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Just what I like to hear - thanks!


Alfred Mann's translation of Fux's Gradus Ad Parnassus was a joy to read. The rules create a somewhat artificial style, but from a pedantic perspective, it's brilliant.

I read through it back in the '90s, but my keyboard technique was quite poor, so I had difficulty playing the examples. (Full Disclosure: my keyboard technique is still pretty terrible).

If you want an accurate representation of Palestrina's style, I highly recommend Knud Jeppesen's Counterpoint: The Polyphonic Vocal Style of the Sixteenth Century. I made a number of attempts to learn the text, but really should have spent more time actually listening to Palestrina first. It's quite like trying to learn how jazz or rock sounds by reading about it.

I found Kent Kennan's Counterpoint - Based on Eighteenth-Century Practice to be perhaps the best book on Bach's actual style.

But all that feels like long ago and far away.

Pretty much all I remember is Contrary motion sounds most like counterpoint and Parallel motion with perfect consonances doesn't sound like counterpoint.


Your hearing is accurate! I think there are two main problems with the cadence.

First, there's a voice crossing. Even worse, it's a voice exchange, where the voices are on thirds (F#/A) and swap parts, and then move by contrary motion into a perfect fifth. See the attached file - the green notes are the melody, the red lines are the counter line.

The motivation is probably obvious: I wanted to keep the counterline out of the low muddy register, because the vocal was already going pretty low.

Second, the synthetic voices on those open fifths are bit harsh and mechanical. So even though the notes are right, they sound off.

But it was a better option than what I had before, so I went with it. I should probably revisit it at some point, but who knows?



Glad to hear it! What's really nice about artificial voices is I can finally do the sort of thing that I had been only reading about 30 years ago. And it's fun!


I think this is the result of writing the music first - the phrasing has to match the notes. There's some wiggle room, of course, and I'll rewrite the notes if needed.

So the musical phrasing leads to equivalent language stresses.

The problem of the process is the amount of time it takes to find a phrase that fits into that spot.

On the other hand, it's much better than dealing with a completely blank page. And it forces me to run through multiple iterations of an idea, which helps get the creaky gears of my lazy brain moving.


I'm glad I'm not the only one who uses this process!

I think my imagination is just rusty, so it takes time to discover who the singer is, and what they're about. As you mentioned, imagery is important and good to place in the initial verse. It's a bit ironic to use spoken language to trigger visuals, but "show, don't tell" seems to work for songs as well as films.


Well, you've done the same!

It's interesting that on a forum filled with songwriters, there aren't as many who talk about process. And that's understandable, because the process can be super-dry as it's mostly "I had a basic idea, and then kept writing and re-writing until I had a song."

And for those who don't have to over-analyze things and the words just come, that's great. But that hasn't been the case for me for a long time.

I assume everyone else is writing songs instead of long posts.

Thanks for stopping by and your comments!