Counterpoint I
This month I will begin a series about the teaching of the playing of counterpoint on keyboard instruments. There are several reasons why this is an important subject, one that can and should be considered as something meaningfully separate from other aspects of keyboard playing—though of course related to them. I will discuss playing counterpoint on organ and harpsichord, but I hope that some of this will also be useful for the playing and teaching of counterpoint on piano, or for that matter on celesta, electronic keyboards, carillon, etc.
This month’s column will consist of some general thoughts, and ways for students and teachers to think about contrapuntal music. This is very much a beginning: it is a vast subject! Next month I will add specific practice suggestions and ways to develop both analytical strategies and playing exercises appropriate to particular pieces.
The first reason that the specific study of playing counterpoint on the keyboard is important is, rather obviously, that a lot of keyboard music is counterpoint. This is, broadly speaking, truer the farther back in time you go, and, also broadly speaking, truer of organ and harpsichord music than of piano music. The organ and the harpsichord repertoires are full of fugues, older fugue-like forms with names like “canzona” or “ricercar,” chorale preludes that are in a fixed number of voices and that involve motivic imitation and development, and other such things. Pieces written in these purely contrapuntal forms are still common in later music, but less so.
The second reason is that a lot of keyboard music that we would not consider contrapuntal in a formal way has elements of counterpoint embedded in it. This is clearly true, for example, of many Bach preludes (whereas Bach fugues are by and large “formal” counterpoint). It is true of many of the keyboard dance pieces that make up the Baroque keyboard suites, and of many toccatas, scherzos, pieces with fanciful “character” names, etc. These elements sometimes consist of lines of counterpoint that are surrounded or accompanied by other notes that are not part of the counterpoint, sometimes of implied contrapuntal lines in thicker textures, sometimes of short sections that are contrapuntal where the surrounding sections are not.
A further reason for studying counterpoint as a player is that listening to—or listening for—contrapuntal lines is extraordinarily good training for listening carefully to anything. Developing the ability to hear, especially, three or more simultaneous contrapuntal voices with some degree of independence is perhaps the best training for the ability to hear all parts of any musical texture, including inner or background harmonies in primarily melodic or homophonic music.
The final reason to mention here—I’m sure that there are more—is that practicing and playing counterpoint is the best training for dexterity and independence of fingers. The physical skills developed by playing counterpoint will improve the playing of any kind of music, usually both by making it seem easier and by making it sound better in the end (or, more meaningfully, by expanding the range of ways in which the player can play the music, by increasing control and security).
In teaching the playing of counterpoint to students who are not already steeped in the (theoretical) study of counterpoint or who do not have the experience of playing a lot of rigorously contrapuntal pieces, the first task is to make the concept of counterpoint as unintimidating as possible. There is no doubt that the formal theoretical study of counterpoint—or, more usually, an indirect impression of what that study is like—can make contrapuntal music seem so complicated, so intellectually rigorous, so arcane, and so steeped in analytical detail as to be prohibitively frightening to play. This fright, which usually comes in the first instance from a sense of what the music is like compositionally, is sometimes enhanced by hearing experienced virtuoso performers say that counterpoint is more challenging than other music: that even a relatively simple Bach fugue, or invention for that matter, is “harder” than Liszt or Brahms or Beethoven. This may well be true for that performer (usually a performer who was first trained on piano music from the Classical period and later); however, it can still be an unfortunate place for a student to start.
If the first source of a potentially crippling fear about playing contrapuntal pieces is a sense that those pieces are by definition intellectually (too) complex, then perhaps the first way to work on alleviating that fear is by trying to define contrapuntal music, and specific contrapuntal forms such as fugue, in as simple and commonsense a way as is possible consistent with accuracy. This would involve avoiding, at least at first, the laundry list of terms that are used to try to describe contrapuntally constructed pieces, or the building blocks of those pieces—terms such as subject, answer, inversion, augmentation, diminution, stretto, episode, perhaps many more. (Fortunately, it seems to me, a simple colloquial way of describing what is going on in a piece can often be in fact the most accurate for that particular piece: more about this later on.) Also, it would be nice if any such definitions could also be interesting and intriguing, and serve to connect contrapuntal music to the rest of our musical (and perhaps non-musical) experience.
So, what is counterpoint and what is contrapuntal music? Here are a few attempts at addressing that question, none of which is intended to be complete or definitive, or to exclude any others. They are all just ideas to be thought about.
Counterpoint is two or more different things happening at the same time. This way of looking at it is not necessarily specific to music. It can apply, for example, to a freight train chugging past a road on which cars are cruising, or to clouds at two different atmospheric levels moving in different directions, or to birds chirping outside the window of a room where the radio is on.
