Modal Counterpoint Renaissance Style

The only species counterpoint text that draws directly on Renaissance treatises, Modal Counterpoint, Renaissance Style, Second Edition, provides a conceptual framework to guide students through composition and analysis as it teaches them general structural principles. It distinguishes between technical requirements ("hard" rules) and stylistic guidelines ("soft" rules), and includes coordinated exercises that allow students to develop their skills systematically. The second edition integrates improvisation activities and new repertoire examples into many chapters; revises the chapter on three-part writing (Chapter 14) so that it pays more attention to rules and strategies; reworks the chapters on cadences (Chapter 10) and on writing two parts in mixed values (Chapter 11) to make them more accessible to students; incorporates clarified instructions throughout; and includes a summary of rules.

Modal Counterpoint, Renaissance Style introduces the rules for writing and analysing 16th-century music through a wide variety of carefully graded exercises. It begins with species counterpoint -- the method used to teach voice-leading and the treatment of consonances and dissonances in contrapuntal composition -- with exercises modelled on examples from among 1600. Unlike other books that bear little stylistic relation to the music of the period, this is the only text available that uses examples and concepts based on Renaissance treatises and contemporaneous theoretical sources. This book provides a conceptual framework that guides the students' writing and analysis and that teaches students the general principles of composition. The author's selection of Renaissance repertoire examples illustrates the range of possibilities within a given technical formula. The concluding chapters provide conceptual tools and formal schemes for building longer pieces, encouraging students to see analysis and composition as complementary activities. By the end of the book students are writing real compositions, not just drill exercises. Adapted from eight years of class testing, this textbook includes many helpful tools for students and teachers, including carefully chosen musical examples, different levels of student exercises with exercise blanks, historial asides explaining interesting and relevant issues of the period, a glossary of terms, brief information on theorists whose work was examined to make this text, and brief notes to the teacher. This book uniquely combines the stylistic accuracy of the "style-oriented" texts with more systematic species counterpoint approach, favoured by many as a pedagogical method.

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This is a comprehensive study of the development of counterpoint form the sixteenth century through the first half of the twentieth century. Deriving the rules of counterpoint from the music itself, each chapter begins with a complete musical example followed by questions for class discussion. Chapter observations and subsequent musical examples amplify the concepts discoverd through individual analysis. --book cover.

This book teaches Baroque compositional techniques through writing and improvisation exercises and analysis of repertoire examples. It provides readers with a historical outlook by focusing largely on principles taught in treatises from the period 1680–1780. This expanded edition includes new sections with keyboard exercises that provide training in Partimento performance as it was practiced at the time, helping students master Baroque style from the inside. While the focus of the book is on fugue, it also treats chorale preludes, stylized dances, inventions, and trio sonatas. The volume is divided into two parts—basic and advanced— which could be taught in a two-semester sequence. There are various options to introduce material from Part II into Part I for a one-semester course.

-- Stanley Persky, City University of New York

Practical work in writing counterpoint! Gauldin emphasizes the acquisition of writing skills in the contrapuntal discipline and the simulation of sixteenth-century sacred polyphonic idioms in this volume. The author follows a didactic method of a non-species or direct approach. While no previous contrapuntal training is necessary to absorb this material, some acquaintance with Baroque polyphonic terminology proves helpful. Key features include: musical examples illustrating specific devices are taken from musical literature or composed by the author; demonstrates the possibility of employing a single given pitch series within the contexts of different compositional techniques; includes a collection of complete or excerpted movements drawn from musical literature at the conclusion of each major textual division; emphasizes Palestrina and the Counter-Reformation sacred style; discusses various compositional procedures of the late Renaissance, including paraphrase, cantus firmus, familiar style, parody, polychoral technique, and chromaticism.

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.