# Composer who was the worst at counterpoint



## Dedalus (Jun 27, 2014)

What at least semi-well known composer was terrible at counterpoint? Are there any composers you think managed to write good or great music without employing skilled counterpoint?


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

Dedalus said:


> Are there any composers you think managed to write good or great music without employing skilled counterpoint?


Gluck

........................................


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## Bruckner Anton (Mar 10, 2016)

As far as I know, counterpoint is a foundamental technique that every composer uses. So, I don't think there is any semi or well known composers who can not handle it properly. But it is true that they treat it differently, and the quality of music varies. As comprehensive anaylsis can only be made by skillful musicians, I would suggest asking some professor specialized in composition in university or something.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

What do you guys think of Reger's fugues?


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## Pugg (Aug 8, 2014)

Bruckner Anton said:


> As far as I know, counterpoint is a fundamental technique that every composer uses. So, I don't think there is any semi or well known composers who can not handle it properly. But it is true that they treat it differently, and the quality of music varies. As comprehensive analysis can only be made by skilful musicians, I would suggest asking some professor specialized in composition in university or something.


Amen to this :tiphat:


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## Guest (May 31, 2016)

I can't imagine that there is or was a composer who ain't good at counterpoint, just that just don't need a whole lotta counterpoint to be effective.

Or more than one voice for that matter.

YES PLAINCHANT I AM LOOKING AT YOU


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## premont (May 7, 2015)

Mandryka said:


> What do you guys think of Reger's fugues?


Complex and skillful works, but they are almost always heavily overloaded with counterpoint, which compromises rather than enhances the expression. The same isn't true of e.g. Bach, to whom the expression was of primary importance, and who's works always are well balanced in this respect.


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

I don't know what Carl Orff wrote before he drove "Carmina Burana" to the bank, but his works in that style certainly didn't require much in the way of counterpoint.,


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## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

I think counterpoint can be very subtle so that it only seems absent. I once complained about the move away from counterpoint in the classic era to a music teacher type, and he informed me the counterpoint in Mozart is subtle and precise. Counterpoint in Mozart? Where? Shows what I only thought I knew about the subject.


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## premont (May 7, 2015)

Weston said:


> I think counterpoint can be very subtle so that it only seems absent. I once complained about the move away from counterpoint in the classic era to a music teacher type, and he informed me the counterpoint in Mozart is subtle and precise. Counterpoint in Mozart? Where? Shows what I only thought I knew about the subject.


Counterpoint in Mozart? Yes, he wrote some fugal movements, and fugato sections are frequent in his music, 
But very much of his music is more or less homophonic, and in such cases I think the term voice leading is more apt.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

i wonder if the music teacher was thinking of things like the quintet in cosi, or soave sia il vento, as contrapuntal.

There's a Mozartian style which I rather like and which is genuinely contrapuntal. Things like the fantasy for organ K608 and the Adagio and Fugue in C minor. A severe side to his music.

When I first saw the title of this thread I thought "Schubert" -- and then I remembered the fugue in the F minor Fantasy for two pianos. But I can't think of anything else. 

Brahms is another interesting case. Listening to Die Schoene Magelone recently I thought to myselfd that the way he writes for voice and piano is more polyphonically interesting of all the lieder composers -- the way he gives the piano and voice independently interesting things to do and say so often. Just an informal impression of course.

At the risk of getting out of my depth, I'll propose Bruckner as the worst writer of counterpoint. I know nothing about Bruckner really so I'll shut up now.


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## isorhythm (Jan 2, 2015)

I second Schubert - of course his music has counterpoint, he learned to compose like everyone else...but it's almost irrelevant.


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## majlis (Jul 24, 2005)

You should ask Sergei Taneyev. Her wrote a huge counterpoint treatise still in use.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

isorhythm said:


> I second Schubert - of course his music has counterpoint, he learned to compose like everyone else...but it's almost irrelevant.


How about Morton Feldman as someone who's completely disinterested in counterpoint.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Mandryka said:


> At the risk of getting out of my depth, I'll propose Bruckner as the worst writer of counterpoint. I know nothing about Bruckner really so I'll shut up now.


