred rhythm or "tactus".
It seems important to differentiate between whether a composer was more concerned about completing a chord, completing a texture or maintaining the strength of several independent lines, and thus the differentiation between contrapuntal and homophonic writing is helpful, rather than hurtful.
Did the great masters you mentioned know counterpoint? You bet. Was it always their primary consideration? No. Just take a look at the chordal emphasis of so many G.F. Handel compositions and it easy to see that he wasn't particularly concerned about any form of independence but rather in creating strong chords.
At it's most basic, the dichotomy seems to be between "horizontal composition" and "vertical compostion".
With all that said, I think that counterpoint should be considered an essential part of the music theory curriculum, just like the study of harmony and form and analysis.
Here are some useful resources for anyone seeking to study the topic independantly:
Here is the WikiPedia article Ogg mentioned earlier:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpoint
The counterpoint analysis and practice program "Counterpointer" by Ars Nova, for Mac and PC. Last time I checked, it was the only widely available program of its kind.
http://www.ars-nova.com/cp/
An updated text on counterpoint, based upon the principles of Fux but different from Fux's own text.
http://www.truespec.com/counterpoint-by-fux-p-266.html
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- KVRian
- Topic Starter
- 1084 posts since 12 Sep, 2008 from Your basement
Wonderful posting and intelligent thought, but I don't agree with your point quoted here. Again the confusion is counterpoint and polyphony (not how Korg and Roland use the term).Per Lichtman wrote: Did the great masters you mentioned know counterpoint? You bet. Was it always their primary consideration? No. Just take a look at the chordal emphasis of so many G.F. Handel compositions and it easy to see that he wasn't particularly concerned about any form of independence but rather in creating strong chords.
Here's the thing. In the most "static" or homophonic aria of Handel, the approach is still counterpoint. The concept of chords or triads was not the point of emphasis.
If you caught Handel after a performance backstage and said, "Whoa George, I totally love how your Hallelujah Chorus went back and forth between the tonic and sub-dominant. That chord progression was so f**king sick the king couldn't even stay in his seat!"
He would not know what you were talking about. "Chord progression?" He didn't think in those terms or have that language. He didn't study Rameau. He studied and applied Palestrinian principles of voices and treating consonance and dissonance in a post-Palestrinian world.
If you study counterpoint and work out whole notes in four parts against a moving cantus firmus (VERY homophonic), you get very lovely consonance (and dissonance) that CAN be expressed in Rameauian terms ("oh yeah, tonic to supertonic-six to dominant-four-three-of-the-dominant to tonic-six-four, dominant seventh to tonic," etc.) or if you're Jack Johnson you'd say, "D, Em/G, E7/G#, D/A, A7, D".
Anyway, I hope I don't sound like a pompous ass. I just love this stuff and it changed how I think about music and writing. I also can totally SEE the limitations of Rameauian chord progression-based theory, although I suppose I use that too sometimes and it's good to know. Thanks for the great discussions.
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- KVRAF
- 6519 posts since 13 Mar, 2002 from UK
More than well worth posting.
For anyone wondering what all the fux is about, there's a stripped-down summary here ... http://www.thereelscore.com/PortfolioSt ... intFux.pdf
For anyone wondering what all the fux is about, there's a stripped-down summary here ... http://www.thereelscore.com/PortfolioSt ... intFux.pdf
Now with improved MIDI jitter!
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- KVRian
- Topic Starter
- 1084 posts since 12 Sep, 2008 from Your basement
That's pretty cool! Some of it is stripped down, but some of it is added to.nuffink wrote:More than well worth posting.
For anyone wondering what all the fux is about, there's a stripped-down summary here ... http://www.thereelscore.com/PortfolioSt ... intFux.pdf
I liked this: the interval 'mi' = B natural (hard hexachord) and
'fa' = F natural (natural hexachord) creating aug 4th
- use Bb to create P4 or P5 interval
The quote I remember from Fux on the Aug 4th that makes me laugh:
Alloysium: "Mi against Fa is the devil in music" (diabolus musicum)
Last edited by Ogg Vorbis on Wed Jan 21, 2009 5:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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- KVRist
- 200 posts since 23 Dec, 2008 from Canterbury, Kent, UK
That's very true. Although key signatures were not used tonally in Palestrina's day, one would often find a Bb in the 'key signature' to avoid the 'devil's interval' (Aug 4th). Because they weren't writing in keys, they would often start on the white notes, writing in modes, and if they strayed towards the Locrian mode, as they were wont to do, they would have to rely on the Bb flat to avoid this awkward interval.
To us tonal thinkers, their 'perfect cadence' was called 'the final' and would signify the key (mode) that the piece would end in. However, each voice had its own formula at the end of a piece (although composers would swap them around). Their final chord did not have a third either.
On the final, the Tenorisan notes would be 'ray' followed by 'doh' (moving a 2nd downwards as opposed to a 7th upwards). However, if the interval turned out to be just a semitone, it was apparent that the piece had ended in Phrygian mode (or Locrian mode with a Bb).
The Bassisan notes were written as 'soh' followed by 'doh', anchoring the 'dominant' and 'tonic' of the final mode.
The Altisan notes were 'soh' followed by 'soh', often tied to produce just one note.
The Cantisan (soprano) was the most complicated as it involved a suspension and would start half a note before the rest on 'doh' and change half a note after the others had started to 'tee' and then up to 'doh' on the final chord.
(note: no third).
I really hope that I've explained that clearly enough. I must say, this forum's great for allowing me to hark back to my university days when I was studying Renaissance analysis.
To us tonal thinkers, their 'perfect cadence' was called 'the final' and would signify the key (mode) that the piece would end in. However, each voice had its own formula at the end of a piece (although composers would swap them around). Their final chord did not have a third either.
On the final, the Tenorisan notes would be 'ray' followed by 'doh' (moving a 2nd downwards as opposed to a 7th upwards). However, if the interval turned out to be just a semitone, it was apparent that the piece had ended in Phrygian mode (or Locrian mode with a Bb).
The Bassisan notes were written as 'soh' followed by 'doh', anchoring the 'dominant' and 'tonic' of the final mode.
The Altisan notes were 'soh' followed by 'soh', often tied to produce just one note.
The Cantisan (soprano) was the most complicated as it involved a suspension and would start half a note before the rest on 'doh' and change half a note after the others had started to 'tee' and then up to 'doh' on the final chord.
(note: no third).
I really hope that I've explained that clearly enough. I must say, this forum's great for allowing me to hark back to my university days when I was studying Renaissance analysis.
Last edited by alphabetgreen on Wed Jan 21, 2009 5:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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- KVRist
- 200 posts since 23 Dec, 2008 from Canterbury, Kent, UK
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- KVRist
- 200 posts since 23 Dec, 2008 from Canterbury, Kent, UK
And so it came to pass...... Amen
Last edited by alphabetgreen on Wed Jan 21, 2009 5:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.