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Updated: May 5, 2025
A prominent figure in the musical world to-day is Josephine Gro, who writes songs and piano pieces, and is the author of many popular dances. Though not as prolific of women composers as its musical reputation might indicate, Italy has still produced some famous names. The women of the earlier schools of contrapuntal work have already been mentioned.
In the long roll and vast swell of his verse there is something of the ocean a moving profundity of power. His sonorous music, with its absolute sureness of purpose, and its contrapuntal art, recalls the vision in Paradise Lost of him who with volant touch Fled and pursued transverse the resonant fugue.
This showed mainly two tendencies: first, one towards expression of poetic feeling and towards definiteness of that expression, the other towards the entirely new technique which was to supersede the contrapuntal technique of Byrde and Palestrina. This technique proved admirable for vocal polyphony how admirable we have all the Flemish and Italian and English contrapuntal music to show.
We can see above the difference between the full-bottomed wig theme and the newer kind; to show, on the other hand, how near Haydn stood to Beethoven let me give bits of themes from each composer. With the disappearance of the contrapuntal theme coincides the end of purely contrapuntal "working" or development. The new kind I shall describe later in its proper place.
The more complex characters, instead of having a simple musical label attached to them, have their characteristic ideas and aspirations identified with special representative themes as they come into play in the drama; and the chief merit of the thematic structure of The Ring is the mastery with which the dramatic play of the ideas is reflected in the contrapuntal play of the themes.
Even a slight song like "Wenn die Linde blüht" is decked with contrapuntal felicities. He copies the mannerisms of the composers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, contorts his compositions with all manner of outmoded turns. He appears to have come to his worktable inevitably with his mind full of the compositions he had been studying.
Had he continued to write in the pre-1761 manner, he would never have by 1790 won his world-wide fame, and made London seek him and so draw from him his finest work. After, say, 1785, the old contrapuntal smack has gone out of his writing, and his form has grown definite.
From the magnificent fugue in the overture to the majestic choral finale, the music is an astonishing combination of divinely beautiful melody with marvels of contrapuntal skill. Perhaps the most surprising part of 'Die Zauberflöte' is the extraordinary ease and certainty with which Mozart manipulates what is practically a new form of art.
In this case the gem is the rich mind-picture which comes to us if we faithfully seek the under-thought. And the seeking is polishing the gem. Music written entirely by the rules of counterpoint is called contrapuntal music; that written otherwise is known as free harmonic music. In the one case the composer desired to have a beautiful weaving of the parts clear as the lines in a line-engraving.
On the whole, it seems that the number of tunes known to us are too few, in comparison with the large body of lyric poetry existing, to permit any generalisation upon the question. Apparently the accompaniment was in unison with the singer; part writing or contrapuntal music was unknown at the troubadour period. No poetical literature has made more use of rime than Provençal lyric poetry.
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