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In Praise of Counterpoint_The Grumpy Old Man Blog

Throughout the years, I have seen many posts and debates on what is still considered “musical” in today’s world of one chord songs and two note melodies.

You get the usual stuff—Ah, that’s what the geezers have always said. They said it in the 50s, etc., etc.

The other day I found a Guitar Pro file for what I think is the greatest TV theme song all time, the theme to the Rockford Files. Remember that?

Well, simultaneously I have been studying a lot of Bach and trying to memorize Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring. The counterpoint in that song amazes me. Chords that keep repeating with slight variations in the harmony/counterpoint. It gives me goosebumps. Paul McCartney uses a lot of Bach tricks in Blackbird, which he says he based on the Bouree in E Minor.

Anyway, I was studying the Rockford files song score, and I went “Dang, they are using a lot of Bach tricks as well!!”

Very similar chord movement as you would find in Jesu.

So that’s why it’s catchy! Like Blackbird. Ear candy.

Then it struck me: so that is why I find so many (if not most) of pop song BORING. It is because there is no COUNTERPOINT. And for me, no counterpoint essentially means NO MUSIC.

You can argue about the merits of loops and one chord songs all day, but it will not change me. If I do not hear counterpoint, I usually think it sucks. Because I am a grumpy old man.
And that is my Grumpy Old Man blog for the day!!!

Am I alone???

What say you songwriters???

This should take you back. An ancient relic, yes, but still the catchiest jingle ever, IMHO. I think it is cool the guitarist Dan Ferguson thanked the viewers here.

Grumpy Old Man #2, I'm #1 (at least according to my wife), you are not alone.

However I like a lot of songs without counterpoint. Jazz has some great chord progressions and improvisation that I like. Smooth jazz, ambient, and light classical can put me in a mellow mood, another like.

For me there are only two types of songs, ones that I like and ones that I don't like, regardless of the musician or the band. YMMV

Counterpoint, I like Jim Rockford's car.

DS;
I enjoy reading your thoughtful posts.
I know that there are songs I am quickly enamored of and others that fail to hold interest and also songs that I can't stop hearing soon enough.
I am a fledgling musician and when I try to identify why I like it, it's often the rhythm, the lyric and the melody.

Without more music theory chops I cannot be sure whether it is Counterpoint(CP).
Are you able to offer some additional examples with CP? and without CP?
Now I am curious to know about some of my alltime fav songs and CP
>>> Off I go, spiralling through the web for CP

This topic, counterpoint, might be the connection that links it together for me to explain why I like some songs so much. I will add it to my todo list for research. Any suggested reading reference is appreciated.

The other way I find that I learn to really respect a song is when I study it and work with it to be able to play it on guitar. Example Neon Moon Brooks&Dunn. When it was a hit I didn't listen to it, I was immature and it was a line dance song. I don't line dance.
Now I really enjoy the song, the imagery and the movement in the song even in it's simplest form.

{watching this thread}
RrR

Rockford was the one who was forever getting beat up.

Simple Definition of Counterpoint. Great question!

Well, I will try to make it simple and show a simple example below. First a few words.

Counterpoint is usually described as the “internal rhyme” in music, beat by beat, in every measure, on different lines to speak.

Those lines are easy to follow in classical guitar. For example, in playing a Bach piece on classical guitar you will often see a treble melody (top note) and bass melody (lower note), and the middle melody or drone.

These three melodies are interdependent. Without the other two, you would not have the same “chemical” effect in the brain as you are listening to it. More on that “chemical effect” in a second. But for the moment, just understand that when two or three notes are played on top of one another as threaded melodies, they are “counterpoint.” Think of it as a “cross stitch.”

In a symphonic piece, the counterpoint gets much more complicated.

Now, what counterpoint DOES is this: it creates the all-important element of surprise. It is what makes you smile, or gasp, or go “Oh gosh, I wasn’t expecting THAT.” Bach was a master of this. Below is a short section from Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring, showing the counterpoint and the first surprise note. (You will see many such surprise notes in Blackbird by Paul McCartney and any number of other clever songs.)

Forgive the childish markup in paint, but look at this setup in Jesu. It is remarkable. It is in G, and goes along for a few bars. Then we hit an Em7. Then right away you get the Major 7th note of the G scale over top of an Em7. Then you get an A note thrown into a G chord, then you get a C chord with an A in it (not a full blown A Minor yet, just a hint of an A Minor) and THEN the C natural moves to C# under a B in the key of G. SURPRISE!

It is this moment that makes you smile or say How Bach! You also get a chemical reaction of elation and surprise, and may even catch your breath and go Ahhh!! when you hear it, because you are surprised, or delighted.

