Beautiful. I must confess, I sincerely applauded after listening to your final result. It's just fifth species counterpoint, but it's incredible how sublime and joyful it already sounds... Thank you for all your efforts.
Notes: - Suspensions can be elaborated with re-articulations, anticipations, embellishing tones, escape tones, or mordent thingies 1:58 - Embellishing tones can influence shape of melody and delay resolution 2:55 - Quavers can fill in fourths but only on weak beats 3:36 - Dotted minims can be used on beat one to add rhythmic interest to 2:1 relations 4:37 - Rhythms should start slow, accelerate to climax, hold, accelerate again, and then glide back into the cadence, but should be well blended too 5:01 - Work from 4th species basis to maintain more equal interest 7:44
I really enjoyed that you provided an example of writing counterpoint from the lens of filling the rhythmic and harmonic needs for the Cantus. Thank you for making these.
I really love your series on species counterpoint but it would make me so happy if you could continue with it with 3 and 4 and possibly more voices. Most of these lectures somehow end in florid counterpoint in 2 voices. I realise that you explored more of harmonic analysis later but it would be a great insight for everyone if you could continue the species counterpoint like Fux did up to 4 voices. Thank you so much for these videos, it helps with my counterpoint practice.
That is a tricky question. Fux only allows the 7-3-6 pattern when he gets to fifth species, but you will notice that I included an 11-5-10 pattern in the 11th measure of the walkthrough at the end of this video, and I am open to the idea that there could also be others. The question is tricky because these embellishing tone leaps rely on a notion of arpeggiation through an implied harmony, which, properly speaking, belongs to the study of free composition rather than strict two-voice counterpoint. So the embellishing tones that Fux allows are already a kind of exception to the rules he lays down. Such leaps happen all the time in freely composed music, but whether any particular one is permitted in a species exercise will depend on the strictness and taste of the composer.
Very Good point it's my video and you can't stop me. Well maybe it's a lesson on how to break rules, yours is a good point and does make better counterpoint so I give you an "A" 73
Above the second G note in the CF, it sounds like that first half note should be embellished so that it becomes a quarter note plus two eighth notes, to repeat the rhythm in the previous measure; it seems to me that the melody is "asking for" the repetition. Same for that last D note in the CF.
THanks again for this video Dr Gran. In all these excercises the CF is always using whole notes but I wanted to compose something with a bit of rhythmic variation in the bass voice CF as well. Do the rules here change if I was to use a CF that had quarter notes or perhaps even 8th notes or do the "strong" and "weak" positions still apply? For example, if I had a bass note in my CF on beat 1 & 2, does that change anything for the second beat or do all the same rules apply? The reason I ask is because in real music, a bass line will be in several different positions... sometimes on strong and sometimes on weak beats and I am trying to understand how things might work when composing to a real bassline as opposed to a simplistic whole note CF.
Great question! Hopefully you will have gained some experience composing moving basslines when you compose counterpoints below the CF, and that experience will help when composing real music. The CF is sort of like training wheels on a bicycle, and at some point we need to take the training wheels off. In a species exercise, the CF is always the slowest moving voice (whole notes). Other voices may move just as slowly, but only repeated whole notes in 1st species can really be considered slower. This slowest moving voice gives us a frame of reference to measure voice leading dissonance, such as passing tones and suspensions. In real music, the role played by the slowest moving voice is distributed around the texture, instead of permanently being found in the CF voice; sometimes the bass moves slowest, sometimes the alto, etc. We can still recognize passing tones and suspensions and all the other voice leading patterns from the strict exercises, but they will occur with a better polyphonic effect because they are more evenly spread out. The rules remain almost entirely the same (with the exceptions pointed out in the subsequent videos in the playlist). I don't know if that addresses your exact question, but I hope it helps.
Hey Jacob, I know this is probably a bit of a daft question but I noticed in these examples that there are quite a few instances in your solution where melodic tritones are outlined between B and F. I also thought that skipping by a third from F and then continuing the descent still outlines that tritone if no recovery is made. Is this allowed in tonal counterpoint compared to species?
@@Vasioth Ah ok. The rule as it is often given is not to 'outline" a tritone or other dissonant interval, which means that it should not form the boundary for a melodic segment (meaning the local highest and lowest notes). In that passage the melody is descending from high G to G an octave below, passing through both the notes F and B, so an octave is being outlined not the diminished fifth between B and F. Imagine this example in 2nd species: B D | F E | D || 3 5 10 9 6 CF: G | D | F || Here the countermelody has B and D on adjacent downbeats and outlines a dissonant interval. If we change the weak beat of the first measure to G, forming an octave above the CF, suddenly the outline disappears because F is not the highest local note. B G | F E | D || 3 8 10 9 6 CF: G | D | F ||
@JacobGran thank you so much for that explanation that really clarified things, I totally misunderstood what was being meant by dissonant melodic outlines.
We can use any of the cadences from the previous species, including decorated 7-6 suspensions from 4th species. In most of the examples I've seen, the composer chooses not to in order to let the melody "slow down" near the end (faster note values go in the middle of the exercise) but Mozart adds eighth note decorations to his suspension at the cadence more often than not.
@@JacobGran That was my impression from the example in the video (preserve the bare 7-6 suspension to slow down); it is useful to know that it is allowed to change. And thank you very much for this entire video series! It's given me something very fun to do this summer, and very well-explained.
So that's what it's called. Bach uses this alot in his cantatas like Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott. Beethoven used this in the ninth and the allegreto from the seventh symphony. My favorite example is bach st mathew passion though.
Jacob start by learning intervals also learn basic chord progressions. I was wondering why not start in counterpoint but I have to try it before telling someone else. I learned music theory years ago using the green text book by Walter Piston. That was back in late seventies. I never took counterpoint. I been listening to these videos but haven't done any exercises. I'm working at a job and can listen to you tube. 73
The entire Neue Mozart Ausgabe is available online at dme.mozarteum.at/nmaonline/ and legible facsimiles of the studies with Attwood can be found in series X, the supplement.
