Counterpoint

The Polyphonic Vocal Style of the Sixteenth Century

Knud Jeppesen

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780486318875
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Classical Music

This classic introductory text focuses on the polyphonic vocal style perfected by Palestrina. Unlike many other texts, it maintains a careful balance between theoretical and practical problems, between historical and systematic methodology. The result is an exceptionally useful resource, ideal for classroom use in teaching modal counterpoint.
In Part One, Knud Jeppesen (1892–1974), the world-renowned musicologist and leading authority on Palestrina, offers a superb outline history of contrapuntal theory. He begins by exploring the beginnings of contrapuntal theory from the ninth to the fourteenth centuries. This is followed by separate discussions of each succeeding century, the styles of Palestrina and Bach, the "Palestrina Movement" after Fux, and more. The section ends with illuminating coverage of notation, the ecclesiastical modes, melody, and harmony.
The second part of the book contains an extended treatment of "species" counterpoint in two, three, and four parts, as well as counterpoint in more than four parts, and specific discussions of the canon, the motet, and the Mass. Throughout, the text is generously supplied with musical examples?exercises, solutions, and illustrations, including many by the great composers. For this edition, the distinguished scholar Alfred Mann has contributed a new foreword to Jeppesen's classic study. Now available in paperback for the first time, it will be welcomed by musicians, composers, theorists, musicologists?any student of counterpoint and the Western musical tradition.

PART I

Preliminaries

Chapter I

OUTLINE HISTORY OF CONTRAPUNTAL THEORY

THE WORD counterpoint presumably originated in the beginning of the fourteenth century and was derived from punctus contra punc-tum, “point against point” or “note against note.”

COUNTERPOINT AND HARMONY CONTRASTED

When we use this expression today, we have a much more concrete, well-defined concept than was had formerly. In the Middle Ages and during a part of more modern times, counterpoint meant quite simply the same as polyphony. Today, however, we think of counterpoint as one particular style among other polyphonic types. Just as polyphony immediately suggests the contrasting idea, homophony, so the term counterpoint calls to mind the correlative concept, harmony. For us, music falls into two large divisions: polyphony, in which we perceive the chief structural elements in terms of melodic lines, that is to say, horizontally; and homophony, in which the fundamental consideration is the harmonic structure, or, as we may say, the vertical aspect of music.

These two styles or types of musical perception are distinguished particularly in the attitude towards chords. In harmony chords are presupposed: they are what is given and do not require any discussion; we submit ourselves to them and attempt to derive the laws for their treatment out of their reciprocal relations and inner states of tension. The situation is quite different in counterpoint: we begin not with chords but with melodic lines. Here chords are the result of several lines sounding simultaneously; hence they are product, not postulation. As always in matters of art, there arises a “not only… but also” relation: we must not only achieve this, but at the same time we must also give its due to a something else, which is hardly compatible. The problem is not only to write beautiful and independent melodies in all parts, but also at the same time to develop the chordal combinations as fully as possible. We must write fresh, lifelike harmonic progressions and yet preserve a natural, convincing voice leading. Most highly cultivated polyphonic music will hold up under investigation from either the linear or the harmonic viewpoint. The best results of contrapuntal and of harmonic instruction are, therefore, in the last analysis, almost identical. Indeed in counterpoint and in harmony we strive for the same ideals and work through the same materials, but the approaches are from opposite directions. This difference in the point of departure, however, has such a telling effect upon practice that it seems appropriate to maintain two disciplines where ideally one might be sufficient. For practical pedagogical reasons it is worth while to keep the subjects separate. If, on the other hand, a more scientific explanation of the causes of musical effects and laws is desired, then one viewpoint should not be isolated from the other. If we wish to know, for example, why a particular treatment in a harmonization is elastic and lifelike, we seldom find the answer in harmony alone. Usually special contrapuntal factors, such as voice leading, must also be taken into consideration, just as we could not get very far in the opposite situation without considering harmony. Many mistakes and misleading explanations in counterpoint and more especially in harmony are due to failure to understand this simple fact.

As has already been said, the point of departure is of very real practical significance. It is by no means immaterial whether we say, as in contrapuntal teaching, “First the lines and then, in spite of them, the best possible harmonies”; or, as in the teaching of harmony, “First the chords and afterwards, so far as possible, good voice leading.”

THE NINTH TO THE FOURTEENTH CENTURIES: THE BEGINNINGS OF CONTRAPUNTAL THEORY

Let us return to the history of counterpoint. Originally, as we know, counterpoint meant polyphonic composition or composition in general. The first textbooks of counterpoint that are known to us, although they do not use this term at all, are based, therefore, on the oldest form of European polyphonic music of which examples are preserved for us, on the so-called parallel organum (about 900 A. D.). By “parallei organum” is meant the principle of musical construction by which a principal voice or part, generally a sacred “Gregorian” melody, is accompanied by one or more voices (by doublings in octaves) chiefly in parallel fourths or fifths.

This technique of composition is so little in accord with later concepts of musical law and procedure that in the beginning of the past century, when a serious interest in the history and evolution of music was very much in evidence, people were inclined to look upon the Musica enchiriadis and the other treatises of Hucbald, Guido, and the other earliest writers, as purely free speculations and theoretical fancies. It was asserted that such a form of musical composition never existed at all, and what is more, from a viewpoint characteristic of the nineteenth century, one even spoke of its “moral impossibility.” In more recent times, however, especially through the investigations of comparative musicology, we have come to realize that song in parallel fourths and fifths is quite an ordinary phenomenon among peoples who, judged by our standards, are on a low musical plane. It is found, for example, among peoples of the Far East, among others in Burma, Siam, and China. Indeed it can still be heard in southern Europe, when people without musical training improvise in several parts. This oldest polyphonic theory, which plainly had some practical basis, is of course as primitive in character as the music upon which it is based. It has discovered that fourths and fifths sound good together, and it now exploits this discovery to the most extreme limits. Otherwise, however, it gives no further thought as to what might sound good together. Aside from the favorite intervals already mentioned, consonances and dissonances seem about equally good.

