Counterpoint

Counterpoint is the craft of combining independent melodic lines into coherent music. Each line retains its own shape while contributing to a coordinated whole.

Voice leading: The practice of connecting musical pitches and chords through the movement of individual voices. Counterpoint depends on shaping each voice’s motion while coordinating it with the others.
Melody: A succession of pitches perceived as a coherent musical line. Counterpoint combines melodies rather than treating music as a single tune with accompaniment.
The Art of Fugue: An unfinished collection of contrapuntal works by Johann Sebastian Bach, centered on a single subject. Bach explores a wide range of fugue and canon techniques through one musical idea.
Organum: An early medieval practice of adding one or more voices to a chant melody. Organum preserves some of the earliest documented traditions of combining vocal lines.
Homophony: A musical texture in which a principal melody is supported by accompanying parts or chords. Homophony subordinates accompaniment to a leading melody, unlike counterpoint’s independent lines.
Consonance and dissonance: The distinction between relatively stable and tense combinations of musical pitches. Their controlled use determines how simultaneous lines sound together.
Musical texture: The way musical layers and lines are combined in a passage or work. Counterpoint is a way of organizing texture through interacting melodic lines.
The Well-Tempered Clavier: Two books of keyboard preludes and fugues in all major and minor keys by Johann Sebastian Bach. Its fugues offer varied examples of contrapuntal writing across the tonal system.
Notre Dame school: A group of composers associated with polyphonic music at Paris’s Notre-Dame Cathedral around the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Its repertory expanded the scale and complexity of written polyphony.
Monophony: A musical texture consisting of a single melodic line without simultaneous accompaniment. Monophony has no simultaneous lines to coordinate contrapuntally.

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