invertible counterpoint

This study situates theories of movable counterpoint by the Russian composer and theorist Sergei Ivanovich Taneyev (1856–1915) against current scholarship on Renaissance music. Analytical approaches that draw upon Taneyev’s theories can lead to rich insights into the inner workings of Renaissance counterpoint, most especially processes that have hitherto escaped attention. Through reference to specific repertoire examples discussed in recent scholarship, the present study demonstrates how Taneyev’s methodology and terminology can provide a basis for systematic identification of key procedures prevalent in Renaissance music. This study also considers how knowledge of Taneyev’s work can inform an approach that points to new possibilities for analyzing contrapuntal processes that operate across fifteenth- and sixteenth-century music.

Commissioned in 1722 for the Holy Week services at the Dresden Hofkapelle, Zelenka's Miserere in D minor (ZWV 56) demonstrates virtuosic handling of a wide range of contrapuntal techniques. Zelenka drew upon his deep knowledge of past musical traditions, honed through his earlier studies in Vienna with Fux and his circle, to provide individual sections of the Miserere with systematic explorations of freely imitative, canonic and fugal writing as well as subtle demonstrations of invertible counterpoint, retrograde motion and melodic inversion. The result is a work that offers insight into Zelenka's abilities to exploit the combinative potential of his motivic materials in settings that maintain expressive as well as technical originality. The present study adopts a range of analytical techniques to uncover the inner workings of Zelenka's counterpoint, thereby providing greater understanding of this composer's versatility and accomplishments.

When Joseph Haydn’s Opus 33 quartets appeared in 1782, his first essays in the form in nearly a decade, the composer claimed that they were written in “a new and special way.” This study focuses on Haydn’s Opus 33, no. 3, nicknamed ‘The Bird’: I will demonstrate how Haydn’s playful, whimsical use of contrapuntal devices (in particular, invertible counterpoint, which involves varying by registral reversal a pair of melodies to create a new harmony) differed from his learned use of the technique in the Opus 20 Sun Quartets. Haydn concluded three of the Sun Quartet with fugal finales, varying multiple subjects by invertible counterpoint, stretto and melodic inversion. Haydn largely avoided such display in ‘The Bird,’ instead adopting a jocular use of counterpoint while varying brief imitative passages within an otherwise predominantly homophonic texture.

This study, building on the contrapuntal concepts of Arnold Schoenberg, Patricia Carpenter and Peter Schubert, will illustrate how Haydn uses invertible counterpoint sparingly and strategically in the outer movements of ‘The Bird’ to contribute to a sense of musical development, to evoke a conversational effect, to build rhythmic tension, and to create textural density and intensity.  These movements display Haydn’s conversational use of counterpoint, illustrating his efforts to incorporate textural elements of Baroque contrapuntal technique into a truly Classical musical language.