His block-like construction doesn't lend itself to a more fluid counterpoint like that of Bach, Schoenberg, or the Renaissance masters, but he didn't take over a decade of courses with Sechter for nothing.

Check out the series of fugues here:





Berlioz is often criticized for writing poor counterpoint in the Symphonie Fantastique, particularly in the fugue in its finale. I'd name Satie as one who probably lacked the technical ability to write much in the way of counterpoint, but I suppose he made up for it in imagination.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Might it be useful to distinguish between counterpoint and polyphony? I think of the former - _puncta contra punctus_, "point against point" - as sustained writing in multiple voices of more or less equal melodic importance, while the latter would include a variety of things going on at the same time, individually interesting and effective in combination, but not necessarily similar or equal in importance. By this definition, all counterpoint is polyphony, but not all polyphony is "point-counter-point."

I don't know how well this distinction accords with the academic use of the two terms, but I'm prompted to make it by the sorts of textures we find in chromatic, late Romantic music such as Wagner and Rachmaninoff, where there is often a lot of beautiful and melodically interesting but very dissimilar stuff happening, as well as voice leading which often blossoms into lines of considerable interest but nonetheless remains obviously harmonic in origin and subordinate to the main melody: polyphony as an outgrowth of homophony. This is not at all like the true counterpoint of the Baroque, and when Romantic composers attempt to inject passages of counterpoint into their works (e.g. imitative passages into symphonic developments) the result can jar slightly ("uh oh, here comes the fugato"). On the other hand, we hear in Wagner's _Meistersinger_ (as again in the great orchestral passages of _Parsifal_) a fascinating, extended exercise in bridging the difference between his own elaborated homophonic thinking and the stricter counterpoint of the past.

Polyphonic mastery is essential in all but the simplest music. The writing of sustained, strict counterpoint is a traditional skill and useful to have under your belt, but maybe not needed to create great music. How much real counterpoint is there in Sibelius? Who cares?


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## SeptimalTritone (Jul 7, 2014)

Mandryka said:


> How about Morton Feldman as someone who's completely disinterested in counterpoint.


This is completely wrong. Completely wrong.

Feldman's lines and textures may have been pared down and simple, and there are in some cases long stretches of elaborations of a chord by changing a minimum of variables, but there is, when needed, a distinct independence and activity of line. Yes, these lines are simple, but these simple lines still are independent, and they also serve to form a unique sonic totality.

Listen to i.e. the first minute of some of the below














The New York minimalists (Feldman, Cage, Wolff, Brown) were not merely "chord" composers: they treated chords or simple linear patterns as their own identity in a kind of sparse musical painting.


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## drpraetorus (Aug 9, 2012)

I would suggest Verdi. There are contrapuntal sections, a few. The only one that comes to mind is the quartet from Rigoletto. However it must be said that he was a master of oom-pah. 

One of the reasons Wagner wrote Die Meistersinger and especially the overture the way he did was to prove to his critics, Hanslick mostly, that he could write strict counterpoint.


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## drpraetorus (Aug 9, 2012)

Chopin is also somewhat wanting in the counterpoint area.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

SeptimalTritone said:


> This is completely wrong. Completely wrong.
> 
> Feldman's lines and textures may have been pared down and simple, and there are in some cases long stretches of elaborations of a chord by changing a minimum of variables, but there is, when needed, a distinct independence and activity of line. Yes, these lines are simple, but these simple lines still are independent, and they also serve to form a unique sonic totality.
> 
> ...


Thanks

Who is Brown?


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## SeptimalTritone (Jul 7, 2014)

No problem.

Earle Brown: He worked with Feldman, Cage, and Christian Wolff.


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## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

tdc said:


> Gluck
> 
> ........................................


Handel would agree with you! I think he made a remark about Gluck and counterpoint.


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## Lisztian (Oct 10, 2011)

drpraetorus said:


> Chopin is also somewhat wanting in the counterpoint area.


I wouldn't really be able to give my own opinion based on analysis, but wasn't it Charles Rosen who called Chopin "the greatest contrapuntist after Mozart"?

Also, listen to his late works: Barcarolle, Op. 62 Nocturnes, F Minor Ballade, Polonaise-Fantasie, and the late Mazurkas...my ears tell me they are saturated in counterpoint.


