Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #587311 in Books
• Published on: 1999-05-10
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Spiral-bound
• 336 pages

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

About the Author
Peter Schubert is at McGill University.

Customer Reviews

Species counterpoint with all the details
MCRS is the most comprehensive textbook in print (as of 2006) that teaches 16th century counterpoint in terms of species. (The Jeppesen counterpoint book also deals with species, but has only c.f. exercises, and is not organized in a student-friendly way.) Schubert's music examples are drawn primarily from Renaissance music treatises rather than repertoire, in order to illustrate the various species; the relatively small number of repertoire examples includes more French chansons than excerpts from Palestrina or Lassus. There are considerably more exercises and assignments--from preparatory "warmups" through analyses and error detections to c.f. fragments and complete cf's--than can be covered in a 15- week course. Canon and invertible counterpoint are recurring topics. My students found the organization of "hard" and "soft" rules helpful. The exercises can be time-consuming, so teachers considering adopting this book as a course text should allow ample time to go through it in advance to decide which exercises to use and to actually write out their solutions.

Comprehensive introduction to Renaissance-style counterpoint
Peter Schubert is on the faculty of McGill University. As a first-time teacher of species counterpoint I am impressed by this book's organization, clarity of explanation and vast quantity of practice exercises. For the sake of the beginner student fine nuances of style are skipped, especially in the early chapters, in favor of a thorough grounding in rules, divided into "hard" and "soft" categories. The former are regarded as unyielding benchmarks of correctness, while the latter have to do more with stylistic ease and euphony. The sheer quantity of rules may overwhelm some students; careful explanation by the instructor is necessary to avoid glazed-over eyes and discouragement. At least in my edition there is as yet no attempt to put some of the examples and exercises in audio form, as do many theory texts today. I also think answer keys for some of the shorter exercises would make this book even more useful, though of course such things tempt some students to peek.

Still, the organization of the material and the obvious expertise of the author make this textbook a most impressive entry in the music theory teaching sweepstakes.