London: C. J. CLAY AND SONS,

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE,

AVE MARIA LANE.

Glasgow: 263, ARGYLE STREET.

Leipzig: F. A. BROCKHAUS.
New York: MACMILLAN AND CO.

COUNTERPOINT,

A

PRACTICAL COURSE OF STUDY,

BY

G. A. MACFARREN, MUS. DOC., M. A.

ROFESS

LATE PROFESSOR OF MUSIC IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE,

AND

PRINCIPAL OF THE ROYAL ACADEMY OF MUSIC.

Cambridge:

AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

1895

[All Rights reserved.]

PREFAC E.

COUNTERPOINT is the artificial application of the natural principles of harmony. Its study is of utmost value, as giving to one who has musical ideas facility in their expression. It is an exercise of the musician's mind as useful for developing the power of thought and the ability to control it as is any mechanical exercise for developing muscular strength and other physical resources. Freethinkers deprecate it on the ground of its artificiality, pretending that its study is useless as a preparation of the modern composer for his task; but they ignore or they forget that discipline strengthens as much the mental as the moral power, that habitude to discipline is the best warrant of liberty, that he alone can successfully evade rules who is fully capable of obeying them, and that the ancient principles of Counterpoint apply-if practically enlarged in their application—most stringently to the structure of music in the idiom of the present day.

It is hoped that the present work contains nothing new in fact, if something unusual in form. It is founded on observation of the music of greatest artists, observation matured perhaps by long use in attempted explaining. It is written in the supposition that the reader will have obtained a large amount of elementary knowledge of music elsewhere, and such details as are within the reach of every musician are therefore, to avoid tedium as much as to save space, omitted. The study of harmony in masses must naturally be collateral with that of part-writing; but if the two be separated in time, then the practice of Counterpoint should precede the other as the likeliest means of fitting the student for its comprehension and its manipulation.

Throughout the book modulation is a matter which is not discussed. This is because the manifold resources of each key offer varieties of effect to the musician, which are of priceless value, but which are often disregarded when the device of changing the key is unrestrainedly employed, a device which tempts composers to transpose from key to key a very limited number of relative combinations and progressions, and to leave unused many others, which, because of their less familiarity, are capable of being made more attractive and impressive. All the examples here offered are thus each restricted to its own key, (a) and the same course is enjoined on the student. Of all modulations, that which is most to be shunned in the writing of exercises, as exercises, is that from one key to another with the same signature. The long-established inaccurate signature of the minor form of a key is a remnant of the Modal system, wherein all the Modes have the same signature, though every one may be transposed higher or lower with altered signature to adjust the position of tones and semitones. This system for ages held back the progress of music, by obscuring, if not totally hiding, the natural principles

(a) The sole exceptions are in the models of Double Counterpoint, the greater extent of which than of other examples is a reason for varying their tonality.

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on which music is based, and which constitute the science that furnishes the materials wherewith the artist works. Some of the very many proofs are advanced (Sects. 26, 27, and 100) of the broad discrepancy between any two keys thus apparently connected, and the conventional terms "relative major" and "relative minor" that are in common use to define the connexion are here denounced as misleading and consequently dangerous to the composer. Modulation is an art wholly distinct from that of partwriting, and its study should be quite as separate; let complete mastery be obtained of all that is possible in any one key, and the transfer of this to any or to every other key is an easy process; but to curb one's thoughts within a chosen tonality, as much as within an appointed melodic compass, is more difficult and so wants greater practice.

Contrary to the method of some teachers, it is here recommended to work each Species of Counterpoint successively in two, in three, in four, and perhaps in five parts, before entering on the practice of a next Species. This plan is dictated by observation of the very far greater clearness of each speciality to a student if considered in various complexities of part-writing, than if the whole series of Five Species be practised in two parts, without exemplification of how each may be affected by less or more fulness of harmony.

Further, the student is urged to distinguish between the several Species, and to keep them ever distinct. Truly in composition, invention is free as to the choice of few or many, and of longer or shorter notes, also of concords or discords; but to draw all the good from an exercise which it is capable of yielding, a writer must restrict himself to the purport of each exercise, save where impossible to escape its infraction. The term dissolute is not too strong to describe the laxity of aim which relinquishes a purpose when its accomplishment is difficult, and moral and mental training are both advanced by the increase of perseverance with the increase of obstacles.

For Subjects upon which to construct exercises, the student may use any of those given in the models, or may take from other works wherein available themes are collected, or may compose such theses for his own elaboration; in the two latter alternatives he is advised to take or to make music that keeps to one major or minor key, and to shun the difficulties and delusions of the Ecclesiastical Modes, the treatment of which and its study stand apart from the general rules of music. In the composition of a Subject for contrapuntal exercise, the rules of melody and of cadence must be regarded which are herein enunciated, and the writer's honesty to himself and his purpose will be evinced by his considering each as a Fixed Song and not as a Flexible Song that may be bent under any difficulty of treatment.

An endeavour is made to systematise the appropriation of contrapuntal principles to the phraseology, or idiom, of melodic and harmonic figures now in use. Avowedly this is incomplete, and so is insufficient; but some good may be effected if the indication be received that what is, is an enlargement of what was, a necessary outgrowth and not a revolution, save only in the sense that the world revolves, and that the hemisphere is now under the sun which a while since was in darkness, and that the buds, the flowers, and the fruit it bears are the expansion of the germs that once were hidden but never lifeless.

April, 1879.