Modal Counterpoint, Renaissance Style - Softcover

Schubert, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0195109120 ISBN 13: 9780195109122

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1999

Synopsis

An exceptional text for undergraduate and graduate music students, Modal Counterpoint, Renaissance Style uses a wide variety of carefully graded exercises to present guidelines for writing and analyzing 16th-century music. The only species counterpoint text that draws directly on Renaissance treatises, it provides a conceptual framework to guide students through composition and analysis as it teaches them general structural principles. With stylistically diverse examples including not only motets and mass movements but also French chansons, German chorale settings, English canzonets, Italian madrigals, and Spanish organ hymns, villancicos, and ricercars, the book gives students a "real-life" feel for the subject. It distinguishes between technical requirements ("hard" rules) and stylistic guidelines ("soft" rules), and includes coordinated exercises that allow students to develop their skills systematically. The concluding chapters provide the formal and conceptual building blocks for longer pieces and encourage students to understand analysis and composition as complementary activities. By the end of the book, they are writing real compositions, not just drill exercises.
Modal Counterpoint, Renaissance Style features carefully chosen contemporaneous musical examples, progressively graded exercises, historical asides that explain important topics and issues of the period, and a set of notes to the instructor. Combining the historical accuracy of "style-oriented" texts with the more systematic species counterpoint approach, this book offers a unique alternative to other methods.

About this title

About the Author

Peter Schubert is at McGill University.

Review

"The finest introduction to modal counterpoint in the Renaissance style that I know....The author's approach is logical, and students are introduced to the potentially difficult subject beginning with fundamentals and advancing step by step to more complex issues and problems. Consequently, an
instructor with only a limited amount of time to devote to an introduction to modal counterpoint could use the opening chapters of the book by themselves; the book is written so clearly that interested students could continue the work on their own. What distinguishes this book most from other
counterpoint texts is the author's capturing the Renaissance sense of 'play' at the heart of the musical composition of the time." --Jan Herlinger, Professor of Musicology, Louisiana State University

"Good basic text for undergraduates."--Robert L. Kendrick, University of Chicago

"Excellent text. Schubert's system of hard-soft 'rules' makes this a wonderful book. It includes many great assignments and the emphasis beyond traditional species is excellent."--Frank Felice, Butler University

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0195109120
• ISBN 13: 9780195109122
• Binding: Spiral-bound
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 336