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## Hildadam Bingor (May 7, 2016)

Lisztian said:


> I wouldn't really be able to give my own opinion based on analysis, but wasn't it Charles Rosen who called Chopin "the greatest contrapuntist after Mozart"?


Yup: https://books.google.com/books?id=e7PHS54HqykC&pg=PA285


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## clavichorder (May 2, 2011)

Counterpoint according to the rules that have been codified by people analyzing Bach(and not being Bach) or other renaissance and more austere baroque masters, is a different matter than counterpoint at it's fundamental essence. I think a sense of other lines is what allows most great composers of large and small scale works, to be more unpredictable. There are great composers whose orchestration, melodic writing, and/or vision for what they wanted to do mostly removes the need, but even they use it to to problem solve or enhance in small ways. Even the "bad counterpoint" of Berlioz in the Witches Sabbath is in keeping with what Berlioz was all about. He didn't care about following rules, and most of us enjoy Symphony Fantastique without reservation. The same could be said about Beethoven's various attempts. And yet they usually detract nothing for me. But I do experience it less as 'pure' counterpoint and more as just another manifestation of Beethoven.

In very late romantic and early modernist works, like those of Mahler or Nielsen, some very interesting multiple line things happen. It's more often like there are several themes that have some kind of built up significance, and are being used simultaneously. I'm less equipped to talk about Mahler yet, but with Nielsen Symphony 5 in the first section, a certain very strange multiplicity to musical material that sometimes involves lines, could be called a more modern incarnation of the essence of counterpoint. It's musical conversation. I recall a scene from Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin that demonstrated that when his imagination was allowed to be free, Tchaikovsky could lack nothing in counterpoint. Great opera composers learn to do this intuitively in these conversation like passages. I recall a Donizetti scene from Lucia Di Lammermoor towards the end that was extremely complex. And he's not being talked about much here in the main part of talk classical.

Of course in the finale, there is an actually fugue at one point, and by that time he had developed his own sense of tonality enough. I don't suspect it follows tonal rules very carefully, but I do think that every note was inspired in it's choice and how the lines relate to each other were judged from a more 'aerial' perspective, rhythmic, thematic and orchestral color often seeming to justify strange pitches, though he wrote a few piano pieces that do similar things and the effect is not much diminished.=


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

majlis said:


> You should ask Sergei Taneyev. Her wrote a huge counterpoint treatise still in use.


myesss myesss

I would say any composer that primarily wrote _opera _would be a candidate for being bad at counterpoint, mainly because it was rarely used in opera. Homophonic is probably the best way to describe most opera music: voice, and accompaniment. Doesn't get much more complex than that. The only time would be in dialogues where multiple singers sing on top of each other, and not homophonically. Fugues? Rare. I think there are a few examples though. And speaking of Taneyev, he wrote an opera _Orestes _so that would be an interesting candidate for contrapuntal analysis, if it indeed went against the norm.


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## clavichorder (May 2, 2011)

It's too late to edit my post above, but the last paragraph makes my post seem incoherent. I made a digression to Tchaikovsky and Donizetti, and the final chunk of text refers to Nielsen 5 again. Just to be clear.


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## amfortas (Jun 15, 2011)

drpraetorus said:


> I would suggest Verdi. There are contrapuntal sections, a few. The only one that comes to mind is the quartet from Rigoletto.


Don't forget his final musical statement, the fugue at the end of _Falstaff_.


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## amfortas (Jun 15, 2011)

Huilunsoittaja said:


> I would say any composer that primarily wrote _opera _would be a candidate for being bad at counterpoint, mainly because it was rarely used in opera. Homophonic is probably the best way to describe most opera music: voice, and accompaniment. Doesn't get much more complex than that.


But this is less true of Wagner, whose system of leitmotifs often featured their contrapuntal interaction. Many subsequent opera composers (Strauss in particular comes to mind) followed his lead.


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

amfortas said:


> Don't forget his final musical statement, the fugue at the end of _Falstaff_.


Yes, what a way to sign off your operatic career! Oh joy!

And, of course, there is the double fugue Sanctus in the Requiem.


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

And don't forget Glenn Gould!


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