Finding the Forest

Working through Fux these past few days has taught me more about the technique of writing counterpoint, but that is a lesser problem standing in the way of completing “A Moral Little Tale”. I am confident that I can figure out the mechanics of good writing, contrapuntal or otherwise, as I go along, it is just a matter of learning the rules and guidelines, practicing them, and using them. The greater problem is figuring out and articulating how the expressive details of the piece will fit together to form a coherent whole that is both intelligible and appealing to a listener (which raises a related question: who is the intended audience?). I lack a vocabulary and analytical framework to guide me in creating that coherent whole.

The outline posted on August 8th is a technical framework: a list of roles and their assignment to voices, a division of the text in to 16 movements, a key structure for those movements, and a simple label describing the nature of each movement. The two paragraphs at the end of that post may be suitable for program notes, but have not helped me put the musical notes, measures, phrases, and chords into the larger whole. I’ve never been able to simply let the music flow out; if that talent exists, it is buried deep.

The posts that followed talked through the chord progressions, phrases, etc. but said nothing about why one phrase followed another, why a particular chord progression or key change, how those sequences and changes fit together to help the listener both understand and enjoy the music. There have been descriptions of bits of word painting, but they are isolated episodes. By the time I got to the counterpoint in the 2nd movement, I had no idea why I should be using counterpoint, other than to give the movement some length. Switching from the melody-harmony texture to counterpoint could be jarring, so why do it? That contributed more to the contrapuntal crackup described in the last post than an unfamiliarity with contrapuntal technique.

“A Moral Little Tale” has a coherent overall structure. Each piece fits together with the others in a specific manner to create the whole. If I can articulate the nature of the pieces and how they fit together, then I should be able to better understand how to fit together the musical pieces into a larger whole. A quick course in literary analysis would perhaps be helpful.

Countrapuntal Crackup

The contrapuntal section of the second movement just wasn’t sounding clear to me. The notes were acceptable, but the words tended to collide with one another and would be indistinct to a listener. I set about reworking it. The first attempt cleared up the word collision, but suffered from flowing smoothly for a few beats (e.g., bars 1-2), then rushing and clunking (bar 3).




I threw that out and started again. This version cleared up the rushing and clunking in the first 8 bars, but got muddy in bars 8-11; the entrances were clunky again. Also, the back and forth aspect of the initial entrances (bars 2-4, 8-11) were not quite working either.




Out went that version. The third try was just a mess.




It finally dawned on me that the real problem was I don’t know enough of the fundamentals of counterpoint. So I’ll set aside “A Moral Little Tale” for a while and spend some time at the feet of Johann Joseph Fux.