Counterpoint and harmonic direction

Hi,

I have a vexing question that made me register at the forums. I'm self-taught in music and have been studying theory and composition by myself for my own amusement every now and then. Since getting interested in Renaissance music my interest has been rekindled and I've been toying again with species counterpoint (with Jeppesen's book) and canonic writing. I have always had insurmountable difficulty in directing the motion of music when using these horizontally-oriented techniques. I can't see the wood for the trees: I can produce formally correct texture that goes nowhere.

From what I understand, pre-Baroque music had no notion of chords (vertical harmony) as such. The Wikipedia article on homophony puts it this way:

In his textbook Jeppesen contrasts Palestrina's "bottom-up" style where, he says, harmony emerges from the interaction of independent horizontal lines as if as a byproduct, with a "top-down" method in Bach and in post-Renaissance music in general, in which a latent harmonic form is broken down into independent strands.

I have always taken all this to mean that, when working in the Palestrina style, one should not resort to conceiving a chord sequence first and then assembling a contrapuntal texture that implements an equivalent harmony; one should write horizontally from the get-go. When I set out to write something with this idea in mind, I find myself writing with my nose in the staff paper, so to speak, without seeing beyond the next barline, without a big picture.

There must be something that I'm missing with this subject. How did folks like Palestrina and Ockeghem approach the harmonic architecture of entire passages or pieces?

I would appreciate any insight on this.

In pre-baroque and baroque (except with the galant style and to some degree Bach) it turns out that there are various ways to write harmony. The most typical way is to have it guided by counterpoint, so that harmonies form by virtue of linear thinking. Palestrina is such case as well as many other composers.

But there's also the case of figured bass, which is chord-formations and harmony. Both things are designed in sense from counterpoint rather than vertical-chord thinking. That comes later.

It's really a case-by-case thing. Harmony in sense from form or tonal regions is treated differently as harmony in chord-by-chord basis. That's the key, really. You had things such as "modulate to X key" and you'd go in that direction, or the typical baroque "modulate to the dominant" thing.

As far as chorals and such is concerned, form is given by the cantus firmus or the melody you're doing the counterpoint for. You plan in virtue of the melody (by analyzing.) If you're doing something free you orient yourself by setting objectives like "go into G major" or "modulate to the relative minor" whatever. This is all very flexible, but an eye for structure is necessary than just writing lines on top of eachother.

Well, most claims regarding the use of harmony in Renaissance polyphony are slightly exaggerated. The truth is that they did utilize notions such as harmonic direction, but as you also mentioned, it was secondary as far as composing the actual music went (most of the time [see the first three bars of Palestrina's "O Magnum Mysterium" for a set derived purely from harmonic thinking]). Yes, few if any composers in the renaissance wrote out a chord progression first, but you still see enough V-I cadences so clearly something was going on.

So while they did care about the harmonic effect created and knew to an extent about harmonic functions, their prime concern was organizing the work contrapuntally. That the rules of counterpoint were observed was far more important than the harmony created by the observance of those rules.

As for how they approached harmonic motion, it was pretty much the same as how they approached melodic motion. That is to say that it was something not talked about very much (either because of musicians hidding their secrets or because such matters were simply taken for granted. Or both). In other words, there wasn't much of a real standard to fall back on regarding harmony and voice-leading besides the old "make it good" standard.

I was going to type more but got distracted and forgot what I was going to say, but all you really need to know is that all descriptions of music are, by definition, secondary to the music itself. Study scores over texts.

(most of the time [see the first three bars of Palestrina's "O Magnum Mysterium" for a set derived purely from harmonic thinking])

Debatable at best. For this to be true we would need to have clear evidence that he used that to write it, which we can't have. It could have been quite simply just a result of counterpoint, since counterpoint rules actually form chords such as major and minor triads, etc etc. You can end up with all sorts of seemingly "thought out harmony!" looking things just by following formulas that have nothing to do with that.