Such is the magic of counterpoint, or the magical use of notes. If you just bang the same note over and over and over you are simply drilling a hole in someone’s skull with a blunt bit.

In pop, numerous prog rock groups have been masters of counterpoint. ELO, YES and Rush come to mind, along with many others. McCartney is a counterpoint genius. On the acoustic guitar, James Taylor is a master of counterpoint in his chord constructions which are all very rich and multi-layered. That is why no one else sounds like him. He is almost always playing weird chords. And that is why he is so great.

In Southern Rock, The Allman Brothers were masters of counterpoint. You had Gregg Allman on the keyboard, and Duane Allman and Dickey Betts playing dual solos with different notes in them. Counterpoint. That is why no one sounds like them, though a few bands tried to copy them, with limited success.

Oh, well, just a brief course on counterpoint.

All of which is to say is someone is playing A D A D A D A D and throwing a pentatontic scale on top of it you are sure to find me asleep.

>What is counterpoint?

I had the same question and found these videos helpful:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4O6lc_ym12U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdRLQlekbd8

Counterpoint is - as you said - two or more melodic simultaneous melodic lines that are independent.

Independent means not similar. This includes being rhythmically different, moving in different directions, and even forming different sets of intervals between the melodies. The more independent the melodies are, the more counterpoint-like they are.

Surprise, harmonic interest, melodic inventiveness... these are all hallmarks of good music, but all of these can be created without the use of counterpoint.

It's fairly easy to write boring counterpoint. Just blindly follow the rules.

That's because the aren't recipes for writing music. They're "rules of thumb", in the sense that they warn you of things you should generally avoid, because doing some things makes the music difficult to sing or play, or melodic lines that aren't independent.

These "rules" aren't really complex, either. Once you understand them, they'll seem like common sense.

For example, there's the classic prohibition to avoid parallel octaves and fifths. It's not because it sounds bad - in fact, it often sounds great. The problem is that voices moving in the same direction (parallel movement) and on strong consonances (octaves and fifths) lose their independence, and no longer sound like counterpoint.

Compelling musical ideas are interesting, and so tend to break rules. That's because the value of doing something musically interesting outweighs the value of doing something musically safe.

Music that never breaks rules tends to be bland and boring. Music that breaks too many rules is difficult to follow and understand.

Counterpoint isn't good or bad in an of itself. But done artfully, it can create some of the best effects in music, where two or more different melodic lines weave together to create harmonies, rhythms, and counterlines that clash and resolve.

Hi David,

Thanks for posting this! Great contribution!

I would add one thing, and it is not a quibble.

I would say that in counterpoint, the lines are both independent and interdependent at the same time.

Interdependent in the sense that at each point in the measure what you sense chemically in your brain is related to the EXPECTATIONS that were built up in the intersecting lines to this point.

It is the jarring of these expectations that creates the element of surprise I am talking about.

Such as in the Jesu piece: you may have heard a B over a D at one point a few beats back (let's say) and you are used to that, but now when you hear a B over a C# you have an element of surprise that cannot be achieved without counterpoint, or in a standard song progression.

Like, if you just play a G, C and D over and over, with whatever inversions, there is nothing to be surprised by, for me, especially if you have a two note melody.

Some would say you could set off a cannon in the middle of your song and that would be surprising and I guess it would, but that is not the kind of surprises that delight me in a piece of music. I am almost always delighted by surprises in counterpoint, not cheap carnival tricks and loops or whatever.

Does that make sense??

I agree.

I like to focus on clarity more than surprise. We can only deal with so much information at a time. Effective counterpoint means that we have to hear two different lines at the same time, as well as the interaction between the two.

So you'll typically do things like make one part complex where the other is simple, so you only have to focus on one line at a time. Because hearing more than one thing at a time requires work, and work is hard. Clear writing keeps you focused on what one melody is doing, while remaining aware of how the others are contributing. It's like listening to a jazz solo being traded back and forth - the other players step into the background and let one player shine, but keep playing their supporting parts.

For me, the beauty of counterpoint is that the independent lines become intertwined and interdependent. They can create and resolve tensions which weren't there in the single melody line; they create harmony; they rhythmically collide and contrast.

As you point out in the Jesu piece, without the other part to complete the harmony, you won't hear the dissonance. You need all the parts for the whole to make sense.


I'll also agree that the most important part of surprise is expectation, because surprise is thwarting expectations.


And I'll agree that good music is able to use the element of surprise to create interest and beauty.


However, I'll still disagree that counterpoint depends on surprise. I can write terribly boring counterpoint with nary a expectation unfulfilled. It's still counterpoint, even if it causes you to fall stone asleep.

But it won't be good music.

I was always baffled, hearing that "rule" over the years, since lines played in parallel intervals like these sound so awesome. To my mind it was the ultimate example of an absurd, arbitrary rule that existed to be broken by Beethoven and dopesmoking hipsters.

