Live Performance, Part I

Counterpoint comes from two Latin words—contra, meaning "against" or "opposite", and punctus, meaning "point". A punctus was the early ancestor of what we'd call a "note". Placing notes against or in opposition to each other was, in some ways, a visual expression of the idea of melodies that play off each other. Probably the earliest known example we have of counterpoint in this sense was a style that originated around the 11th and 12th century known as organum, where a chant melody formed a static baseline for several more florid melodies that were placed "opposite" each other.

A good example of this is Viderunt Omnes by Perotin. When listening to this, the human ear naturally tends to want to hear the top notes being sung. The rest is secondary. What doesn't come through in recorded performances is the fact that these melodies are constantly switching places, intertwining, popping on top of and dipping below each other. You can see a copy of the score of Viderunt Omnes here. If you follow along with the music, you can see this happening. But you still can't hear it happening. In a recording, like the YouTube link above, it simply sounds like one guy is singing the entire melody, when it's really it's a motley affair, the contribution of several different singers.

In a live performance, things are different. Due to the physical presence of the singers and their distance from each other, you can hear different melodies coming from different places in the room. The result is that you hear X melody coming first from your left, and then, suddenly, the same melody X from your right, while the guy singing on your left is now singing Y melody. And then it switches again. The texture is an enormous—perhaps a fundamental—part of understanding the music. It's something you won't ever get in recorded performance.

This isn't just true of Perotin. It's true of many pre- and post-Reformation composers, including Dufay, Josquin, Palestrina and Byrd, perhaps to a lesser extent, and the Lutherans through Bach. The physical placement of the musicians is totally essential to understanding counterpoint. In many ways, without live performance, we understand the punctus part of counterpoint, but not the contra part.

Contra gives us words in English like "contrarian", "counterclockwise", and "counteract". But contra has some more delicate connotations than simply "against" or "opposite". In Vergil's Aeneid, for instance, he constantly uses the word in his conversations. Sic Venus et Veneris contra sic filius orsus is literally, "Thus spoke Venus, and the son of Venus began opposite." Another denotation is "in turn". The word contra adds a back-and-forth dimension to the conversation. They're speaking contra in the same way you might throw the baseball contra somebody. You're throwing the ball back and forth, opposite each other.

Applying that back to music, the contra of counterpoint is the playful, conversational element of it that can't be expressed through Bose speakers. Your boom box can only give a slight impression of distances between singers and the delineation of lines. A CD can't really express how the singers are interacting and jumping on top of each other and creating notes that are in response to other notes. That's why counterpoint really necessitates live performance. Being present while different melodies come from different parts of the room and hit your ear at different places will only really give you the idea of a conversation between parts.

Atonality, the Logical Conclusion

"Thus Schoenberg, as well as many of his disciples, regarded atonality and the dominance of chromaticism as a logical, if not inevitable, historical phenomenon." (Some Aspect of Counterpoint in Selected Works of Arnold Schoenberg, Boris William Pillin.)

This much one can accept—the question is, the logical conclusion of what?

Bach's Classical Education

The subject matter [of Bach's schooling] included Latin exercises based on Reyher's Dialogi seu Colloquia puerilia and beginning Greek reading exercises...Leonhard Hutter's Compendium locorum theologicorum, a systematic summary of Christian doctrine derived from the Bible and early Lutheran theological writings, as well as the biographies of Roman leaders by Roman historian Cornelius Nepos and letters by Cicero...historical writings of Roman author Curtius Rufus; Idea historiae universalis, an influential book on world history and geography by the seventeenth-century scholar Johannes Buno; and the latin comedies of Terence. Arithmetic was taught in all classes. (Christoph Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician.)

Bach's Raw Material

"It's often said that because Bach requested 16 singers for his choral establishment, he must have wanted at least that number for the St Matthew Passion. But that's a selective reading of the appropriate document because he goes on to say quite specifically that the reason he needs this number is because he has to provide music for services in four churches, each with very different musical requirements. Bach is very frank when he talks about his singers. He says he's usually got four good singers who can sing his more elaborate music, for who are a bit rough but who he can work with most of the time, and several who can just about manage a chorale if he's lucky. The idea that he had 16 virtuoso singers who could sing all his most demanding music goes against all the evidence.... We have to get ourselves out of the mentality of a genius working for posterity and realise that at the end of the day Bach was also working as the head of a school's music department!"

