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Began to study counterpoint with William Smith Rockstro and continued to do so until Rockstro's death in 1895. The Humour of Homer. A Lecture delivered at the Working Men's College, Great Ormond Street, London, January 30, 1892, reprinted with preface and additional matter from the Eagle.
Liszt continued his journey from Eisenach, leaving me to be entertained and looked after by Stohr and the musical director Kuhmstedt, a diligent and skilful master of counterpoint with whom I paid my first visit to the Wartburg, which had not then been restored. I was filled with strange musings as to my fate when I visited this castle.
Viewed rightly, this suits the modern democratic instinct, and there is to-day a tendency to return to polyphonic writing. It is individuality in union. In the hands of genius it affords the most refined kind of harmony. A thorough knowledge of counterpoint shows the mistake of regarding it merely as a dull relic of a dead past.
Besides piano, which was her chief subject, she learned singing, organ, counterpoint, and the elements of the violin. "So much is demanded nowadays," she said in her dear soprano. "And if you want to get on, it doesn't do to be behindhand. Of course, it means hard work, but that is nothing to me I am used to work and love it.
Like Moussorgski, Christophe thought that it would be as well for musicians every now and then to leave their counterpoint and harmony in favor of books or experience of life. Music is not enough for a present-day musician; not thus will he dominate his age and raise his head above the stream of time.... Life! All life! To see everything, to know everything, to feel everything.
First, that as far as craftsmanship is concerned he fell between two stools: had his aim been lower, it would have been also less confused, and the result would have turned out better. That is, had he thought only of composing a well-constructed symphony, with skilful, easy-running counterpoint, he might have produced a more obviously clever if more superficial work.
But again we have vocations which are imperfect; we have men whose minds are bound up, not so much in any art, as in the general ars artium and common base of all creative work; who will now dip into painting, and now study counterpoint, and anon will be inditing a sonnet: all these with equal interest, all often with genuine knowledge.
For these young composers, the plans and shapes of phrases, the modes, the rhythms, the counterpoint, the "Rules," the entire musical theory and science that had been established in Europe by the practice of generations of composers, was a convention; the Russian music, particularly that of Rubinstein and Tchaikowsky, which had sought to ply itself in accord with it, an artificial and sophisticated thing, as artificial and sophisticated a thing as the pseudo-Parisian culture of the Petrograd salons.
During that period the early men were human-naturally looked upon as barbarians. But that period is long past. We know the laws of counterpoint to be not eternal, not immutable; but on the contrary to have been short-lived convention that is now altogether disregarded.
Even the organ blundered as it played so common a tune as Rousseau's Dream, and I, who learning counterpoint, feared to be seen singing so ordinary a melody, lest it should set me down as unmusical for ever. But soon my concern was with the unfortunate young man, for he was, I felt sure, quite ignorant of the habits of such congregations as ours, and would certainly offend our best people.
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