I love where Youtube takes me! Just now, and I'm not sure how it happened, I ended up at the below video clip.
For those who have not discovered Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina before, he pre-dates Johann Sebastian Bach and is considered the ultimate composer in the style of Renaissance polyphony.
It is from Palestrina that our present system of music that's based on chords and chord notation would develop a few hundred years later.
What makes Palestrina's music all the more impressive is that it was written only by considering melodic movement and pairs of intervals between parts.
These intervals were classified as either concordant or discordant; that is, 'sounds good, resolved' and 'sounds unresolved, jars the senses'. Once such a classification was made, that then determined what needed to happen next to the two notes involved.
Much of this style of music was written without the aid of instruments and was composed for voices.
Gives me goosebumps. I was a chorister at Worcester College in Oxford (UK) as a child. I always love hearing choral church music (plain song etc). The famous Nicholas Cleobury was my choir master for a few years.
Here's a Youtube of Adoramus Te. I haven't sang this since 1985, but our madrigal director required us to memorize it, and I remembered about 75% of it.
Back in the day when I read Gradus Ad Parnasum by Johann Joseph Fux, which was ostensibly an attempt to create teach the style of Palestrina. It's a great text, and I'd highly recommend it to people interesting in learning counterpoint.
But like many music theory texts, it presented a stylized version of music rules that weren't really followed by composers.
Later, I read Counterpoint: The Polyphonic Vocal Style of the Sixteenth Century by Knud Jeppesen. This was similar in approach to the teaching style laid out by Fux, but was modeled on the actual music of Palestrina.
I plowed my way through it, but finally realized the obvious - you really need to know the style and idioms before learning how to compose in the style.
Since I tend to listen to more "classic" rock than 16th century counterpoint, I finally gave up that dream. Plus, there's a lot to learn! But still, if you're interested in learning the style, it's an excellent text.
Love it, thanks. I teach guitar to little ones and grown-up ones alike (with ambitious fingers that work too fast sometimes), so this becomes a great added resource to help 'resolve' the glazed look and the Wha-a-a? plea, whenever we discuss why something may sound good or not (using terms like discordant and resolved).
Songwriter, not Singer-Songwriter. Dropped singing in time to save a few friends and pets. Website: www.songmaker.ca
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Along with version 2026, we've released an incredible lineup of new content! There's 202 new RealTracks, brand-new RealStyles, MIDI SuperTracks, Instrumental Studies, “Songs with Vocals” Artist Performance Sets, Playable RealTracks Set 5, two new RealDrums Stems sets, XPro Styles PAK 10, Xtra Styles PAK 21, and much more!
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