A friend of mine who plays guitar has lent me his copy of Dusan Bogdanovic's book Counterpoint for Guitar. It looks like a very good, practical introduction to species counterpoint, in sound instead of as an exercise of drawing circles and lines on staff paper, and much more going into actual music making.
I won't go into too many technical details of why I think the book is important but if someone went through it, doing the exercises carefully, the species counterpoint exercises and then the extension into making that knowledge into real music, they would learn everything more than the traditional note-drawing futility.
One thing that is a huge drawback would be that the price of the book is extremely high, this edition cost about seventy dollars for a book of rather modest size. Another is that that edition seems to be unavailable, perhaps out of print. I think if Bogdanovic or someone authorized by him produced a far less expensive edition it might be a best seller. Though I have to confess what little knowledge of the publishing industry I used to have seems to be way out of date.
I would recommend consulting the books that Bogdanovic mentions as the basis of his study, especially Arnold Schoenberg's Counterpoint. He recommends Fux's classic study, but better might be Knud Jeppesen's, Counterpoint: The Polyphonic Vocal Style of the Sixteenth Century (which unlike the others except Fux seems to be in the public domain and can be downloaded on non-dodgy sites). Though it's one of the strongest points in Bogdanovic's study that while he nods to vocal style, he teaches in idiomatically instrumental style based in lute and guitar music. If I had the time I'd adapt his idea to the keyboard using the music written for organ and the other keyed instruments of the period.
Somebody asked a musician if he could read a chart. He replied “not enough to hurt my playing.”
ReplyDeleteOh, come on, I'll need more than an old joke to work off of.
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