Piano4t Counterpoint
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All Students preparing for Grade exams are recommended to use the Hofnotes on-line training pages to practise for the aural tests. 

At higher grades  you must be able to discuss with the examiner musical features such as texture, form, style, and period of a piece of music.  My own  web pages to help with these parts of the test at Grade 5+ and at GCSE are available here!

 

 

 

 

 

JS Bach The Art of Fugue

Counterpoint involves the simultaneous sounding of separate musical lines. 

Of course, chords happen when multiple notes sound together, but these chordal, harmonic, "vertical" features are secondary.

Counterpoint focuses on melodic interaction.

Renaissance composers worked with counterpoint. This type of counterpoint is usually called polyphony.

But Baroque  composers were the masters. 

Examples here are from Johann Sebastian Bach's massively important The Art of Fugue.  The first is a relatively simple imitative counterpoint, the second a canon.

Play Contrapunctus I. 

Playa Canon.

Can you think of a piece you play that has a contrapuntal or imitative texture? 

For a fully developed fugue, on the harpsichord, listen to the concluding movement:

PlayThe Art of Fugue, final movement

Ravel's Tombeau de Couperin includes a Fugue.  You can hear it now for a modern 'take' on counterpoint.

Play