Hucbald

The treatise Musica enchiriadis, which was formerly attributed to Hucbald, contains a rule which prescribes certain restrictions with reference to the range of the free lower parts for the purpose of avoiding the dissonant fourth (tritonus). Remarkably enough, however, Hucbald himself does not even observe this rule logically. Besides, seconds, which are dissonances of much sharper character than those one was supposed to avoid, are introduced in the examples repeatedly. There is no reason why one should speak of any sort of dissonance treatment; the whole must be characterized as a very general preference for certain consonances on the one hand, and a not too logical avoidance of certain dissonant combinations on the other.

Contemporary music theory quite naturally reflects the evolution of polyphonic music in the course of the tenth and eleventh centuries. Parallel motion is gradually abandoned, partly to be replaced by the principle of consistent contrary motion (which is perhaps just as stiff and mechanical but musically much more fruitful) and partly to facilitate a freer treatment in general (which, as a matter of fact, was not unknown at an earlier date). Not until the music of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the so-called ars antiqua, do more stable rules for the treatment of the dissonance begin to develop and with them the rudiments of a real theory of counterpoint. Indeed, the theory of the treatment of the dissonance during this period shows that theorists gradually came to realize that there can be no talk of an art so long as melodic lines proceed with no regard for each other but ricochet along together without restraint in harsh, unclear tonal combinations. Here certain guarantees are required by the opposing viewpoint, by the vertical, the harmonic dimension. Only where tension exists between the two dimensions is polyphonic art in the deeper sense possible.

The Franconian Law

In the Franconian law, which seems to have come into being about the middle of the thirteenth century, we meet for the first time in the history of musical theory a genuine contrapuntal rule: “At the beginning of a measure in all modes (certain metrical orders), a consonance must be placed, regardless whether the first note is a long, a breve, or a semibreve.”¹

This law really pertains chiefly to rhythm, since it considers that so-called accented beats in the measure attract more attention, and are more prominent than the unaccented ones. It attains a validity which extends far beyond the time in which it was formulated. With a single exception, the suspension dissonance, which is more apparent than real, it continues in force as long as the classical vocal polyphony prevails. Not until about 1600, when modern music begins, is its force broken. Even then it exercises a certain influence which is, to be sure, rather hidden. One of the most important rules in the evolution of polyphonic music is thus comprehended by Franco and formulated for musical theory.

Another valuable advance in the endeavor to find a richer, more artistic style is the introduction of thirds and sixths, not merely as accidental harmonies, but as basic consonances, as factors upon which the musical structure primarily rests. The technique of the ars antiqua, on the other hand, is based chiefly on the fifth. If one examines a motet or any other polyphonic composition of the twelfth or thirteenth century, one finds fifths on most of the accented beats in the measure, combined for the most part with octaves. Thirds and sixths occur more incidentally, generally on the unaccented parts of the measure. They are thus used as dissonances, a circumstance that accords very well with the fact that throughout the greater part of the Middle Ages they were actually regarded as such and so classified. In the meantime, there are many indications that in western Europe, especially in England and perhaps also in Scandinavia, thirds and sixths were used at a time when in other places—where the art was nevertheless perhaps more highly developed (as in France)—the fifth and octave were still used. Statements of various medieval English theorists, it seems, as well as some contemporary musical works from the British Isles, must be understood in this sense. At any rate, towards the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century there is a whole series of important English composers who within a short time exercise an influence on the Continent, especially in the Netherlands and in France. The most important thing in the art of these masters, that which means most for further development, is a new and fruitful attitude toward the consonance and thereby naturally also toward the dissonance. While the position of the ars antiqua with respect to the matter of tonal combinations was rather indifferent and negative, and while about the only requirement was the demand for consonances on accented places (for the sake of transparency), this attitude seems from now on to take on a more positive form. The chord becomes a factor which receives careful attention, and between the melodic and harmonic elements a certain tension arises, in which the melodic for the time being has the supremacy, which, however, it gradually relinquishes in the course of the fifteenth century, so that the state of balance between homophonic and polyphonic factors in the Palestrina style is made possible only after renewed inroads of the harmonic-vertical element (this time apparently through the popular music form of the beginning of the sixteenth century in Italy, the frottola).

THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY: CRYSTALLIZATION OF PRINCIPLES

In the course of the fifteenth century the polyphonic art develops and becomes established, and as early as the middle of the century one can speak of a music that is in the modern sense intellectually mastered, and in which the non-essential—the most dangerous, but not always equally well-known enemy of all art—is forcibly put on the defensive. Now arise the first great composers whose art is aesthetically satisfactory to us today without further reservations. Among them are Dunstable, Dufay, Binchois, Ockeghem, and Busnois and, in intimate relation with the practice of these musicians, the first great theorist in the modern sense, the Fleming, Johannes de Verwere, or Tinctoris, as his name is written in Latin.

Tinctoris

Tinctoris lived in Naples as Chapelmaster at the court of Ferdinand I. He wrote, among other things, a treatise called De Contrapuncto in the year 1477. This dissertation is in Latin, like most of the literature on musical theory of that time. The introduction, a well-known prefatory discourse addressed to King Ferdi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Alfred Mann
• Introduction to The English Translation
• Preface
• Part I: Preliminaries
• Part II: Contrapuntal Exercises
• Appendix
• Index