It includes 14 elaborate fugues, about an hour's worth of the most riveting, complex and astonishing contrapuntal music ever written.
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Guglielmo's musical tastes were conservative for the day. He enjoyed imitative contrapuntal music but was concerned to maintain clarity of text, thereby showing the influence of Tridentine reforms. Upon his death, his son Vincent invited followers of the more modern trends to his court.
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3 overture, bars 69-76 Leonora no 3This technique is often used in contrapuntal music, as in the "canon by diminution" ("per diminutionem"), in which the notes in the following voice or voices are shorter than those in the leading voice, usually half the length.Jeppesen, Knud. Counterpoint: The Polyphonic Vocal Style of the Sixteenth Century. trans. Glen Haydon.
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Rimsky-Korsakov, My Musical Life, 188–89. While musical ideas for such a work predated 1877, now they came with greater persistence. By early 1878 the project took an increasing amount of his attention; in February he started writing in earnest, and he finished the opera by early November. Rimsky-Korsakov wrote that May Night was of great importance because, despite the opera's containing a good deal of contrapuntal music, he nevertheless "cast off the shackles of counterpoint [emphasis Rimsky-Korsakov]".
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He is the composer of three operatic works: the 2013 opera Steal a Pencil for Me, based on a true story of love in a WWII concentration camp, which Lucid culture described as "…mesmerizingly hypnotic, intricately contrapuntal" music, with moments of "…Bernard Herrmann-esque, shivery terror…". His opera Sarah and Hagar (2008), based on the story from the book of Genesis, and Seed (2011), a one-act opera about love and choices for a post-apocalyptic couple, have been performed in concert form.
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Los Angeles Times reviewer, and Summerlin's onetime bandmate,Don Heckman, gave the album 3 stars and paid tribute to his erstwhile collaborator. > Veteran tenor saxophonist-composer Ed Summerlin has been effectively > venturing through the jazz avant-garde for more than three decades. "Sum of > the Parts" displays the complexities and inherent swing in his dissonant, > contrapuntal music. Resonant with influences from George Russell and Ornette > Coleman, it nonetheless comes together as one of the genuinely individual > voices in the arena of exploratory jazz.
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Boulou Ferré (born Jean-Jacques Ferret, 24 April 1951) is a French virtuoso jazz guitarist, composer, arranger, and improviser. He is the brother of Elios Ferré, also a jazz musician, with whom he has recorded widely. His repertoire includes jazz and classical music. He is considered one of the greatest contemporary musicians of the manouche (gypsy jazz) tradition and has contributed to the genre through his knowledge of both jazz and classical music and his interest in the contrapuntal music of J. S. Bach.
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The influence of Isaac was especially pronounced in Germany, due to the connection he maintained with the Habsburg court. He was the first significant master of the Franco-Flemish polyphonic style who both lived in German-speaking areas, and whose music was widely distributed there. It was through him that the polyphonic style of the Netherlands became widely accepted in Germany, making possible the further development of contrapuntal music there. The Austrian serialist composer Anton Webern (1883–1945) gained his Ph.D on Isaac's Choralis Constantinus, with Prof.
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Palestrina is an opera by the German composer Hans Pfitzner, first performed in 1917. The composer referred to it as a Musikalische Legende (musical legend), and wrote the libretto himself, based on a legend about the Renaissance musician Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, who saves the art of contrapuntal music (polyphony) for the Church in the sixteenth century, through his composition of the Missa Papae Marcelli. The wider context is that of the European Reformation and the role of music in relation to it. The character of Cardinal Borromeo is depicted, and a General Congress of the Council of Trent is the centrepiece of Act II. The conductor of the premiere was Bruno Walter.
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Since the Renaissance period in European music, much contrapuntal music has been written in imitative counterpoint. In imitative counterpoint, two or more voices enter at different times, and (especially when entering) each voice repeats some version of the same melodic element. The fantasia, the ricercar, and later, the canon and fugue (the contrapuntal form par excellence) all feature imitative counterpoint, which also frequently appears in choral works such as motets and madrigals. Imitative counterpoint spawned a number of devices, including: ;Melodic inversion: The inverse of a given fragment of melody is the fragment turned upside down—so if the original fragment has a rising major third (see interval), the inverted fragment has a falling major (or perhaps minor) third, etc.
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Robert Taylor of AllMusic wrote that "On Reflection" was revolutionary for its time, due to the band's vocal approach. Taylor also wrote that the song was one of prog-rock's defining moments. Music webzine Sea of Tranquility called the song a classic, and wrote that "On Reflection" probably never appealed to non-progressive rock fans, but that most fans of the genre considered the song "a remarkable achievement." uDiscoverMusic also commented on the song positively, writing that the song's opening four-part fugue remains one of Gentle Giant's and the progressive rock genre's defining moments. Paul Stump in the 2005 book Acquiring the Taste wrote that the song was an example of the band's "mastery of writing and performing intensly complex contrapuntal music", and that it was an instant hit when they performed live.
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A melody or series of notes is augmented if the lengths of the notes are prolonged; augmentation is thus the opposite of diminution, where note values are shortened. A melody originally consisting of four quavers (eighth notes) for example, is augmented if it later appears with four crotchets (quarter notes) instead. This technique is often used in contrapuntal music, as in the "canon by augmentation" ("per augmentationem"), in which the notes in the following voice or voices are longer than those in the leading voice, usually twice the original length. The music of Johann Sebastian Bach provides examples of this application:Bach, Vom Himmel Hoch canonic variations, BWV 769, Variation 5Bach, Vom Himmel Hoch canonic variations, BWV 769, Variation 5 Other ratios of augmentation, such as 1:3 (tripled note values) and 1:4 (quadrupled note values), are also possible.
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Palestrina was taken as the chief representative of this contrapuntal music of the stile antico, sung with little or no instrumental accompaniment, which was regarded as more suitable to church music than the more emotional style that had emerged during the 18th century . The fusion of historical and emergent styles, forms, techniques, and content in a given work is encountered with great frequency in the music of most periods. The fugue, for example, whose origins can be traced to the imitative counterpoint of the late Middle Ages and which reached full maturity in the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, figures prominently in the musical styles of a number of important composers in the 19th century and beyond, including Beethoven, Mendelssohn (whose early works were modelled on symphonies of C. P. E. Bach), Reger (whose works for solo cello, viola or violin closely imitate Bachian forms), Shostakovich, and Hindemith. A closely related instrumental genre that first appeared in the late Renaissance, the toccata achieved particular prominence in the keyboard works of Buxtehude and J.S. Bach and has since been revived by such distinguished composers as Schumann, Debussy, and Prokofiev.
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