This feels advanced compared to the previous material. I will have to think this through quite a bit, but it will be worth it. Thank you for teaching material beyond what is presented in undergraduate theory classes. You are doing great and important work here.
Thanks for the great lesson Dr. Gran. I'm not sure I fully understand why the example at 19:20 can be considered a proper suspension with the note F moving during the resolution. As I understand in a suspension, the suspended voice will resolve while the other voices remain in oblique motion. Two exceptions are the bass which may sometimes move underneath, and consonant voices during the suspension, which is the A in the tenor in this case. The F in the soprano is neither of those, so it seems to me that moving it, while good for voice leading, makes this no longer a suspension in the strict sense of the word?
That is a good point that hadn't occurred to me. Fetis gives his example in the context of strict counterpoint, and it would be interesting to hear his take on this, but the Sechter example that showcases the same voice leading at 21:51 is given in the context of thoroughbass (free composition), and the voice leading there strikes me as irreproachable. But in any case, whatever is happening in the other voices, the bass clearly has a suspension I think. Felix Salzer used to give blended functions to chords, like labeling things "NP" for Neighbor-Passing, by which he meant that one of the voices is passing and another has a neighboring motion. Perhaps this is a voice leading chord composed of a suspension in the bass and some other function for that dissonant fourth. An accented passing tone? If it had remained on F, it would have formed the seventh of a dominant seventh chord like in the CPE Bach and Albrechtsberger examples, so in a certain sense it does not at that moment have an obligation to move, despite being a dissonance. "Obligation to move" is almost a synonym for dissonance. The fact that it does move (by step to a consonance) cannot really violate a rule, can it? I'm going to stop now because I'm giving myself a headache, lol.
I think he doesn't want the fourth to stay on a dissonance. It's not a proper way of preparation for the seventh (in strict composition) because it wasn't a consonnance just before.
Few books on harmony and counterpoint treat this subject the way you did Master Jacob..you you rig very deep to understand and explain it with great professional experience...thank you. Do you have a book that you wrote that we can buy to read a study. ...thank you.
Thank you, Franco. I am actually working on writing a textbook on this material right now, although I am still many months of work away from submitting it to publishers. If you are subscribed to the channel, then you will get updates about that project as it develops. Thank you!
Hello Dr. Gran, I would respectfully disagree with the statements made in the first section! All the chords would only be anticipations if they belonged to the subsequent harmony. But f.ex. in the first measure, the chord in the upper voice is just a d7 chord, whereas the bass voice holds a tonic suspension. It does not matter whether this happens on an upbeat or downbeat ...
There was an English translation of Seyfried's book from 1853 as _Louis van Beethoven's Studies in Thorough-Bass, Counterpoint and the Art of Scientific Composition_ that you can find on IMSLP and Archive.org. The problem is that it is very hard to read because the visuals don't make sense because of the way the clefs were written and how the visuals represent unisons and octaves. It only confused me because the top staves don't seem to have a treble clef. It's the same problem that plagued the original German version. I really wish there were either a modern edition of the same translation or a new English translation, along with a new English translation of Albrechtsberger's composition and thoroughbass book from 1790. It's amusing that Fux's book did get a modern English translation from Alfred Mann.
I agree on how useful new English editions of those books would be. There is no English translation I am aware of for Nottebohm’s Beethovens Studien, which is an updating of Seyfried’s project. That would make a good thesis project for a graduate student somewhere IMO.
It seems those book exercises are not by Beethoven. I read a 1970's article by Alfred Mann about Haydn counterpoint lesson to Beethoven when he comments that, those are not genuine Beethoven works, it was forged by Ignaz Seyfried.
8:38 I haven't seen anticipated dissonances in actual classical pieces, only anticipated consonances being dissonances during the anticipated chord, like the Chopin piece on the previous slide. Anticipating dissonances doesn't sound like a good idea. 12:00 I don't think suspensions resulting in presumably dissonant chords do much, you can barely hear the held note 2, they are just a voice leading artefact
I miss the 1:1 counter points lessons where I could easily understand and follow. Here I understand the concept but it's getter increasingly frustrating when I'm trying to follow the examples and / or compose my own.
I'm sorry to hear you are frustrated, and I admit I did not simplify or hold back in this video at all. This is probably graduate level music theory, but I think anyone can get it with the right amount of prerequisite knowledge and perspective. Do you own a copy of Gradus? I would recommend going through the three- and four-voice exercises in there using the simple species, which I glossed over in this video series but that are clearly a stepping stone on your way to this kind of combined species counterpoint.
@@JacobGran Hey Jacob, thanks for your reply. I do not own a copy of any book on the topic and I'm not a music graduate. I practically learn all of these from you videos 😅 I'm just wandering how is it worth for me to study and practice these or maybe understanding the concepts will be good enough to help me improve my own (free) compositions. Anyway even though I can't follow everything I did learn a lot of useful stuff from the videos so thanks!