Then a composer explained to me that the prohibition isn't on parallel movement of entire lines, it's about parallel movement for a single step. In other words, if at any point you have two lines with notes pitched a fifth apart, the immediately following notes must not also be a fifth apart.

Why not? Because, it was explained to me, if you're hearing two melodies in counterpoint, it's OK if they pass through different harmonic relationships, including octaves, fifths etc., as long as they keep going. But if they hit on a fifth and then the next interval is also a fifth, the effect is going to be that of two lines collapsing into one harmonized line. (If you think about the limiting case of unison, it's really easy to imagine how that would sound like a "hole" in the players that opens up and then closes again.)

I hope I'm stating this as clearly as this guy did, it clarified decades of confusion on my part.

Exactly! The same applies to parallel octaves.

There's a good page here that has lots of pictures and - more importantly - audio examples: https://www.schoolofcomposition.com/whats-wrong-with-parallel-fifths/

For a non-counterpoint example of the same phenomena, consider writing for 4 horns in a jazz setting. If you've got a chord progression like:

      C | Am7 | F | G7 | C

You've got a mixture of 3-note chords (C, F) and 4-note chords (Am7, G7). If you double one of the notes on the 3-note chord so there are enough notes to give the 4 horns, you risk getting the same sort of "collapse" when the notes in octaves blend together.

To avoid this, you'll typically write all the chords out as 4-note chords, so the harmony maintains the same 4-note texture throughout:

      C6 | Am7 | Fmaj7 | G7 | Cmaj7

The interval of the 6th in the C chord is neutral, so it doesn't change the harmonic function of the chord. The sound of 6th chords is a bit dated, but that's a different story.

David,

I've lately (since acquiring BIAB, in fact) been wondering about the whole "jazz chords" thing, as in, why should it be part of a musical style to add "extra" notes like this? What is the point of turning every CMaj into a C6 or worse? Why complicate things for the sake of complication? Is part of it just to show off on stage, and look smart on paper?

Now I'm wondering if what you just presented might be part of the answer.

Something about the effect of chordal density on the perception of melody?

Now I'm going to be thinking about this all day. I should start with checking out that URL, thanks!

Mark

It's certainly a part of the answer. When improvising, it's a means to guide the other musicians about the structure of the sound and the direction it'll take, so that the soloist has a fairly clear route over those chords. If the backing musicians go too far "off piste" they can potentially clash badly with the soloist. With something like a big-band, it's pretty much essential to avoid a mad cacophony.

But it's also often a means to get a particular sound ... 6/9 chords for example, or m11.

Sometimes, for sure, it's showing off, though I think most showing off, when it happens, is done else-wise in the music.

Very cool stuff guys.

I am learning a lot and glad I started this.

Keep it up!



BTW, I hear boatloads of counterpoint in most jazz, just not counterpoint the way it is classically defined, but a different sort.

Too long for an explanation now. Maybe later.

A core part of jazz is call and response, where two or more musicians have a sort of conversation in music. One plays a phrase, another replies to it, maybe identical, maybe altered a little, maybe inverted, maybe a different melody but an identical rhythm. That perhaps is pretty much the essence of counterpoint.

Anyone not directly involved in the direct conversation will be playing harmonies in some form, quite likely purely from the defined chords, which is one reason why the chords are often relatively complex. And those harmonies will also have a counterpoint-ish flavour to them.

New Orleans style highlights that well.

But this effectively defines counterpoint as varying a theme. If you reduce the band to one and solo over a repeated passage, is that "counterpoint"?

I did say "two or more musicians ... sort of conversation". If it's a strict case of each purely takes their turn, then it's not counterpoint; and likewise if a a single monophonic instrument player doing a solo over just a base harmony, then it's not counterpoint.

But when musicians are playing different melodies or variations of a melody with/against each other, then typically it's counterpoint.

THis is a long video aimed a schools, but it opens with a good example of those interactions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw33n2Mpqfk

I guess I now have to add that one musician on a chording instrument like piano can and often do, play a counterpoint with/against his/herself, e.g., left hand against right-hand.

Sure, but my point in asking that rhetorical question is to ask, well, if not, why not? And my point in asking THAT is, I don't think circling solos counts as counterpoint, either. Fugal, maybe, but not contrapuntal. To my mind, you need the element of simultaneity.

To be clear that I'm not saying anything about jazz in particular – I would say if you took a totally contrapuntal Baroque quartet and had the four players play each measure in turn, not in parallel, I wouldn't call that counterpoint, either, except in an obvious but very extended sense.

But if you DO allow that, I see not reason why not to extend the concept even further to a single serial soloist.