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1. Introduction
Counterpoint is the coherent combination of distinct melodic lines in music, and the quality that best fulfils the aesthetic principle of unity in diversity. Before the 20th century, coherence and unity were achieved in contrapuntal music by adherence to rules of voice-leading predicated on the distinction between consonance and dissonance, and the need for the latter to resolve on to the former. In post-tonal music, contrapuntal lines may follow principles of symmetry (often mirror symmetry) and complementation, the pitches of one voice not duplicating those of other voices, within the span of a phrase or other structural unit. But for music to be truly contrapuntal there must always be a balance between independence and interdependence, and this is as true of a canon by Webern as of a fugue by Bach.
2. Early history
Counterpoint arises when the natural procedure of two or more voices singing exactly the same melody an octave or some other interval apart is modified, so that the voices are no longer heard in rhythmic unison. For counterpoint to be aesthetically and technically acceptable, however, the differences between the contrapuntal voices must not undermine the perceived coherence of the musical result.
Counterpoint is likely to be most immediately perceptible when the distinct voices use the same material in close proximity. This is the case when a texture is heterophonic, or when the form is that of round, canon, fugue, or some other genre in which the imitation of a leading voice by others is fundamental. But there is another kind of counterpoint, in which unity in diversity is achieved differently. Here there might be a single, slow-moving line, a tenor or cantus firmus, round which other more florid lines are arranged in ways that make it clear to the ear that these lines are decorating or embellishing the framework provided by the principal line (Ex. 1, from the Credo of Dufay's Missa 'L'Homme armé'). The chaconnes and passacaglias of the tonal era also acknowledge this principle of decorative counterpoints moving against a recurrent pattern. In such counterpoint, it is all the more important that some governing principle, ensuring that the independent lines still combine to make musical sense, should be apparent to the ear; and for most of the history of music that principle has been subsumed under basic rules of voice-leading which embody perceptions about the distinctions between intervals that are stable (consonant, or perfect) and those that are unstable (dissonant, imperfect).
3. Theory
Counterpoint came to prominence in music as a means whereby composers could exploit the ability of singers to demonstrate their skills at carrying independent lines in combination. The sacred vocal polyphony of medieval and Renaissance times, culminating in the masses and motets of Palestrina, was a powerful embodiment of the ability of music to reflect the sublimity and intensity of religious belief, and also of the increasing perception that such a sense of ritual depended on a no less intense need for order and control. (Ex. 2, from the Credo of Palestrina's Missa 'Quando lieta sperai', illustrates the balance of independence and interdependence typical of Renaissance counterpoint.) It was therefore natural and right that, as society came to recognize the role of composers as individuals dedicated to the provision of music which served its purposes in the most efficient and effective manner, the need arose for manuals that identified the ways in which such provision could be guaranteed and offered methods of procedure to aspiring composers, derived where possible from study of the works of well-established masters. Such treatises would usually seek to establish the legitimacy of their subject matter by recounting the history, as it was then known, of the ways in which musical intervals and modes, or scales, had evolved from the time of the Ancient Greeks and early fathers of the church, in order to ground prescriptions for contemporary practice in the most convincing way.
The culmination of this process during the 16th-century High Renaissance was Gioseffo Zarlino's Le istitutioni harmoniche (1558), the title of which in English translation, The Art of Counterpoint (not 'harmony'), offers a neat confirmation of the ambiguity of basic musical terminology. At the heart of Zarlino's treatise is the attempt to define how 'an artful union of diverse sounds reduced to concordance' could be achieved, and Zarlino's four basic principles not only codified existing practice but set the standards which have remained valid for any composer wishing to remain within the framework of the traditional modal or tonal language.
In brief, these principles require: the subordination of dissonance to consonance, within clearly defined rhythmic and metrical contexts; the creation of an equable balance between difference and similarity of direction and melodic shape in all the independent voices; the use of specific modes to govern the harmonic, vertical relations between voices, and within which the main cadences of a work are placed; and control over rhythmic diversity by means of regular successions of strong and weak beats. As is usual with pedagogical prescription encoding existing practice, such strategies were likely to be resisted and rejected by the radicals of the time, and as new vocal genres (opera, cantata) came into being around 1600, and instruments gained new prominence in music of all kinds, laws relevant to purely vocal polyphony might be deemed archaic and irrelevantly restrictive. In fact, Zarlino's laws were no less adaptable than the modal system itself, and as modality transmuted into tonality, so the laws of vocal counterpoint became relevant to the bass-orientated, chordally conceived harmonic-contrapuntal complexes of the Baroque era, which reached their technical and stylistic fulfilment in the passacaglias and fugues of J. S. Bach. (See Ex. 3, from Bach's great G minor Fugue for organ BWV542.)
