Gradus ad Parnassum, or The Old Books are Best

This summer, I seek to improve my skills at improvisation. To that end, I have gone back to one of the basic tasks of the musician: Modal Counterpoint. This is the third time (at least) that I have sought to climb this mountain, at roughly fifteen-year intervals. It was a required course as an undergraduate, and I returned to it in preparation for the F.A.G.O. examinations in the 1990's. Here I stand again, in the Year of our Lord 2010, at the foot of the slope.

I began with the text I used in the 1990's. After three days, I tossed it on the discard pile. Instead, I returned to the source: Johann Joseph Fux (1660-1741), and his Gradus ad Parnassum, in a translation from the Latin by Alfred Mann. It is superior in every way to any modern text that I have encountered on the subject.

Needless to say, my opinion is not shared by the authors of said modern texts. An example of their views:

"The teaching of Counterpoint has for centuries past been confined to the system called Academic Counterpoint, embodied in the Five Species, first organized by Fux in his Gradus ad Parnassum (published 1725). . . . [T]he rigid adherence to a cantus firmus in even notes (already obsolete in the sixteenth century), and the exclusion, both of the ecclesiastical modes and of the rhythmic diversity of voice leading in the vocal polyphony, gives a highly artificial and stylistically misleading picture of the contrapuntal practice of the sixteenth century." [from the Preface to Direct Approach to Counterpoint in 16th Century Style (Gustave Fredric Soderlund), 1947, pg. vii]

Soderlund's book is useful, much better than the 1990's text that I discarded, and I have it alongside Fux for my work. But Soderlund misses the point; Fux wishes to teach his students about the contrapuntal practice of the sixteenth century, but not by directly imitating it, as Soderlund and the other modern theorists would do. Instead, he created an artificial method, the "Species Counterpoint" (or "Academic" Counterpoint as Soderlund called it).

"My object is to help young persons who want to learn. I knew and still know many who have fine talents and are most anxious to study; however, lacking means and a teacher, they cannot realize their ambition . . . Seeking a solution to this problem, I began, therefore, many years ago, to work out a method similar to that by which children learn first letters, then syllables, then combinations of syllables, and finally how to read and write." [from the Author's Foreward, Gradus ad Parnassum, p. 17-18]

I am no longer young, but I want to learn. And, unlike the imitative methods of the modern texts, the Five Species teach the student to manipulate the notes in such a way that the skills can be applied to one's own musical time and place.

Standing at the foot of the mountain, with the intent this time to work through the subject at the organ rather than on paper, and seeking to apply it to my own "compositions," I am daunted. It seems, at times, like a pathless wilderness. But it is not, and others have walked this path ahead of me, mighty men of old.

Joseph Haydn had sung under Fux's direction as a choirboy. After his voice change, when he and brother Michael were living in dire poverty in Vienna, Joseph taught himself to compose from the Gradus. "Haydn took infinite pains to assimilate the theory of Fux; he went through the whole work laboriously, writing out the exercises, then laying them aside for a few weeks, to look them over again later and polish them until he was satisfied he had done everything exactly right." (G. A. Griesinger, Biographical Notes on Joseph Haydn, p. 10; quoted in Alfred Mann's Introduction to his edition of Gradus ad Parnassum, p. xi). Wolfgang Mozart worked through Fux at his father's knee, and again under Padre Martini in 1770. As a teacher in his own right, Mozart continued to use Fux with his students. Some years later, Ludwig van Beethoven sought lessons from Joseph Haydn, and, finding him uncongenial as a teacher, turned to Johann Schenk, and finally Johann Georg Albrechtsberger. All three of these teachers based their instruction of this unruly young man on Fux.

Other students who learned from Fux's treatise include these, as listed in Mann's introduction (p. xiv): Cherubini, Berlioz, Chopin, Paganini, Hummel, Liszt, Schubert, Bruckner, Brahms, Richard Strauss, Hindemith.


There is one other Old Book that I should mention: the Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments, by Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach, 1753. This spring, I worked through part of it, especially the section on Fingering (about a quarter of the book). I have seen many presentations of that subject, and Bach's Essay surpasses them all. Indeed, most later authors on this subject simply borrow from Bach, and present the material with less clarity.

My college and graduate textbooks and teachers mentioned these Old Books; they could hardly avoid it. But they did not use them, nor did they assign readings or exercises from them. I wish they had. Perhaps we are so fallen from the level of past generations that we are incapable of learning as they did. But the path is still there for those who want to attempt it.