COUNTERPOINT

Organist and Master of the Choirsters of Westminster Abbey; Professor of Harmony and Counterpoint at the Royal College of Music; Examiner in Music for the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, London, Durham, and the Victoria University; Gresham Professor of Music.

My best thanks are due to Sir John Goss, for kindly allowing me to insert several examples, written in 1864, when I was receiving instruction from him in counterpoint; to H. Keeton, Esp., Mus. Doc., Organist of Peterborough Cathedral, for Examples 121, 122, 127; and to James Higgs, Esp., Mus. Bac., Hon. Sec. of the Musical Association, for many valuable suggestions.

~ J. F. B.

The Cloisters,
Westminster Abbey,
March, 1878.

To say that the musical primer Counterpoint by J. Frederick Bridge lacks popularity as a counterpoint text is a gross understatement. Indeed, I had never heard of it before stumbling across it on archive.org during the summer of 2017. So what is the reason for updating and digitizing a textbook that's over 100 years old?

For starters, the usual suspects for university-level textbooks on Counterpoint typically cost in excess of $100. These textbooks are updated infrequently and rarely come with supplementary materials, such as workbooks and audio CDs/DVDs. Having taught Counterpoint numerous times now, I always feel large twinges of guilt every time I list one of these books as required on my syllabus.

And since we are talking about contrapuntal rules and guidelines from the sixteenth century, the subject matter itself does not change. There's no reason why a textbook from the late nineteenth century on Renaissance-era counterpoint could not remain relevant today, especially if some of the vocabulary is updated.

These two considerations led me to search for a suitable public-domain text for teaching sixteenth-century counterpoint. What I wanted was a concise text with plenty of musical examples, and that is what I found in Bridge's Counterpoint. Likely, this particular text is not suitable as a sole textbook for a course on sixteenth-century counterpoint, ¹⁾ but could very well serve as a supplementary text. And having chosen the current text, what, then, to do with it?

This digital edition is not simply meant to merely be a recreation of the original. Had that been the case, I would have simply posted a link to the PDF for my students to use. And speaking of which, the original PDF is simply a scan that some kind soul created and posted online with no attempt at updating. The format of a scanned PDF is rigid: the formatting is unchangeable, text search does not work, etc. Instead of a “digitally remastered” version of the original, I wanted to create a new edition that accomplished two main goals:

1. Updated structure, formatting, and vocabulary

Structure: While Bridge's text is organized into chapters (which I left untouched), the content of each chapter is broken into numbered paragraphs, turning each chapter into a kind of large, organized list. I have omitted the paragraph numbers for this edition and have instead imposed appropriate headings, such as “Rules 1-5”, Rules 6-10“, and so forth. Each chapter now also has a wiki-style Table of Contents menu with links one can click to swiftly navigate through the chapter headings.

In the original edition, Bridge made frequent references to specific paragraphs (e.g. see par. 87). In place of this cumbersome structure, I have replaced these references with easy-to-access footnotes containing the entire text which he was references, plus links to the specific chapter where from which the reference came.

Formatting: This new, digital edition should display beautifully on any computer, tablet, smartphone, or e-reader. The text should flow well, images automatically change size to fit the screen, and the contents are easy to search and bookmark.

Vocabulary: Here is an area where I acted with some restraint. We are talking about a textbook written in the nineteenth century, and I did not wish to “modernize” Bridge's writing style, which is decidedly old-fashioned, but makes for charming reading. The bulk of my updates in this area revolve around making the text more readily understandable to American music students. For instance, whenever Bridge, who was English, talks about crotchets ²⁾, minims ³⁾, or consecutives ⁴⁾, you should see a footnote with the American equivalent, as I have done here. My other changes to the original text have been minimal, and only serve to facilitate the removal of paragraph number references as mentioned earlier.

2. Updated musical examples, complete with media players:

Updated musical examples:

Lilypond Octave treble clef (aka “vocal tenor clef”)