In music, if two “things” that are not the same are to happen at the same time, it is necessary to know what a “thing” is. For the kind of keyboard counterpoint that we are discussing here, the “thing” is a contrapuntal voice or, putting it a bit differently, a melody. It could in theory, however, be something different, like a rhythm (think, for example, of the opening of the John Fogerty song Centerfield, in which a repeated rhythm generated by clapping—rather than by any musical instrument—is joined after a while by the lead guitar and then the bass line) or even a sonority (as in, for example, the Jethro Tull song Mountain Men, in which the vocal line is accompanied by guitar, ostensibly in unison, but with an effect that is—–because of the sonority—not that of blending into one sound, but rather of counterpoint at the unison).
Counterpoint is also the same thing happening at different times, assuming that it is also coming from different places. That is, if in a piece of music we hear the same tune or melody or motif at different times, but we perceive that it is coming from the same instrument or singer, or from the same voice in a multi-voice texture, then that does not feel like counterpoint. If it seems to be coming from a different voice or a different instrument, then that is counterpoint. (For example, in the Vierne Arabesque, when the opening theme [m. 2] recurs, still in the upper voice, in m. 6, this is just a repetition, not counterpoint. When it enters in the lowest voice in m. 21 and thereafter, this is a contrapuntal event.)
A contrapuntal piece of music is one that has voices (regardless of whether they do the same thing as one another or different things). The concept of a voice in a contrapuntal texture can seem so intuitive or obvious to anyone who has gotten used to working with contrapuntal music that it can be hard to remember that it is new to many students—or at least that earlier explanations may have been incomplete or left them confused. It is not uncommon for a (beginning) keyboard student to assume that “voice” means “hand,” or to have trouble sorting out which notes belong to which voice. And, in fact, the contrapuntal voice is a concept that can be elusive. After all, if some music is being played, and, most of the time there happens to be more than one note sounding, then what is it exactly that allows us to say that certain notes follow one another in the same voice? Is it just that the composer’s notation suggests what the voices are? Isn’t that potentially pretty arbitrary? If I took a nicely contrapuntal piece or passage and rewrote various stem directions, or changed the placement of some notes on the different staves, so that the flow of the voices was ostensibly changed—but all the notes, rests, etc. remained exactly the same—would a listener hear it as a different piece? Would a performer need to do something different? If not, then what in the world is the meaning of this concept of a voice, anyway?
This elusiveness may well be one of the keys to understanding the job of the performer in playing contrapuntal music. If for whatever reason we grant that the phenomenon of voices is significant (artistically, philosophically, intellectually, emotionally) and if the concept is elusive or abstract, then presumably it is up to the performer to try to make the significance of the voice structure manifest and project it in a way that is (emotionally, artistically, etc.) meaningful and powerful.
The easiest way to introduce a student to the concept of a voice as it applies to keyboard music is probably by the traditional, straightforward analogy to singing, which is probably the original source of both the concept of a contrapuntal voice and the nomenclature. That is, a contrapuntal voice is a line of music—a melody—that could be sung by an individual singer or played by an individual melody instrument. Making the concept of a voice vivid and clear to a student can best be achieved through analysis and practicing of actual pieces, as I will discuss next month.
To sum up, a contrapuntal keyboard piece is one that is clearly in voices, which are usually doing different things at the same time and similar things at different times. The patterns according to which voices do similar and different things are probably meaningful or interesting. Usually, most of the notes form part of musical gestures that recur, and the voices sounding together make sense in the harmonic language that prevails in the musical culture in which the piece was written.
I will close this month with a story from my own earliest year studying music, which, I think, nicely frames some of the issues in practicing and learning contrapuntal music that I will begin to discuss in detail next month.
When I was about ten years old, I was known around my school as someone who was interested in music and was beginning to play piano. One of the older students (ninth grade, maybe) was kind enough to bring in some pieces that she thought I would like, and to help me work on them occasionally after school. Once she brought in a volume of what I seem to remember were simpler Bach fugues, arranged for four hands, and she and I sat at the piano trying them out. She told me that they were hard, and I found them hard. She also explained to me what fugues were, and that it was very challenging to play different voices at once, even though we were each playing only half the notes of the original pieces. All of a sudden sitting there I had a revelation: why not forget about this idea of “voices” and just make sure to position my hand above the notes as they came along, and play them! This idea made me think that I could even cope, at home, with trying to play all the notes of some of these pieces, which I did then try. I found it easier than I had been led to expect, especially if I kept it slow. After doing this for a while, however, something (I don’t remember what: probably something another student said) made me suddenly realize—or I should say, suddenly believe—that ignoring the voices this way was musically the worst thing I could do: actually really barbaric, creating a strong danger that I would be shown to be a charlatan! I was horrified with myself, and tried to flee as quickly as I could from that way of looking at it, even though it had made the learning of the pieces seem easier.
Many years later, I now think that some sort of synthesis of these two approaches is probably wise: that a student should simultaneously study, listen to, and understand the voices as thoroughly and vividly as possible, and eagerly embrace the easiest, most practical approach to fingering and to the practical side of learning the notes. I will take this up in detail next month.
