Chapter 15:
Harmony and Counterpoint
What we have so far is shown here:
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Starting to add counterpoint to the first voice.
As you can see, creating counterpoint requires a lot of logical thinking—it’s a lot
like thinking through the moves in a game of chess. The
conventions are there and
it’s all very logical, but you have to work hard to make it all fit together as it should.
We’ll continue adding to the upper voice line, following the conventions note by
note. When we’re finished, we have two complete melodies, in counterpoint to
each other, like this:
Your first counterpoint!
Your first counterpoint is a good example of simple 1:1 rhythmic counterpoint. Of
course, classical counterpoint requires that the rhythms differ between the two
voices, so let’s continue to work with this example to
create some rhythmic vari-
ations.
How do you introduce different rhythms into the top melody? In this example,
you can do it by essentially scooting all the notes to the left one beat. That is,
you put the eighth-note figure on beat one instead of beat two of each measure,
and extend the measure-ending quarter note into a half note.
Here’s what this looks like:
Your first counterpoint—but with different rhythms in the top melody.
Part 5:
Embellishing
Note that this approach created eighth notes in the top part when the bottom
part is using quarter notes, and vice versa. This provides a simple rhythmic vari-
ation without going whole-hog on complex interrelated rhythms.
What to Avoid
Whether you’re writing harmony or counterpoint, there
are certain combinations
of notes that you want to avoid. In most cases, you’ll avoid these combinations
because they don’t sound right; still, it’s good to know the conventions in advance
so you can keep from making rookie mistakes.
Avoid Extended Parallel Movement
Parallel movement is when two or more voices move in the same direction by
the exact same interval. Parallel movement is frowned upon in some types of
music—but perfectly acceptable in others. For example,
in classical music you
want to avoid parallel movement in perfect fourths or fifths and octaves; in pop-
ular music, however, parallel fourths and fifths are permitted and even some-
what common—even if they do sound a little boring if carried on for too long.
In any case, if you try hard, you can generally come up with something that
sounds more interesting than extended parallel voices. Go ahead and use a little
parallel
movement if you have to, but then vary things whenever possible to
keep from getting boring.
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Avoid extended parallel movement.
Avoid Big Leaps
Whether you’re writing harmony or counterpoint, you should follow one of the
key conventions used when creating melodies—keep the intervals between
notes as small as possible. Avoid big leaps between notes; they not only sound
disconnected, they’re also hard to play and sing.
As with standard voice-leading,
any interval larger than a fourth or fifth is probably too big a leap.
Chapter 15:
Harmony and Counterpoint
Avoid big leaps.
Avoid Dissonant Intervals—Unless They Resolve
In this case we’re talking about the intervals between different voices—and this
is as much a practical consideration as anything else. If you’re fitting voices to
chords, you probably won’t have much in the way of dissonance to work with;
there’s nothing dissonant within an F Major chord, for example.
But what if you’re harmonizing an F Major seventh chord—in which two of the
notes are E and F, which are just a minor second apart? The voicing you want
to avoid is putting the two notes
together on two close voices; for example, hav-
ing the first soprano sing the F and the second soprano sing the adjacent E. Not
only will this sound harsh; it will also be difficult for each voice to sing—the
notes are too close together. A better approach would be to put one of the notes
in a lower voice, so that there’s an octave or so space between the two notes.
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Avoid unresolved dissonances.
The tritone is another interval to avoid in your harmony. This is simply the
hardest interval in the world to sing, or for instruments to hit. When you put a
tritone
in your harmony, you’re just asking for trouble—specifically, for one of
the voices to miss the note!
Now, it’s okay to introduce this kind of dissonance, if you then resolve it. That
means you can include dissonance in passing tones, or even at the end of phrases,
but only if one of the voices then resolves to a more pleasing interval. For
example, in that F Major seventh chord, the voice with the E might quickly
resolve to either an F or a C. In the tritone example,
you can move one of the
voices up or down a step to create either a perfect fifth or a third.
For some good
examples of close
harmony, listen to
some old Beach
Boys albums. Of particular
note is the classic
Pet
Sounds
album, which con-
tains
some terrific close
harmony on songs like
“God Only Knows” and
“Wouldn’t It Be Nice.”
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