When I was a composition student, my teachers (especially in my undergrad) gave me a lot of tools that I use today. Everything from writing the rhythm first to reinventing set theory in a way that works for me, from extracting entire movements from one motif to thinking of form as an envelope of energy expenditure. But the tool that has most influenced the way I write to a fault? Counterpoint.
When I describe the kind of composer I am to other musicians, I usually say that I am a contrapuntalist. I don’t know a lot of composers of my generation that identify as a contrapuntalist, so self-identifying as one is an interesting take on what it means to be a 21st century composer. Throughout the last 600ish years, we’ve seen a clear evolution of what contrapuntal music looks like: Palestrina, Monteverdi, Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Schoenberg, Strauss, Hindemith, Stravinsky, Persichetti, Maslanka — and Rabb.
I remember when I first learned counterpoint in my junior year from one of the best teachers I have ever had. My brain simply lit up. Rules? For writing music? Sign my autistic ass up.
But counterpoint is not the only tool that can build a work of music. It can’t do everything, and I’ve been treating it as though it can.
Counterpoint is a power drill. It structures a piece of music together with steel supports, fixes a lattice of wooden frames to them, and binds the structure together with walls. Counterpoint is about hardware, about creating passages that are perhaps beautiful but definitely structurally sound. When people teach counterpoint, we talk in terms like “strong” and “weak”, because there are things that work and things that don’t. The counterpoint tool encourages musical tropes that reinforce our expectations as listeners.
It is hard to decorate the walls with a power drill.
This summer, I started teaching composition lessons to one student who has been my guinea pig for developing the way I teach, and I have found myself teaching the variety of compositional tools that were imprinted upon me as a composition student myself. Naturally, I got to thinking about how I don’t practice what I teach, about how almost every one of my compositions eventually become a counterpoint exercise.
The thing is, I think I’m more creative than that. I know I’m more creative than that. And I can prove it.
When I was writing Three Aviaries for Oboe, English Horn, Narrator, and String Quartet, I quickly realized that counterpoint could not write the whole work. Three of the movements are aleatoric. Two of the movements are for solo monophonic instrument and narrator. The five remaining movements are mostly contrapuntal, but I still had to expand the tools I used for them.
And that is the best work I have ever written. So far.
There’s nothing wrong with counterpoint or being a contrapuntalist, but I think I need to be more deliberate about the tools in my compositional toolbox I use when I write. I need to put my money where my mouth is and practice what I preach.
I am not just a contrapuntalist. I color with all the crayons in the box.