Yes, few if any composers in the renaissance wrote out a chord progression first, but you still see enough V-I cadences so clearly something was going on.

True, but things like "V-I cadences" also appear very easily just by following strict counterpoint rules between voices, so you can't always attribute this to "vertical harmonic thinking". Not saying that it didn't exist of course.

So, while it is certainly possible and probably that the renaissance composers sometimes thought about something like harmonic motion, many harmonically interesting passages can also come to exist when just concentrating on voice leading and not worrying about harmonic progression at all, since the counterpoint rules already contain a little harmonic "mini-system" that works very well on its own.

And this doesn't even apply solely to renaissance music, but can even be applied to a lot of music of the late 19th and 20th centuries. There are pieces by Schumann, Brahms or Wagner where an analysis based on voice leading, consonance/dissonance relationships, chromaticism, leading tones etc. might be much more suitable than a vertical harmonic analysis. And this gets even more pronounced when you go on to Sch

Thanks for your comments. Bite the bullet and study scores, I guess there's no way around it...

Gardener points out the 20th century connection; one of the things that I find particularly exciting and motivating about Renaissance polyphony this time around is its structural affinity to dodecaphony - a connection I had never realized before and something that is bound to lead to better understanding of serialism.

Belborn - You raised an interesting point which I hasn't been addressed in the subsequent posts.

You said that writing Renaissance polyphony has you looking just at the next barline. One of the challenges of Renaissance polyphony (though this exists with all compositional styles and even improvisation in various degree!) is creating a convincing melodic arc with counterpoint that supports and/or competes with it. If you have been reading the Jeppesson, you may recall he discusses the possible tonic and dominant point of the modes. This implies Rennaissance composers may have kept in mind a tone "point" to aim for with their counterpoint rather than a specific tonic chord/harmonic progression. If I recall Ockeghem did do this -- planned various cadential points for his works using text and what was considered the important tones of the mode. I recommend the Grout/Palisca History of Western Music with the Anthology of Western Music - they have a nice general discussion of Ockhegem's Missa De plus en plus. Also the 2 books of score selections is,in the long run, a huge budget saver - you get at least a part of many great classical works from Perotin and Gregorian Chant to Berio, Babbit. Note though the actual history text is not my favorite for comprehensiveness but as a thorough primer with a good bibliography (important for further exploration) and some excellent selections from the Western art music canon of the last 1000 years.

Want to add about composition organization during the Renaissance - as the music is is predominantly vocal the text plays a much stronger role in shaping the form and presentation. In the Ockghem example he uses the texts structure to establish in part the musical structure (just like pop today uses various formulations of the chorus/verse structure). Recall too that prior to the Rennaissance, many "composers" were poets/musician/troubadours -- Machaut being one of the most skilled --- therefore this heritage remains strong in the Rennaissance.

One last recommendation is to hear the composers of the late 16th and very early 17th century composers who continued with Rennaissance polyphonic practices. Late Lasssus and Gombert offer some interesting foreshadowings of the trends that arise in the late 19th and early 20th century. For Gombert, the constant elision of cadences create works with a seamless counterpoint and a weakened sense of the "tonics' and dominants of modes (ps. this is not the accurate terminology, I have to check the Jeppeson), in Lassus' late works his ever increasingly chromatic counterpoint creates a further dissolution of a sense of "mode" and in a few cases any sense of tonality.

Pardon the digressions but your experience raised some interesting ideas. Good luck with your study. I intend to return to my study of 16th century cterpoint from where I left off before this December. I want to get a handle of 4 voice ctrpoint and get to Jeppesson's chapters on Canon, vocal fugue and motet. Where are you at right in your study?

I intend to return to my study of 16th century cterpoint from where I left off before this December. I want to get a handle of 4 voice ctrpoint and get to Jeppesson's chapters on Canon, vocal fugue and motet. Where are you at right in your study?

Since reading the replies to this thread, I'm writing short two-voice canonic pieces with the goal of achieving focused sensible form.