Grove's dictionary of music and musicians

—
STRICT COUNTERPOINT STRICT COUNTERPOINT 721
for Counterpoint is not a science but an art.
It is true that its most important rules, when
tested by the principles of natural science, are
found to coincide with them in all essential
particulars ; and to this circumstance alone are
they indebted for their unassailable position
and promise of future security. Their mathematical
accuracy fails, however, to account for
their universal acceptance as a code of artistic
regulations. Their authority for this rests
solely upon the praxis of the great masters of
the polyphonic schools ; which praxis was from
first to last purely empirical. The refined
taste and musical instinct of Josquin des Pres,
"Willaert, Byrd, Tallis, Palestrina, and their
contemporaries, rebelled against the hideous
combinations demanded by the rules of Diaphonia
and Organum,' and substituted for
them the purest and most harmonious progressions
that art, aided by a cultivated ear, could
produce ; but in their search for these they
were guided by no acoustic theory. They
simply wrote what they felt ; and because the
instincts of true genius can never err, that
which they felt was uniformly good and true
and logical, and based unconsciously upon a
foundation firm enough to stand the test of
modem mathematical analysis. The leaders of
the monodio school rejected the teaching of
these great masters ; and in their insane desire
for progress, invented new forms of cacophony
not a whit less rude than those practised by
the Diaphoniats of the 13th century. All
Italy followed their baneful example, and for
a time relapsed into chaos. But German
musicians, unwilling to destroy the old landmarks,
i-etained, in their full force, the timehonoured
laws relating to the use of Perfect
and Imperfect Concords, Syncopations, and
Notes of Regular and Irregular Transition,
while they extended the system by promulgating
new regulations for the government of
Fundamental Discords introduced without the
customary forms of preparation ; and because
such discords had never before been sanctioned
this newmethod of part-writing was called ' free,'
though its rules were really more numerous
than those of the older one.
It was not until some considerable time
after the invention of printing that the laws
of Strict Counterpoint were given to the world
in the form of a systematic code. Franchinus
Gafurius, in his Praetica Musice published at
Milan in 1496, gave a tolerably intelligible
epitome of certain rules which at that period
were supposed to embody all the information
that it was necessary for the student to acquire.
The Musicae activae Micrologus of
Omithoparcus, printed at Leipzig in 1516, set
forth the same laws in clearer language. The
Toseanello in Musica of Pietro Aron, printed
at Venice in 1523, and the Dodecachm-don of
1 See Diaphosia; Obganum; Poi.yPHOs ia.
Glareanus (1547), were illustrated by examples
of great value to the tyro, whose labourswere still
further assisted by the appearance of Zarlino's
Istitutioni harirumiehe in 1558, and Zacconi's
Prattica di Musica in 1596. In 1597 Thomas
Morley published his Plaine and easie Introduction
to Practicall Miisicke— the earliest treatise
of importance in the English language ; and
in 1609 John Douland printed an English
paraphrase of the Micrologus of Omithoparcus.
These works set forth, with gradually increasing
clearness, the regulations which in the
15th century had been transmitted from
teacher to pupil by tradition only. The compositions
of the great polyphonic masters formed
a living commentary upon the collective rules ;
and with an endless succession of such works
within his reach the student of the period ran
little risk of being led astray. But when the
line of polyphonic composers came to an end,
the verbal treatises, no longer illustrated by
living examples, lost so much of their value
that the rules were in danger of serious misconstniction,
and would probably have been to a
great extent forgotten, had not Fux, in his
Gradus ad Pamassum, published at Vienna in
1725, set them forth with a systematic clearness,
which, exhausting the subject, left nothhig
more to be desired. This invaluable treatise,
founded entirely on the practice of the great
masters, played so important a part in tlie
education of the three greatest composers of the
school of Vienna, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven,
that it is impossible to overestimate its
influence upon their method of part-writing.
So clear are its examples, and so reasonable its
arguments, that it has fonned the basis of all
the best treatises of later date, of which two
only—Albrechtsberger's Griindliche Anwcisvvg
zur C7omposiiioK (Leipzig, 1790), and Cherubini's
Cours de Contrepoint et de la Fugue (Paris, 1835)
are of any real importance.
These two, however,
are especially valuable ; not, indeed, as substitutes
for the Gradus,' ' but as commentaries
upon it. For Fux treats only of strict counterpoint,
and writes all his examples in the old
ecclesiastical modes ; but Albrechtsberger deals
both with the strict and the free styles, while
Cherubini accommodates the laws of the strict
style to the tonality of the modern scale, with
such consummate skill, that they bear all the
appearance of having been originally enacted in
couneetion with it ; thus solving for the modern
student a very difiicult problem, which Haydn,
Mozart, and Beethoven were left to work out
for themselves.
In most important particulars these three
great teachers follow the same general plan.
All write their examples on Canti fermi, cousisting
entirely of semibreves ; all make their
Canti fermi close by descending one degree upon
the tonic or the final of the mode ; and all
agree in dividing their exercises into five
3a