The most celebrated book on counterpoint is Fux's great theoretical work GRADUS AD PARNASSUM. Since its appearance in 1725, it has been used by and has directly influenced the work of many of the great composers, including J.S. Bach, Haydn, and Beethoven. Originally written in Latin, this work has been translated in to the principal European languages. The present translation by Alfred Mann is the first faithful rendering in English, presenting the essence of Fux's teachings.

Explores the contrapuntal element in significant works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for the music student who fully understands the composition of harmony

(Berklee Guide). Use counterpoint to make your music more engaging and creative. Counterpoint the relationship between musical voices is among the core principles for writing music, and it has been central to the study of composition for many centuries. Whether you are a composer, arranger, film composer, orchestrator, music director, bandleader, or improvising musician, this book will help hone your craft, gain control, and lead you to new creative possibilities. You will learn "tricks of the trade" from the masters and apply these skills to contemporary styles. Online audio examples illustrate the principles being discussed, and many recommended listening lists point you to additional examples of how these principles have been used in music over the past thousand years.

-- Stanley Persky, City University of New York

What does postcoloniality have to do with sacramentality? How do diasporic lives and imaginaries shape the course of postcolonial sacramental theology? Neither postcolonial theorists nor sacramental theologians have hitherto sought to engage in a sustained dialogue with one another. In this trailblazing volume, Kristine Suna-Koro brings postcolonialism, diaspora discourse, and Christian sacramental theology into a mutually critical and constructive transdisciplinary conversation. Dialoguing with thinkers as diverse as Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak as well as Francis D'Sa, S.J., Martin Luther, Mayra Rivera, and John Chryssavgis, the author offers a postcolonial retrieval of sacramentality through a robust theological engagement with the postcolonial notions of hybridity, contrapuntality, planetarity, and Third Space. While exploring the methodological potential of diasporic imaginary in theology, this innovative book advances the notion of sacramental pluriverse and of Christ as its paradigmatic crescendo within the sacramental economy of creation and redemptive transformation. In the context of ecological degradation, In Counterpoint argues that it is vital for the postcolonial sacramental renewal to be rooted in ethics as a uniquely postcolonial fundamental theology.

A Pulitzer Prize–winning critic’s “lyrical and haunting” (Alex Ross, The New Yorker) reflection on the meaning and emotional impact of a Bach masterwork. As his mother was dying, Philip Kennicott began to listen to the music of Bach obsessively. It was the only music that didn’t seem trivial or irrelevant, and it enabled him to both experience her death and remove himself from it. For him, Bach’s music held the elements of both joy and despair, life and its inevitable end. He spent the next five years trying to learn one of the composer’s greatest keyboard masterpieces, the Goldberg Variations. In Counterpoint, he recounts his efforts to rise to the challenge, and to fight through his grief by coming to terms with his memories of a difficult, complicated childhood. He describes the joys of mastering some of the piano pieces, the frustrations that plague his understanding of others, the technical challenges they pose, and the surpassing beauty of the melodies, harmonies, and counterpoint that distinguish them. While exploring Bach’s compositions he sketches a cultural history of playing the piano in the twentieth century. And he raises two questions that become increasingly interrelated, not unlike a contrapuntal passage in one of the variations itself: What does it mean to know a piece of music? What does it mean to know another human being?

Counterpoint manuals have long been central to the music education of composers, historians, and theorists. In this book a conductor uses counterpoint exercises to aid musicians in becoming sensitive to the fundamental ingredients of good music making.

Features a historical survey of writings on the fugue from the Renaissance to the present as well as four 18th-century studies: works by J. J. Fux, F. W. Marpurg, and more. Includes introductions, commentary, and 255 musical examples.

First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.