No Nested Counterpoint, I Promise
My current composition project is a trio for men's voices. It may be the last of a line of experiments in geeky canonical writing. Counterpoint is at it's most facile when you give it room to breathe; let the time interval be two measures (or better, four) and let the pitch interval be alternating fifths and fourths. Then, as Handel did, make sure each part has plenty of big rests scattered around -- make the score look gap-toothed. There! The counterpoint never becomes too thorny, and the focus hops back and forth between parts, so the listener never gets bored.
Unless he's a geek like me, that is. I've been writing canons with a time interval of one measure (or sometimes just one beat) and, just to be perverse, pitch intervals of a third or, as in today's example, a second. Is this a good idea? Am I just showing off? Let's just say that I'm growing in my appreciation of just how limited the possibilities are.
The text in this example is from Psalm 40: "and set my feet upon a rock." The first line is my first version. As in all dense vocal counterpoint, the words tend to step on one another. (That's the reason I have never found renaissance polyphony perfectly satisfying.) In the first line I displaced one note (on the word "my") from the beginning of its measure to break things up a bit, but those "feet" are still stepping on other words in the text.
In the second line, I've changed the first two notes from four and six beats to five beats each, just so no word begins simultaneously with any other. Hey, look what happened. If you lay out the words in order as they will be sung by all three voices, you get the sentence repeating itself with words progressively added at the end, then removed from the beginning: "and - and set - and set my feet - set my feet - my feet." The geeky mathematician in me finds that very satisfying. The musician in me wants to take a wait-and-see attitude, but why should we listen to him?
Thus endeth the lesson. As promised, I included no torturous nested counterpoint examples, but I've got a bad feeling I lost most of you by the third paragraph anyway. Sigh.
Umie the Umlaut says, "ask your doctor about the Fredösphere!"
2 Comments:
it shows you have great humility to sigh...
I think it's brilliant. I always wondered how you composer types wrestled with the details to make the music sound good. To my tastes as a listener, there seems to be too much emphasis on "my" rather than "feet", but then, my taste is all in my mouth :-)
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