Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 19, 2025
At first the suggestion seems plausible; but on analogous grounds we might set the piano above the orchestra, because the piano gives us pure harmony and counterpoint, without the adventitious aid of variety in timbre. And it is indeed true that, for some such reason as this, musicians delight in piano-sonatas, which are above all things tedious and unintelligible to the mind untrained in music.
My study of counterpoint had taught me to appreciate, above all, Mozart's light and flowing treatment of the most difficult technical problems, and the last movement of his great Symphony in C major in particular served me as example for my own work. This overture, also, was soon afterwards performed at a recital given by the favourite singer, Mlle.
The popular girls would each lead over her collection of slaves of Horace and Trig, and Counterpoint and Rhetoric, and we'd cheer politely while they voted 'em. Then we'd take off our hats and bow low to said slaves, and they would go back to their galleys after having done their duty as free-born college girls, and that would be over for another year.
Wilt thou teach me?" The master's voice rose angrily. "Teach me, who learned descant and counterpoint in the Gallo-Belgic schools, sir; the best in all the world! Thou, who knowest not a staccato from a stick of liquorice!" Carew shrugged his shoulders impatiently. "Come, Master Gyles, this is fool play. I told thee that the boy could sing, and thou hast not yet heard him try.
In addition to the plangency of his chord combinations, as such, his polyphonic skill is responsible for much of the solidity of his fabric. His pages, particularly in the more recent works, are studded with examples of felicitous and dexterous counterpoint poetically significant, and of the most elastic and untrammelled contrivance.
In this perhaps he showed his wisdom, for his natural gifts were of such a nature as could scarcely have been enhanced by erudition, and the mission which he so amply fulfilled in freeing his national art from eighteenth-century convention was certainly not one which depended upon a profound knowledge of counterpoint.
The themes sing and the music takes its impulse and motion from them; the web is no longer made up of contrapuntal workings: counterpoint is never more than an accompaniment, a helpful device. What Wagner called the melos, the melody, or melodic outline, that begins at the beginning and ends only at the end this is the thing.
The fifteen-year-old Josephine or "Peppi" Lang and Delphine von Schauroth seem to have touched his heart most deeply; to the latter he dedicated a piano composition; to the former he taught double counterpoint, a forbidding subject which the two doubtlessly found gay enough.
If we leave evolution alone, we may stick to common practice and the law courts; touch evolution and we are in another world; not higher, nor lower, but different as harmony from counterpoint.
It is part of a broad and versatile mastery that it is difficult to analyze. Thus it is not easy to find salient traits in the art of M. Saint-Saëns. We are apt to think mainly of the distinguished beauty of his harmonies, until we remember his subtle counterpoint, or in turn the brilliancy of his orchestration.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking