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In the introduction to his excellent translation of Jeppesen's Counterpoint Glen Haydon asks that the subject be taught so that it will lead to "some insight into the principles of musical style both with respect to what is characteristic of the period and with respect to what is common to great musical compositions in many different periods." But that is just what the study of sixteenth-century counterpoint cannot do. What is it? I ask because that is exactly what I am interested in teaching. What is there in the study of sixteenth-century counterpoint that equips the student to understand seventeenth-century music? or eighteenth-century music? or fifteenth-century music? Of course there is much in the study of sixteenth-century counterpoint that is applicable to the music of other centuries. Much as I admire Jeppesen's achievement in describing very precisely the details of Palestrina's use of the dissonance-consonance interaction, which he rightly sees as the decisive element in the control of relationships between lines, I have to ask whether the study of that approach to writing music prepares the student for the understanding of other ways of writing music. With class hours as precious as they have come to be and with a student body which needs to begin with rather elementary matters, I have made a decision to turn my back on Palestrina and-for that matter-on sixteenth-century counterpoint. But in the light of today's teaching situation, I do not feel that a semester's concentration on any one composer is justified. There certainly is merit to those positions. We are all familiar with the arguments that it is a good discipline for students to learn one style in detail, and that Palestrina's idiom is eminently teachable because it is so consistent. First, it seems clear to me that we do well to separate the element of style from the study of counterpoint.
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In thinking about these questions we may learn some useful things about the study of counterpoint. Now if Chapelmaster Fux was so mistaken in his understanding of Palestrina, "the celebrated light of music," what about all of the famous and not-so-famous from Johann Sebastian Bach through Brahms and beyond, who claimed to have learned so much from Gradus ad Parnassum? Were they all mistaken too? Or did they learn something from the book which Fux did not know he had put into it, but which was there just the same?
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Equipped with the powerful resources of modern musicology, Jeppesen was able to correct Fux on one stylistic point after another. The distinguished Danish scholar Knud Jeppesen, fresh from writing his monumental book The Style of Palestrina and the Dissonance, in 1925, realized that Fux's book was based only on a vague idea of the style characteristics of the Renaissance master. While Fux invented neither the pedagogical use of a cantus firmus nor the notion of grading exercises progressively through the use of increasingly complex rhythmic relationships, his formulation of the various types or species of counterpoint was the clearest and most useful, and soon became the standard. Fux's book served the purpose of teaching that language as he saw it. Since the Renaissance style was indeed out of style by 1725, aspiring composers needed to learn in one way or another a musical language of which they were not native speakers. Such liturgical music was written in the official style, which answered to the name of Palestrina although, as we now know, eighteenth-century Vienna knew very little of the music of sixteenth-century Rome. Johann Joseph Fux intended his book to be a composition model, a do-it-yourself item for composers writing music for the Catholic church. First a few words about the old approach to species counterpoint.