The Art of Counterpoint from Du Fay to Josquin

Revolutionizes our understanding of pacing and flow in Renaissance music and invites new ways of hearing and performing it.

Jesse Rodin (Author)

9781107184596, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 12 December 2024

392 pages
25 x 17.6 x 2.4 cm, 0.84 kg

'This is altogether a masterly, engagingly written contribution to the scholarly literature, holding great value not only for musicologists but also for choral directors engaged in performing Renaissance music. I would consider it a necessity for music libraries that support graduate programs in musicology or choral conducting and recommend it for music libraries at undergraduate-only schools that have strong choral programs.' John L. Snyder, Notes, the Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association

This book transforms our understanding of a fifteenth-century musical revolution. Renaissance composers developed fresh ways of handling musical flow in pursuit of intensifications, unexpected explosions, dramatic pauses, and sudden evaporations. A new esthetics of opposition, as this study calls it, can be contrasted with smoother and less goal-oriented approaches in music from before – and after – the period ca. 1425–1520. Casting wide evidentiary and repertorial nets, the book reinterprets central genres, theoretical concepts, historical documents, famous pieces, and periodizations; a provocative concluding chapter suggests that we moderns have tended to conceal the period's musical poetics by neglecting central evidence. Above all the book introduces an analytical approach sensitive to musical flow and invites new ways of hearing, performing, and thinking about music from Du Fay to Josquin.

Introduction
Part I. Starting Points: 1. An esthetics of opposition that privileges intensification, deintensification, and dramatic arcs-and what came before and after
2. A discursive vacuum
Part II. Tinctoris's Varietas: 3. Defining terms
4. Varietas as an esthetic paradigm
5. Tinctoris knew the repertoire
6. Pieces exemplifying varietas
Part III. Fundaments of the Art: 7. The parameters
8. Affordances of four- and five-voice texture
9. Sacred genres
10. The formes fixes
Part IV. The Art in Action: 11. Some songs by Du Fay
12. Peaks, valleys, and flow in Ockeghem's sacred music
13. Busnoys, Josquin, and the Hurricane Osanna
14. Seven awesome endings
15. Pater Noster across the esthetic divide
16. The art of counterpoint in performance
Appendices: 1. Tinctoris's rules of counterpoint
2. Rough guide to the late fifteenth-century cyclic mass
Bibliography
Index of Compositions
General Index.

Subject Areas: Medieval & Renaissance music [c 1000 to c 1600 AVGC2]