"Bach was above all a pragmatist. He had a small team of more or less talented individuals, but they were trained by one composer in one style over a long period of time. Of course there were moments of frustration, but the image of Bach writing music way beyond the abilities of his players and singers is patronising and far from the truth. Leipzig was no provincial backwater, but the very epicentre of a progressive Lutheranism which proved the most fertile ground for Bach's musical genius."

- Paul McCreesh

Music and the Public Square

While I am the last person to have an unnatural desire to apply Marxist historicism to everything I can get my hands on, it's worth noting that Classical music is, in much of its history, a matter of social distinction. You go to Classical music concerts if you're rich and you can pay for it. These boundaries are largely destroyed in the advent of commercial recording, but even now they still exist. If you want the real taste of Classical music, the live performance, the aspect of the connoisseur, you must go rub shoulders with the city councilmen and the local music theory faculty at a live performance. Maybe your dentist, your family doctor, your French teacher. Chances of seeing the plumber there? Adjuster? Not really that high. It's a bit like golf, but worse.

Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily. But it is worth noting that it can be fallacious when people formulate bombastic apologiai for Classical music, trying to win "back" the younger generation and the majority of people to the aesthetically superior form of music. The problem is, Classical music has never had a wide audience and, quite possibly due to commercial availability, never wider than today. It isn't a matter of getting Classical music back to a position of wide-spread appeal, since it may not have had it in the first place.

On the other hand, not all Classical music is like this. It doesn't seem likely that you're going to hear Brahms' 2nd piano concerto if you're a 19th century Dickensesque inn keeper. It does seem considerably more likely that you hear a Bach cantata if you're an 18th century inn keeper. Bach's music was music that was heard in church and, while, at its more corrupt moments, the Church's liturgy has been a matter of class, music of the church is music that is heard by all the congregation. And, in early Lutheran Protestantism more than anywhere else, perhaps, the music is informed (but not dictated) by the congregants' needs and their level of musical education. These early Protestant churches love congregation-lead music.

I've talked before about the tune that most of us sing O Sacred Head Now Wounded to—it was apparently a German love song. Both his predecessors and Bach himself took this tune and set it many different ways. (And, so did a few composers who came after him, most famously Brahms.) This is an example of the composers of High music lifting folk and popular tunes out of the culture and implementing them in a religious context. I think it would be a little unrealistic simply to attribute that to some already-existing quality in the folk song that merited its use in worship. Bach et al were, to some degree, trying to teach and edify by using something that would be, to most of the congregation, familiar.

Bach is an excellent example, but he's not the only example. As I've mentioned before, Josquin and Dufay do this with the famous tune L'homme arme, just barely leaving the tune recognizable but ubiquitous in their Missae L'homme arme. There's even a rumor that the tune Pange Lingua, to which is set St. Thomas' famous poem, was in fact a Roman marching song.

But does that mean that modern Church music composers should take a "melody" (coughcoughcough) from Coldplay or Regina Spektor and use it as the basis of a Kyrie? Yyyeah, no. That's dubious, to say the least. Not that I have anything against Coldplay or Regina Spektor (that would be appropriate in this post), but the issue is one of apples and oranges. Bach and Josquin were working on generations upon generations of people who had built up a Christo-centric culture. The music that came out of that culture was certainly not sinless and certainly not totally consistent with a Christian worldview. But the music didn't clash with Christian doctrine. Today, we have a totally different field to play on. Inevitably, a song (regardless of the ethos of its authors) that hits the top of the commercial music list is going to clash with the catechesis of Christian worship. That doesn't mean it's not going to work 100% of the time, but it does mean that there are many more issues to weigh in the balance and many more insidious cultural connotations to deal with. Bach and Josquin had a level playing field—they weren't in a battle with the majority of the culture. We are.

When the music of a culture is defined by the music of its Church (I don't think it ever isn't), when, in short, at the center of the public square is the music of worship, the effects on folk and pop music will be drastic. When this happens in Christian Churches, and we all come to hear, worship with, love, and understand the High music of the church, the gap between the aesthetically richest 10% and the aesthetically poorest 10% will be narrowed. But, as usual, it doesn't work to regulate that. It has to happen organically, over the course of generations and academic years and, uh, counterpoint classes. But then we won't be far from the sort of culture that writes quodlibets for a pastime. Everyone will be edified, musically, by being immersed in music they have, over time, come to understand. The give-and-take between the music of the Church and the music of the culture will be such as was not really possible for the majority of the history of Classical music.

G. K. Chesterton on Education

“Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.”

– G. K. Chesterton