It was part and parcel of the intellectual ferment of the 18th century that an element of principled antiquarianism should become increasingly influential over ideas about education and creativity. Johann Joseph Fux's Gradus ad Parnassum (1725) is notable for stepping back from any primary concern with contemporary compositional practice, and even though the a cappella style of unaccompanied vocal polyphony was still in use in the early 18th century, Fux included no analyses of Handel or Bach in his text. Instead he sought to create an ideal world of basic contrapuntal practice in terms of elementary yet fundamental principles involving mode, cantus firmus, and contrapuntal voices, governed, in the simplest rhythmic and formal contexts, by the laws of voice-leading. Fux's treatise was not a composition manual to the extent that those later theory texts which referred in considerable detail to actual works by composers of the time aspired to be. But the clarity and conviction with which Gradus ad Parnassum defined and demonstrated basic contrapuntal practices ensured its long life and immense influence, culminating in Schenker's incorporation of Fuxian principles in his theoretical exposition of 'free composition'.
4. Later history
The forms and procedures of contrapuntal composition survived the development of more chromatic harmonic perspectives and the new generic and textural initiatives of the 19th century. A fugue, or some other multi-voice design, like the extended vocal and orchestral ensemble which ends Act II of Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, was still an appropriate way of achieving the composer's aesthetic goals: and the basic musical laws governing tonality—whether conceived primarily as chordal and harmonic, or as contrapuntal—remained in force. Moreover, the 19th century's strong feeling of respect for tradition meant that some of its most powerful products—Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, Bruckner's symphonic developments, Brahms's many elaborate polyphonic structures—served to reinscribe the virtues of a contrapuntal practice which took legitimacy from the way it built new and even radical structures on recognizably ancient foundations.
5. Post-tonal counterpoint
With the Schoenbergian 'emancipation of the dissonance'—something evident in Debussy, Ives, Skryabin, and other early 20th-century composers as much as in Schoenberg himself—the old Fuxian rules were swept away, and it has often been argued that there has been no more obvious and inept demonstration of the horrors of 'wrong-note composition' than in thoroughgoing post-tonal polyphony, like Webern's Movement for String Trio of 1925 (Ex. 4), or in imitative textures where obvious similarity of melodic shape is cut adrift from the laws of good combination which governed them in tonal times. Such criticism denies to post-tonal music the capacity for suggesting the ebb and flow of tension and release: but the counter-argument is that these qualities can still be achieved, even in the absence of the consonance-dissonance relation and the rhythmic conventions of tonal counterpoint.
In any case, many 20th-century composers of post-tonal music alluded to the contrapuntal strategies of earlier times, from cantus-firmus-based polyphony to canon and fugue, in ways which make determined efforts to free such procedures from the constraints of traditional tonal voice-leading, while not suggesting that the resulting polyphony is merely arbitrary, governed by no elements of aural discrimination. In this respect, 20th-century counterpoint, like that of Peter Maxwell Davies, has more in common with the pioneering, visionary polyphony of a Machaut or Dufay (see Ex. 1) than with the more explicitly integrated procedures which replaced them. The crucial point is that coherence can be achieved even when the constraints in operation are not those of traditional modal or tonal practice.
It nevertheless remains true that we cannot abstract general principles of contrapuntal procedure from Webern or Maxwell Davies which are comparable to those deducible from Palestrina or Bach. At the same time, post-tonal composers recognize the value of the kind of rhythmic controls that balance the voices against each other, and they also seek to ensure that the succession of intervals, from both linear and vertical viewpoints, balances similarity and difference while creating a musical atmosphere appropriate to the chosen text. Coherence in Webern is as much to do with equilibrium as it is in Bach, and even though Webern's counterpoint crosses the great divide from something recalling the 'natural' polyphonic practice of singers who start from the absolute authority of perfect intervals (particularly the octave), it can often be perceived in terms of a stable axis of symmetry, which functions as a centre and point of focus for the polyphonic lines that move above and below that centre.
With more experimental kinds of 20th-century composition, like that of Cage, the mutually supportive yet independent lines of traditional counterpoint transmute into the elements of collage or montage in which conjunction is accidental and even arbitrary. To the extent that the listener can still find these unexpected combinations stimulating and attractive, the contrapuntal principle remains positively at work, and only when clashes arise through simultaneities that appear pointless and unpleasant might counterpoint be felt to have been definitively abandoned.
Arnold Whittall
From The Oxford Companion to Music
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