Preface
Introduction
The teaching of counterpoint has a long and illustrious history, but its pedagogy is all too often abstracted from musical reality. Perhaps more than any other musical discipline, counterpoint has bred ingrown academic traditions whose relevance to musical practice often seems painfully limited. For example, I recently taught fugue to a good graduate of a major European conservatory, and discovered that his experience of counterpoint was limited to three years of exercises in 4/4 time with canti in whole notes. While this sort of work may be appropriate for a beginner, it hardly constitutes a complete preparation for most of the real life applications of counterpoint --- or even, for that matter, for composing a musically convincing fugue.The main problem with scholastic approaches is that they generally substitute rigid rules for flexible general principles, and thus fail to provide guidance in enough varied musical situations to be really useful in practice. At best, of course, an inspiring teacher can fill in the gaps and make the subject seem relevant. But at worst, the student is constrained by a hodge-podge of inconsistent rules, and wastes a great deal of time struggling to avoid situations that are musically unimportant. A common fault is to confuse practical rules — say, about the range of a human voice — with pedagogical stages. The former are general principles, which cannot be avoided if the music is to be performable at all; the latter by contrast are by nature temporary, rules of thumb to avoid common elementary problems, or to force the student to concentrate on a particular problem and to avoid others that might be confusing. If such pedagogical constraints are presented as global rules, they lead quickly to nonsense.
Here our aim will be to explain contrapuntal issues so as to provide the most general applications possible. We will approach counterpoint as a form of training in musical composition instead of as a discipline in itself. We will try to define general principles of counterpoint not rigidly, but in ways that are transferable to real musical situations, and which are not limited to the style of one period.
This is not a textbook: We will not repeat in detail information easily available elsewhere. We will also not propose a detailed method, complete with exercises, although the specifics of such a method are easily derived from our approach, and indeed have been tested by me in the classroom for years.
In short, this book is more about the "why" of counterpoint than the "what".
The pedagogy of counterpoint
The pedagogy of counterpoint is often a confused mix of style and method. Most approaches limit themselves more or less closely to one style, making some attempt at graduated exercises, often derived from the species method of Fux.Fux’ method does have pedagogical value, but its advantages are best understood independently of stylistic issues. The main advantages to the species approach, especially for beginners, are:
- By eliminating explicit variety of rhythm in the first four species, and by imposing stable harmonic rhythm, it frees the student to concentrate on line and dissonance. (I say "explicit variety of rhythm" because even in a line in steady quarter notes, changes of direction imply some rhythmic groupings)
- The use of a supplied cantus in whole notes provides a skeleton for the overall form, freeing the student from having to plan a complete harmonic structure from scratch.
- The limitation to the most elementary harmonies simplifies the understanding of dissonance.
- The emphasis on vocal writing provides an excellent starting point for contrapuntal study, for three main reasons:
- Every student has a voice.
- Most traditional instruments are designed to sing, that is to say to imitate the voice.
- Instruments are much more varied in construction and idiom than voices.
- The avoidance of motives, at least in the earlier stages, frees the student from the formal consequences they engender.
- The progression from two part, to three part and four part (etc.) writing is logical, although creating harmonic fullness in two parts poses some unique problems.
- Each of the first four species focuses effectively on just one or two elements:
- The first species, eschewing dissonance completely, forces concentration on relationships of contour.
- The second species introduces the problem of balancing the three simplest forms of linear development between two harmonies: Static elaboration (neighbor notes), gradual development (passing tones), and more dramatic leaping movement (arpeggiation).
- The third species introduces other idioms for linear development between harmonies: The succession of two passing tones (including the relatively accented passing tone); combinations of passing tones, neighbor notes, and arpeggiation, and (depending on the teacher’s preference) perhaps the cambiata and double neighbor figures as well. In fact, third species counterpoint corresponds almost exactly to the ancient tradition of "differencias", wherein the student systematically explores all possible ways of filling in the space between two chord tones with a given number of notes. (The technique of differencias was part of the training both of composers and performers; the latter frequently needed to be able to improvise ornamentation.) Schoenberg’s "Preliminary Exercises in Counterpoint" uses a variant of this method.
- The fourth species focuses on suspensions. With suspensions, for the first time, the student encounters melody and harmony out of phase on the strong beat of the bar and the start of more elaborate patterns of elaboration.
- The fifth species, the culmination of all the previous ones, provides preliminary work in rhythmic flexibility. Apart from a few more elaborate idioms like the various ornamental resolutions for suspensions, the student mainly works on controlling rhythmic momentum (but without motives).
- Finally, the mixed species exercises, used in some pedagogical traditions, provide an introduction to stratified textures, and encourage exploration of simultaneous dissonances while maintaining a clear harmonic context.
Other approaches to learning counterpoint are usually directly style based, for the most part either attempting to imitate either Palestrina or Bach. While they vary in efficacy, they share a serious limitation: In teaching a specific style, general principles are easily obscured. Also, as Roger Sessions points out, in the Foreword to his excellent Harmonic Practice, for a composer, a style is never a closed set of limitations, but a constantly evolving language. For these reasons, this approach seems more appropriate for training musicologists than composers.
Whatever the pedagogical regime, there are two essentials for any successful study of counterpoint:
- Students must sing the individual lines aloud in turn while listening to the others. The other lines should be sung by other students or played on the keyboard. This is contrapuntal ear training: It directs attention to various lines in turn with the others as background. It leads to an intimate knowledge of the music’s inner details, that is otherwise unattainable.
- Quantity counts: the more exercises the student does of each type, the more he becomes familiar with the ways in which notes can be combined. Since the basic movements between chord tones are relatively limited (see below), after a while, many patterns become familiar.
Finally, we would recommend that any counterpoint exercise, from the simplest to the most elaborate, be discussed as a real composition, with a beginning, a development, and an end. This is the only way to evaluate counterpoint that will be consistently relevant to the real problems faced by a composer.
Stylistic Assumptions
If we are to see counterpoint in this way - as an aspect of composition and not as a self-contained discipline - we must define the limits of our approach. We repeat here some of our remarks in the first book of this series:It is difficult to teach composition without making at least some assumptions about formal requirements. The crux of our argument here is that many basic notions enumerated here result from the nature of musical hearing. Let us make clear some of the assumptions behind the phrase "musical hearing".
We assume first that the composer is writing music meant to be listened to for its own sake, and not as accompaniment to something else. This requires, at a minimum, provoking and sustaining the listener's interest in embarking on a musical journey in time, as well bringing the experience to a satisfactory conclusion. Thus, "musical hearing" implies here a sympathetic and attentive listener, at least some of whose psychological processes in listening to the work can be meaningfully discussed in general terms.
We will limit our discussion to western concert music. Non-western music, which often implies very different cultural expectations about the role of music in society or its effect on the individual, is thus excluded from our discussion.
Further, although some of the notions presented here may also apply to functional music (e.g. music for religious services, ceremonial occasions, commercials) all these situations impose significant external constraints on the form: The composer's formal decisions do not derive primarily from the needs of the musical material. In concert music, by contrast, the composer is exploring and elaborating the chosen material in such a way as to satisfy an attentive musical ear.
Despite my belief that counterpoint is best studied through tonal exercises (it is easier for a beginner to work within a familiar framework than to define a coherent language from scratch), the principles defined here will not be entirely limited to tonal music. The thoughtful reader will quickly see applications which do not depend on tonality.
© Alan Belkin, 2000. Legal proof of copyright exists. The material may be used free of charge provided that the author's name is included.