Species Counterpoint
A three-hundred-year-old teaching method that still works: add one rhythmic layer at a time to a fixed melody, and learn what two independent lines can and cannot do. Five steps, and by the last one you are writing real counterpoint.
- 5 species
- 1 fixed melody
- one new freedom each step
In which styles
- Classical
- Film scoring
- Choral music
- Jazz arranging
In short
The insight behind the method is to remove every variable but one. The cantus firmus never changes. In the first species you add one note against each of its notes, so the only thing you can get wrong is the interval. In the second you get two notes, so rhythm enters. By the fifth species everything is available at once, but by then each freedom has been learned in isolation. It is deliberate practice, four centuries before the term existed.
Austere and strangely satisfying. Species counterpoint sounds like a puzzle solving itself, because that is almost exactly what it is.
Where it sits in the phrase
Counterpoint lives in the texture rather than in a position in the phrase. Its effect is constant: two or more lines that keep their independence, so the listener can follow either one and hear a different piece.
Where you run into this
- Any Bach invention, which is species counterpoint grown up
- A string quartet where the cello is clearly not just holding the bass
- A pop arrangement where a countermelody enters in the last chorus
The types side by side
First species is note against note, and teaches intervals. Second adds passing notes. Third brings four notes to one and with them the shapes that make a line feel like a line. Fourth introduces suspension, which is where the emotion arrives. Fifth combines them. Played in order the progression is audible: the exercise gets more like music with every step.